Their paper about the evolution of malaria was in review for what seemed like an eternity. Every month, Susan Perkins and her then-graduate student Spencer Galen would check in with the editors. The problem, evidently, was a lack of peer reviewers. “But no one ever asks us to review,” Perkins recalled Galen saying.
That struck a chord. Inspired by the success of DiversifyEEB, an initiative focused on improving representation of women and minorities in ecology and evolutionary biology, Perkins, a curator and professor of microbial genomics at the American Museum of Natural History, created a database of early-career researchers available to be reviewers.
“A lot of editors would say, ‘I’d be happy to use them; I just don’t know how to find them,’” Perkins said. Since she launched the list in February 2018, it has grown to more than 1,100 early-career researchers in ecology, evolution, behavior, and systematics — and more than 200 editors have accessed it.
Jonathan Atwell, assistant professor of organizational behavior at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, agrees. “Count me skeptical that the creative act of people talking with each other to create shared visions of the future can be captured by the current approaches,” he says.
Selling, Atwell notes, “is about people talking to people.” The finer points of the salesperson’s job generally come down to “social skills like creating trust and emotional and social resonance,” observes Atwell. “We can’t make an algorithm understand it yet, because a lot of that behavior looks like statistical noise.”
But that hasn’t stopped entrepreneurs from trying. Having reinvented the “back-office” parts of industry, enterprise software makers are now focused squarely on the front office, mostly “SG&A,” selling, general and administrative costs, which now stand out as conspicuously high with the streamlining of the cost of goods.
Brigham and Women’s Hospital has launched the Preventive Genomics Clinic, the first academically-affiliated clinical service to provide comprehensive DNA sequencing, interpretation, and reporting to help accelerate precision medicine research.
The clinic will interpret disease-associated genes for healthy adults and children seeking to understand and mitigate their risk of future disease.
The Preventive Genomics Clinic differs from consumer-facing laboratory offerings in that it requires individuals to be evaluated in-person by genetics specialists before testing is ordered.
Some time ago, I wrote about how we’re now in the long-tail of machine learning in drug discovery. I noted that we’re moving past generalist applications of AI such as IBM Watson’s to more specific, purpose-built tools. This got me thinking: What are all the startups applying artificial intelligence in drug discovery currently?
Accordingly, I did some research and developed the following list, which I have grouped roughly by research phase.
Top-tier tech talent is already more difficult to find in the D.C. area than in tech hubs like San Francisco and New York. And “startups are worried that Amazon will lure away the talent because they can pay so much more,” says Jonathan Aberman, dean of Marymount’s School of Business and Technology. “They think Amazon is going to create a war for talent that the startup community is ultimately not going to be able to compete in.”
Today’s settlement requires YouTube to ask people who upload videos to the service to indicate whether those videos are aimed at kids. If the video uploaders say their videos are for kids, then YouTube is supposed to make sure it doesn’t collect data about kids who watch the videos (without getting an okay from their parents); it also promises not to show children ads that use “behavioral” targeting, which requires all kinds of internet surveillance.
YouTube notes that it will do more than the terms of the settlement require; it’s also going to use software to backstop the self reporting, using “machine learning to find videos that clearly target young audiences, for example those that have an emphasis on kids characters, themes, toys, or games.”
Forget the titanium Apple Card — Amazon’s latest payment method uses flesh and blood.
The e-tailing giant’s engineers are quietly testing scanners that can identify an individual human hand as a way to ring up a store purchase, with the goal of rolling them out at its Whole Foods supermarket chain in the coming months, The Post has learned.
Employees at Amazon’s New York offices are serving as guinea pigs for the biometric technology, using it at a handful of vending machines to buy such items as sodas, chips, granola bars and phone chargers, according to sources briefed on the plans.
The Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, stood up just last year, has plans to hire an ethicist to help guide the Defense Department’s development and application of artificial intelligence technologies.
“One of the positions we are going to fill will be somebody who is not just looking at technical standards, but who is an ethicist,” said Air Force Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, the JAIC’s director. “We are going to bring in someone who will have a deep background in ethics, and then the lawyers within the department will be looking at how we actually bake this into the Department of Defense.”
Although terrorists have become skilled at manipulating the Internet and other new technologies, artificial intelligence or AI, is a powerful tool in the fight against them, a top UN counter-terrorism official said this week at a high-level conference on strengthening international cooperation against the scourge.
This year, NeurIPS registration will change from the prior first-come-first-served model to a randomized lottery. In addition, some tickets will be held back from this lottery to ensure authors of accepted papers and those creating content for and around the conference are able to attend and take part in the event that their thought leadership is helping to create.
Between September 6th and September 20th, those wishing to attend the conference from the public (those not contributing to the conference or any of its affiliated groups) will indicate their intention to register for the conference and desire to purchase a ticket by signing up for the lottery.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Press was the first university press to sign an agreement with the Internet Archive to scan older print books for which it had no digital copies to make them available for one-at-a-time lending, a model known as Controlled Digital Lending.
The Geospatial Analysis and Intelligence (GAI) Bachelor of Applied Science (BAS) program at Delta State University, located in Cleveland, Miss., is the first undergraduate program to be accredited by the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF).
When scientists want to get a high-resolution view of mitochondria dividing, they often shine a powerful laser upon the cell. But that laser power causes cells to become stressed, and mitochondria divide in response to that stress — a phenomenon known as phototoxicity-induced fission.
That’s a problem, because scientists want to see how mitochondria divide under normal conditions, not ones created by research. Scientists have long tried to get around that by using much lower image quality, but that approach creates its own problems because it makes it harder to detect the fission, or to see it with as much detail.
[Uri] Manor said he and his team wanted “the best of both worlds” — low phototoxicity and high image quality. So they set to work developing a deep learning method that would do that.
Pennsylvania State University, Institute for CyberScience
from
State College, PA Beginning September 17, starting at 10:30 a.m. Presenter: Orfeu Buxton, “Interdisciplinary and Multimethod Approaches to Investigating Sleep Health and Digital Biomarkers.” [free]
Atlanta, GA September 11-13. “Smart City Expo Atlanta is the only U.S. edition of Smart City Expo World Congress, the world’s leading conference and expo on smart cities and smart urban solutions, held annually in Barcelona.” [$$$]
Cambridge, MA November 20-21 at MIT. “Matthew Herper, Editorial Director of Events, and the rest of the STAT team are assembling top executives and researchers, policymakers, and patient advocates to scout the future of medicine — the biggest advances and the emerging challenges — and identify ways to push the limits of what’s possible for human health.” [by invitation]
“Participants are invited to develop and submit prototypes of any type of technology application leveraging
the very latest Cloud and AI technologies, including mobile, web-based or robot applications. The aim is
to enhance the future spectator experience for sporting events and highlight Tokyo 2020’s commitment to
innovation.” Deadline for submissions is October 14.
Neural Structured Learning (NSL) is a new learning paradigm to train neural networks by leveraging structured signals in addition to feature inputs. Structure can be explicit as represented by a graph or implicit as induced by adversarial perturbation.
In this post, we explore the deep connection between ordinary differential equations and residual networks, leading to a new deep learning component, the Neural ODE. We explain the math that unlocks the training of this component and illustrate some of the results.
Continuous Delivery for Machine Learning (CD4ML) is a software engineering approach in which a cross-functional team produces machine learning applications based on code, data, and models in small and safe increments that can be reproduced and reliably released at any time, in short adaptation cycles.