Once limited to human creativity, music is now being influenced and created by artificial intelligence.
BBC Click’s Stephen Beckett meets the singer-songwriter Imogen Heap who is embracing AI and also learns about an AI Eurovision Song Contest. [video, 4:05]
University of Colorado, CU Anschutz Medical Campus
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“I think the psycho-social impact is much more extreme than people realize,” Oser said. “We already have problems in this country with poor mental health, opioid abuse disorder and suicide. I think it’s crucial, particularly for the research community, to assess the additional effect of social distancing related to COVID-19 so we can start designing interventions and be prepared as a healthcare community.”
The time for social support is now
While the survey data should help transform large-scale disaster response for the mental health profession, the end goal remains a long way off. “For now, I think it’s important that we stay connected with our friends and family through calls, texts, video chats, social media – anyway that we can so that we all feel less alone,” Jewell said.
The European Commission together with several partners has launched a European COVID-19 Data Platform to enable the rapid collection and sharing of available research data. The platform, part of the ERAvsCorona Action Plan, marks another milestone in the EU’s efforts to support researchers in Europe and around the world in the fight against the coronavirus outbreak.
The Sims, FIFA, Battlefield, Need for Speed, Star Wars: Millions of players worldwide enjoy video games like these on a variety of electronic devices. Few stop to think (unless they happen to work in the gaming industry) about the treasure-trove of customer data that is accumulated behind the scenes. Through their game and subscription choices, playing habits and patterns — basically every time they pick up a console or smartphone to play — users transmit a steady stream of information to gaming companies about “what keeps them engaged, what they are excited about, and what things they are not happy with,” according to Wharton marketing professor Raghu Iyengar.
Iyengar, who is faculty director of Wharton Customer Analytics, notes that this enormous amount of data collection was made possible by the migration of video games to an online format about 20 years ago. “Lots of gaming [involved] basically selling DVDs or other physical assets to a Walmart or a game store, but much of that has completely changed…. It’s now a direct connection to the consumer.”
Gaming companies pay a lot of attention to the data they collect, structuring and using it to make business decisions and serve customers better, he notes. It’s a heavily data-driven industry. And of course, game firms are always looking to dig deeper into the data to boost their competitive edge.
As many of the most forward-thinking tech and biopharma behemoths — from Apple and Google to Gilead and MIT — rush in to use their savvy and expertise to help fight Covid-19, some of their independent efforts risk undermining their common goals.
For all the know-how and good intentions of these institutions, responding to a global pandemic is far different than operating in the private sector. In interviews with STAT, several researchers and technology experts said that instead of collaborating and seeding innovation, some groups are effectively duplicating each other’s work or competing for limited resources — which could stymie progress in the pandemic response, the experts warned.
“It’s noisy,” said Eric Perakslis, a data science researcher and fellow at Duke University who led technology efforts for Ebola response programs in West Africa. “While these efforts are well-meaning, they do lower all boats in a way.”
Surveying large swaths of the public for antibodies to the new coronavirus promises to show how widespread undiagnosed infections are, how deadly the virus really is, and whether enough of the population has become immune for social distancing measures to be eased. But the first batch of results has generated more controversy than clarity.
The survey results, from Germany, the Netherlands, and several locations in the United States, find that anywhere from 2% to 30% of certain populations have already been infected with the virus. The numbers imply that confirmed COVID-19 cases are an even smaller fraction of the true number of people infected than many had estimated and that the vast majority of infections are mild. But many scientists question the accuracy of the antibody tests and complain that several of the research groups announced their findings in the press rather than in preprints or published papers, where their data could be scrutinized. Critics are also wary because some of the researchers are on record advocating for an early end to lockdowns and other control measures, and claim the new prevalence figures support that call.
“Due to the frailty of our health system it could potentially have been worse here than in Italy or Spain,” said Ricardo Baptista Leite, a physician specialized in infectious diseases and a lawmaker with the opposition Social Democrats (PSD).
“The Portuguese people understood very clearly that if we want to survive this, we would have to do even more than the others in crushing the curve, in prolonging and pushing forward the number of new cases,” he told POLITICO. “The country has shown tremendous solidarity.”
Students say that universities, despite their massive endowments and ongoing fundraising, are not meeting their basic needs as they continue their education in the midst of a pandemic.
As policymakers figure out the best design for each state or county, they could learn a lot from the retail industry, where strategic decisions such as where to locate warehouses and distribution centers are being made by companies like Amazon in the face of uncertain customer demand.
I have been researching complex systems design in health care, transportation and energy supply management and have found that good models using mathematics and data can help design such systems, even with the kind of information uncertainty we see with the new coronavirus spread.
