Prior studies have shown breathing patterns to exhibit diagnostic differentiation between normal patterns of breath and patterns in patients with respiratory conditions. The remote, contact-free collection of these breathing patterns holds great potential for the diagnosis of contagious diseases. Due to this potential, CDS researchers have been investigating the relationship between breathing patterns and respiratory diseases beyond controlled environments to establish whether the relationship between breathing patterns and respiratory diseases survives when collected remotely in an uncontrolled environment. Associate Professor of Data Science and Computer Science Kyunghyun Cho and Ph.D. student William Falcon and have introduced the platform “Breathe for Science”, designed to collect a database of breathing patterns. This platform consists of a pre-recording survey to collect background information about the subject and an automated phone call to record the subject’s breathing pattern.
A team of researchers from Apple and Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute have presented a system for embedded AIs to learn by listening to noises in their environment without the need for up-front training data or without placing a huge burden on the user to supervise the learning process. The overarching goal is for smart devices to more easily build up contextual/situational awareness to increase their utility.
The system, which they’ve called Listen Learner, relies on acoustic activity recognition to enable a smart device, such as a microphone-equipped speaker, to interpret events taking place in its environment via a process of self-supervised learning with manual labelling done by one-shot user interactions — such as by the speaker asking a person ‘what was that sound?’, after it’s heard the noise enough time to classify in into a cluster.
Google says all advertisers will have to verify their identity going forward, as the company tries to curb spam and other problematic ads on its platforms.
The change will only apply to US advertisers at first, but Google plans to expand the new rule globally. However, the process could take years to roll out.
Fast Company; Richard Florida and Patrick Adler and Henrik Hoelzer
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The COVID-19 crisis has upended urban life as we know it. Cities are on lockdown, and the once bustling streets of Paris, New York, London, Rome, and more now sit virtually empty. Technology has been critical to the way cities and society have coped with the crisis. Online delivery companies have been essential for getting food and supplies to residents, while their restaurant delivery counterparts have helped keep restaurants up and running during the lockdown. Urban informatics has helped track the virus and identify infection hot spots. In the not-too-distant future, as cities begin to reopen, digital technology will be needed to better test and trace the virus as well as to ready urban infrastructure, like airports, public transportation, office buildings, and businesses, to open back up safely.
The number of seated diners has plummeted to zero over the past two months due to the Covid-19 pandemic, according to data released Wednesday by OpenTable. The company, which is owned by Booking Holdings, provides reservations software for about 60,000 restaurants, mostly in the U.S.
University of California-Berkeley, Berkeley Institute for Data Science.
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The Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) and Accenture Applied Intelligence have announced a new strategic relationship to support interdisciplinary research and training that will advance the field of data science. This collaboration aims to explore major social and scientific challenges, such as ethical AI, biomedicine, and environmental sustainability in California.
Arnab Chakraborty, who leads Accenture’s US West Applied Intelligence practice, based in the Bay Area, describes the rationale behind this collaboration: “While we have worked closely with leading academic and research institutions worldwide, this is the first time that we have entered such a holistic initiative. BIDS brings together extraordinary cross-disciplinary expertise from faculty in sciences, professions and humanities – including Nobel Laureates – to some of the most advanced data science thinking in the world today.”
University of California-Berkeley, Berkeley Institute for Data Science.
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UC Berkeley is launching a new Computational Social Science Training Program (CSSTP) to train predoctoral students with advanced computational and data science analytics skills to address pressing needs in biomedical, behavioral, social, and clinical research.
A five-year, $1.2 million grant from the NIH National Institute of Child Health & Human Development makes the program possible. It will prepare the students to take advantage of advances in computing and data science that can enable their research.
For A.I. to reach its full potential, those implementing the technology must develop new techniques to enable its deployment across all industries. (My company, Landing AI, helps companies with A.I. adoption.) In particular, companies outside Silicon Valley need to overcome three challenges to increase their odds of success.
First, they must learn to harness small data. The tech giants use vast volumes of data collected from billions of users to train A.I. models. Techniques developed for these big data settings need to be adapted to the much smaller datasets that most other industries have.
On New Year’s Eve, a small company in Canada was among the first to raise the alarm about an infectious disease outbreak. Its computer algorithm calculated where the virus might spread next. The technology could change the way we fight another contagion.
“Algorithms designed by humans are very general,” says study co-author Ferran Alet, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). “We were inspired to use AI to find algorithms with curiosity strategies that can adapt to a range of environments.”
