Peter Schuyler Greene, MD, brings more than 20 years of information technology experience to his role as chief medical information officer of Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore. … Here, Dr. Greene discusses the biggest challenge he faces as CMIO as well as the issue surrounding efficiency of EHRs.
Could wearable biosensors change the face of clinical trials and shorten a drug’s regulatory journey? That’s what Yale University and the Mayo Clinic are trying to find out, using biosensors and Biofourmis’ mobile health platform.
The partners will study the use of various patient-focused endpoints, including quality of life, alongside the so-called “hard outcomes” such as mortality or rehospitalization rates, which have traditionally served as endpoints in clinical trials. They will monitor patients with heart failure at home for at least two months after being discharged from the hospital.
The study will be run through a collaboration between Yale, the Mayo Clinic and the FDA called a CERSI—a Center of Excellence in Regulatory Science and Innovation—and it will employ Biofourmis’ BiovitalsHF platform as well as the latest Apple Watch and Biovotion’s Everion multisensor wearable.
“It’s not clear that academe has that at scale,” he said, adding that Amazon’s decision to go outside higher ed should be “deeply threatening” to community colleges and continuing-education divisions of research universities that are eager to expand their employer partnerships on training and credential programs.
Other major tech corporations have joined Amazon in creating their own postsecondary pathways, perhaps most notably Google and IBM. For example, Google last year created a subsidized online IT support certificate program, which has enrolled 75,000 students.
The tech corporations create the content for these programs, determine the required competencies for students to master and say they are seeking to create standardized skill sets that apply beyond their payrolls, for job seekers across entire occupational fields.
“The future of work is affecting basically every industry. This has become a CEO-level conversation,” said Catherine Ward, managing director of private sector strategies for JFFLabs, a division of the nonprofit group Jobs for the Future.
The retailer is pouring $700 million into worker training — mostly through its own programs. We asked some experts on postsecondary education and training to assess whether Amazon’s initiative is threat or boon to higher education.
Professor Magdalena Balazinska has long been considered a leader in data management and data science at the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. A well-regarded researcher and educator, the data is now pointing to Balazinska’s next challenge: as leader of the prominent — and rapidly growing — Seattle institution.
After 13 years at the UW, Balazinska will take over as director of the Allen School, it was announced Wednesday. She succeeds Hank Levy, the computer scientist who has held the position since 2006, the year Balazinska arrived.
Russian tech company Yandex announced that it was expanding its one-year intensive data science program, Y-DATA, which debuted at Tel Aviv University last year, and will introduce the learning experience at Ben-Gurion University in of the Negev this coming academic year.
The program, aimed at graduates with advanced STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) degrees and members of elite IDF technology units, is meant to provide its students with the necessary skills to work with various applications of machine learning models.
London School of Economics, Impact of Social Sciences blog
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A critical issue for advocates of Open Access (OA) has been the persistent lack of institutional incentives for academics to engage with Open Access publishing. Drawing on their research into Review, Promotion and Tenure documents, a team at the Scholarly Communications Lab, including Juan Pablo Alperin, Esteban Morales and Erin McKiernan argue that when these key documents for research assessment do discuss OA, they do so in a negative fashion that does not correspond to the general understanding of OA in the wider academic community.
The construction industry is ripe for some innovation, or disruption, or whatever else you want to call it. As I’ve written before, there are a host of factors that make the industry tough to automate, starting with the individual nature of each building site and ending with the 20-30 different trades involved in getting a building from foundation to finish-out.
Which is why, for a large number of companies, the initial step to automation is figuring out what’s happening on the job site. An easy way to do this is via a camera and computer vision. Using existing cameras, a startup called Indus.ai maps construction sites, tracks the flow of people and materials, and then uses the data gleaned from the cameras to anticipate any problems.
Despite the University of Alaska’s budget crisis, classes for the fall semester are to go on as scheduled, according to leaders of the university system. The spring could be a different story. That’s when program cuts may start taking effect.
But there’s a more immediate problem. Thousands of students rely on state scholarship money that currently isn’t available. With classes starting next month, many students are scrambling. Some have already decided to transfer, while others are looking into it.
“Everybody is panicking,” said Joey Sweet, a master’s student on the Anchorage campus who recently served as the student regent on the university’s board.
A team led by Argonne National Laboratory scientists moved 2.9 petabytes of data — in a single file transfer — as part of a project involving some of the largest-ever cosmological simulations.
As a research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Dr Arman Shehabi has spent more than a decade trying to answer that question, providing comprehensive US-focused reports on the impact of the industry, and helping to predict how fast energy demands are growing.
And yet, Shehabi is the first to admit that his work is inexact, hampered by pervasive industry secrecy and a rapidly changing market.
Intel has made its neuromorphic chip available to the broader research community.
The chip itself is known as Loihi, but Intel combines eight to 32 of the chips to form one ‘Nahuku board’ and then combines several Nahuku boards to form one Pohoiki Beach neuromorphic system containing 64 Loihi chips.
Officially launched today at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Electronics Resurgence Initiative 2019 summit in Detroit, Michigan, the eight million neuron Pohoiki Beach is somewhat inspired by the architecture of the human brain.