Bloomberg Prognosis; Angelica LaVito , Kristen V Brown , and Keshia Clukey
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A New York study seeking to measure the spread of the new coronavirus found that 13.9% of 3,000 people tested across the state had signs of the virus, one of the biggest U.S. reviews to date.
That implies that about 2.7 million residents may have had Covid-19, Governor Andrew Cuomo said. That’s about 10 times more than the official count based on the state’s testing, which covered mostly very sick patients.
Eat garlic and you won’t get the virus. Gargle with bleach. Or just drink hot water with lots of lemon juice. Misinformation about COVID-19 has been spreading as widely as the virus itself, as the U.N. Secretary-General noted in March, making the pandemic harder to quell and causing real harm in its wake.
These kinds of online falsehoods hurt everyone. But they do far more damage among already vulnerable social and economic groups, says Kasisomayajula “Vish” Viswanath, a professor of health communication at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Viswanath has studied past epidemics and looked at how misinformation spreads. He notes that social factors—income, ethnicity—can especially affect how people receive and act on information about health threats.
“We expected to see a spike on that Monday morning,” says Cal Henderson, Slack’s CTO. The company has “an internal channel that automatically posts when we set a new record,” and its automated chime went off more than once that day: Slack’s worldwide connected users hit an all-time high. The number of daily messages sent did, too. “We didn’t build Slack for a global pandemic,” says Henderson, just over a week after hitting this benchmark. “But it is hugely applicable to what’s happening in the world.”
Even if you ignored the news as the pandemic unfolded and were just watching Slack’s user stats, you would have known something epic was happening. Slack hit the milestone of 10 million simultaneous users for the first time ever on March 10. Six days later, on March 16, Slack notched 11 million. Seven days after that, on March 23, Slack reached 12 million simultaneous users.
YouTube has served up around 14 billion text-based information panels with links to the CDC and WHO in recent weeks in an effort to get reliable coronavirus information to its users, YouTube Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan said during Protocol’s Virtual Meetup on Thursday.
“Our goal is to raise up authoritative voices,” Mohan said.
In addition to these outbound links, YouTube has also been aiming to put a bigger emphasis on surfacing videos from health officials on its service. “When we recommend videos, we want to make sure that they’re coming from authoritative sources,” Mohan said, explaining that it had been working with doctors and medical professionals to fine-tune these recommendations.
At the same time, YouTube has been trying to squash misinformation
Reducing uncertainty in clinical practice will require a move toward a learning health system in which research is embedded in clinical care, write the authors of a recent Perspective piece published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Adrian Hernandez, MD, MHS, Professor of Medicine and Vice Dean for Clinical Research for the Duke University School of Medicine, was one of the authors for this publication, which comments on a goal set in 2010 by the National Academy of Medicine (NAM). The goal outlined that by 2020, “90 percent of clinical decisions will be supported by accurate, timely, and up-to-date clinical information, and will reflect the best available evidence.” The paper’s authors argue that uncertainty still abounds in clinical practice, with little or no evidence in many cases and “haphazard, arbitrary selection” guiding treatment decisions.
The Daily Beast has confirmed that Palantir will provide a major aspect of the analytics platform. Sources familiar told The Daily Beast that Palantir’s data suites will be a primary contributor to HHS Protect Now, if not the core element of the tool.
Online October 19-23. ” Due to COVID-19, the organizing committee has decided that AIIDE’20 will be held online. The conference dates remain the same, as shown below. As usual, accepted papers will be published by AAAI and at least one of the authors must register and attend the conference to present their work.” Deadline for paper abstracts is May 29.
San Diego, CA, and Online August 24. The workshop “brings together a global community of leading researchers and decision-makers from computer scientists, data scientists to epidemiologists, economists, urban policy researchers, computational social scientists, operations researchers, privacy researchers, legal scholars, and humanitarian organizations to advance the field of crisis informatics with a commonly shared priority research agenda.” Deadline for participation is May 20.
“The KDD Cup competition is anticipated to last for 2-4 months, and the winners will be notified by mid-July 2020. The winners will be honored at the KDD conference opening ceremony and will present their solutions at the KDD Cup workshop during the conference.”
“These Community Mobility Reports aim to provide insights into what has changed in response to policies aimed at combating COVID-19. The reports chart movement trends over time by geography, across different categories of places such as retail and recreation, groceries and pharmacies, parks, transit stations, workplaces, and residential.”
“Below is just a small sample of the work researchers at Microsoft and their colleagues have produced to improve the remote work experience. For those seeking to build better remote work products and services—or for anyone who wants to be more productive at home—we hope this research can provide some guidance, insight, and inspiration.”
“WebGPU is an emerging API that provides access to the graphics and computing capabilities of hardware on the web. It’s designed from the ground up within the W3C GPU for the Web group by all major browser vendors, as well as Intel and a few others.”