The researchers created a “meta-learning” algorithm that generated 52,000 exploration algorithms. They found that the top two were entirely new — seemingly too obvious or counterintuitive for a human to have proposed. Both algorithms generated exploration behavior that substantially improved learning in a range of simulated tasks, from navigating a two-dimensional grid based on images to making a robotic ant walk. Because the meta-learning process generates high-level computer code as output, both algorithms can be dissected to peer inside their decision-making processes.
Rutgers University announced today that it has launched the nation’s largest prospective study of health care workers exposed to COVID-19. The study includes a series of clinical trials that will explore new drug treatments, antibody testing, and long-term health tracking in the hope of providing insight into how to treat the disease and prevent its spread.
Close to 550 health care providers and close to 300 nonhealth care workers from Rutgers, University Hospital in Newark and Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick have volunteered for the study, some with direct patient exposure and others with no direct patient contact. The study is being coordinated by Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences (RBHS), the university’s academic health center. Initial results suggest a gender disparity in risk: women have been infected at a rate of 13 times their male counterparts. Some of this may be attributed to the existing disparity in the nursing workforce, which currently includes more women than men.
“Health care workers throughout the world are on the front lines of battling COVID-19,” said RBHS Chancellor Brian Strom. “Our hope is that this study and other scientific developments can give state, national and global leaders the evidence-based tools to ultimately end this pandemic.”
Open source code would add to the transparency of the process, says elections expert Peter Wolf of the intergovernmental International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) in Stockholm. That can assuage concerns from opposition political parties, competing voting system providers, and voters.
At least 22 countries have reported to IDEA that they had experimented with some form of open source voting, and the list is growing. In the United States, voting is administered at the county level, so there is a plethora of experiences to compare.
Microsoft is also involved in an open-source vote verification system, tested in this year’s Wisconsin primary election. It would allow a voter to confirm that their vote was counted.
I have studied the spread and impact of health misinformation for decades, and have never seen the topic being taken as seriously as it is right now. Perhaps that is because of the scale of the crisis and the ubiquity of the nonsensical misinformation, including advice from some very prominent politicians. If this pro-science response is to endure, all scientists — not just a few of us — must stand up for quality information.
Here are two places to start.
First, we must stop tolerating and legitimizing health pseudoscience, especially at universities and health-care institutions.
“The National Institutes of Health’s Office of Data Science Strategy is offering a Data Science Boot Camp for science teachers interested in learning how to incorporate data science into the classroom. The camp will be held July 6-10 in Shady Grove, Md.” Deadline to apply is May 1.
“Sounders FC is challenging you to use data visualization to tell a story and deliver insights that help decision-making process of key stakeholders at club.” Deadline for submissions is May 10.
“Mozilla and [Ford Foundation’s] ‘Tech & Society Fellowship’ is a 24-month program supporting five to ten tech-and-society strategists across the Global South. Fellows will embed with existing civil society organizations to recognize, design, and implement a strategy that brings together a specific regional issue and technology. Fellows will be developers, tech policy analysts, designers, and other tech-specific professions. And they will build tools, grow communities, and conduct research.” Deadline for applications is June 2.
“The Social Data Research Fellowship and the Social Data Dissertation Fellowship, new endeavors of the Social Science Research Council, with support from Omidyar Network, seek to encourage multifaceted pathways for the collection and analysis of social data, with the larger aim of cultivating robust research on technology and society. In particular, we are interested in supporting research that makes creative use of available social data to investigate how social media interact with democracy and elections.” Deadline for applications is June 16.
“a fully managed integration service that enables you to securely transfer data between Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications like Salesforce, Marketo, Slack, and ServiceNow, and AWS services like Amazon S3 and Amazon Redshift, in just a few clicks.”
Governments around the world have begun using Palantir Foundry to accelerate their response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As we recently wrote on our blog, we believe data-driven approaches to crises must be grounded in a broader understanding of technology’s promises and limitations, including a focused regard for preserving societal values such as privacy and civil liberties. Our enterprise platform, Palantir Foundry, is currently used by customers around the world to integrate data critical to combatting the COVID-19 crisis. In this post, we’ll describe in greater detail how our customers can do so in a secure and privacy-protective way.
“The list, which includes 408 books in total, covers a wide range of scientific and technological topics. In order to save you some time, I have created one list of all the books (65 in number) that are relevant to the data and Machine Learning field.”
Harvard University, Institute for Quantitative Social Science
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“This project aims to provide an information infrastructure for the spatial study of the new novel coronavirus (COVID-19), which was first reported in Wuhan, China and then were found in more than 60 countries and regions in the world.”
The British Museum has revamped its online collections database, making over 1.9 million photos of its collection available for free online under a Creative Commons license.