The Official Microsoft Blog, Microsoft On the Issues, John Kahan
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The Cascadia Innovation Corridor is home to some of the world’s leading technology, research and medical organizations. In December of last year Microsoft and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center together started a new chapter for our region when Microsoft President Brad Smith announced a $4 million challenge gift focused on accelerating cancer research. Today, in collaboration with Fred Hutch, we’re proud to welcome four key players as part of the Cascadia Data Discovery Initiative (CDDI): BC Cancer, University of British Columbia, University of Washington eScience Institute and the Knight Cancer Institute at Oregon Health & Science University.
CDDI aims to establish the Cascadia region as the global leader in biomedical data science and health technology innovation, with a robust health data ecosystem that focuses on enabling collaboration, data sharing, and data-driven research.
Twitter’s website is getting a major overhaul. The company has been testing a new version of its desktop website since the beginning of the year, and today the final product is rolling out to the public. The upgraded experience simplifies navigation with a new — and fairly large — left-hand sidebar that directs you to all of Twitter’s key sections, including Notifications, Direct Messages, Explore, Bookmarks, Lists and more. The site also features an expanded, more inbox-like Direct Messages screen where you can view and respond to conversations in one place; plus easy profile switching, support for more themes, advanced search and other features.
Tens of thousands of Google employees participated in the uprising, including 20,000 who walked off the job in February. The activist Google employees moved from victory to victory, including the ouster of a a transphobic, racist, xenophobic ideologue who had been appointed to Google’s “AI Ethics” board.
Two key organizers, Meredith Whittaker and Claire Stapleton, publicly accused the company of targeting them for retaliation in April (to enormous internal uproar).
Now, Whittaker has resigned (on the thirteenth anniversary of her employement with Google), along with Celie O’Neil-Hart, who had been global head of trust and transparency marketing at YouTube Ads, and Google News Labs’ Erica Anderson.
London, England November 13, starting at 10 a.m. “This year’s One-Day Conference is a partnership between UKSG and ALPSP, two organizations uniquely placed to understand and address the scholarly communications’ community’s needs and concerns in this rapidly evolving ecosystem. The event promises strategic insight, practical takeaways and robust discussion among research funders, academics, librarians and publishers.” [$$$]
New York, NY October 16, starting at 8:30 a.m., Columbia University. “The Spatial Data Science Conference (#SDSC19) is the first event to bring together Data Scientists and Developers who specialize in working with spatial data.” [$$$]
“We are excited to inspire twice as many students during the 2019-2020 school year than we did last year. As a nonprofit 100% funded by grants and contributions, we need your support!”
Ann Arbor, MI September 19-20, at University of Michigan. “The ACNN 2019 workshop will continue our work on the development of common practices and standardization to make it easier for neuroscience researchers to annotate and process data; to share data, tools and protocols, and to work with distributed high-performance computing environments.” Deadline for abstract submissions is July 31.
“These awards will fund scientists (individuals or teams) to generate new tools, protocols, and resources to significantly improve the ability to observe and manipulate aquatic symbioses of interest. An essential component of this opportunity is a willingness of all grantees to form a collaborative community where methods and ideas are openly and actively shared to accelerate the pace of methods and technology development and avoid unnecessary redundancy in these pursuits. Grantees will convene periodically virtually and in person to build connections between teams and should expect to interface with other groups in the scientific community working on model systems.” Deadline for submissions is August 8.
San Diego, CA October 15-17. “The NSF cyberinfrastructure ecosystem presents an aggregate of complex cybersecurity needs (e.g., scientific data and instruments, unique computational and storage resources, complex collaborations) as compared to other organizations and sectors. This community has a unique opportunity to develop information security practices tailored to these needs, as well as break new ground on efficient, effective ways to protect information assets while supporting science. The Summit will bring together leaders in NSF cyberinfrastructure and cybersecurity.” Deadline for submissions is August 12.
“The Moore Foundation and Simons Foundation seek to support novel research on the origin of the eukaryotic cell, including understanding the processes that may have led to the emergence of the first eukaryotic common ancestor (FECA) and how FECA evolved into the last eukaryotic common ancestor (LECA). These grants will advance understanding of the evolutionary, ecological and biological mechanisms that may have allowed emergence of the first eukaryotic cells almost two billion years ago and should aim to demonstrate progress towards clarifying or eliminating eukaryogenesis hypotheses. We also seek to support development of new hypotheses with potential to reveal novel but potentially unexpected insights into eukaryogenesis.” Deadline for submissions is September 30.
This repository contains the code for a simple neural network framework. In this course as part of the End-to-end Machine Learning School, we step through this code together, writing it part-by-part in a sequence of coding exercises.
For the past few years, I’ve been building and operating a large distributed system: the payments system at Uber. I’ve learned a lot about distributed architecture concepts during this time and seen first-hand how high-load and high-availability systems are challenging not just to build, but to operate as well. Building the system itself is a fun job. Planning how the system will handle 10x/100x traffic increase, ensuring data is durable, regardless of hardware failures is intellectually rewarding. However, operating a large, distributed system has been an eye-opening experience for myself.
In June Synced published an article about Microsoft ObjGAN’s impressive performance on transferring text to images. Now, just weeks later, Carnegie Mellon University researchers have made another leap in the field with their Joint Language-to-Pose (JL2P) model, which generate animations from text input via a joint multimodal space comprising language and poses.