On February 28, the news emerged of New Zealand’s first case of Covid-19. For Michael Baker, a government advisor and epidemiologist at the University of Otago in Wellington, the following weeks would be a time of extreme anxiety.
While New Zealand is now regarded as a global success story in containing the coronavirus – as of May 7 it has reported just 1,489 cases and 21 deaths amongst a population of five million – this did not always appear such a likely outcome. Indeed, scientists believe that without the right strategies being swiftly implemented at crucial times, the country could have experienced more than 1,000 cases a day, overwhelming its fragile healthcare network.
When the news arrived that Covid-19 had reached New Zealand’s shores, Baker had already been monitoring the seemingly inexorable global progression of the pandemic since early January.
At CDG, the @British_Airways
check-in staff wore masks and gloves. Masks are mandatory inside the airport. But on the plane to London, and on my next flight to HK, no BA staff wore masks, surprisingly. [thread]
Amid the cacophony, sometimes the founding collaborative spirit of the Internet reemerges.
David Yu — team lead of hockey analytics at Sportlogiq, a Montreal-based, AI-driven advanced stats company that works with most NHL teams — is the author of one of those recent precious moments.
He isn’t an epidemiologist. Nor is he an expert in infectious diseases.
But the soon-to-be 33-year-old hockey analyst has created a powerful tool, the COVID Projections Tracker, which has provided those in the field a way to find flaws in the model widely used by U.S. health care providers, media outlets and government bodies — including the White House — to make crucial decisions related to the novel coronavirus pandemic.
No f—ing joke, a new study showed that Jonah Hill has overtaken Samuel L. Jackson as the actor who has uttered the most damn swear words in movies.
An analysis from the research group Buzz Bingo called “Profanity On Film” said that Hill has used bad language 376 times in his movies while Jackson has only used swear words 301 times in his films, landing him at just third place overall.
Hill took the top spot in large part because of his role in Martin Scorsese’s 2013 film “The Wolf of Wall Street,” which the report says is the most profane movie in terms of language ever, with offensive language used over 700 times.
Top funded chip startup company Graphcore is a semiconductor firm, which has developed an intelligence processing unit (IPU) that is specifically designed for AI applications.
Palo Alo-based SambaNova Systems, a stealth startup, has received over $450 million to build a net-generation AI computing system of hardware and software.
Cerebras Systems’ Wafer Scale Engine—the world’s largest computer chip—is at the heart of its deep learning systems, enabling AI research at unprecedented speeds and scale.
Mythic is focused on machine learning inference. Its IPUs leverage analog computing by performing the calculations required for the inference stage of deep neural networks inside a flash memory array.
Groq offers an alternative platform for machine learning that is not dependent on the performance limitations of GPU parallelism and long latency, offering a superior inference platform with no performance penalty for small batch sizes or workloads of any size.
The COVID-19 pandemic represents a massive global health crisis. Because the crisis requires large-scale behaviour change and places significant psychological burdens on individuals, insights from the social and behavioural sciences can be used to help align human behaviour with the recommendations of epidemiologists and public health experts. Here we discuss evidence from a selection of research topics relevant to pandemics, including work on navigating threats, social and cultural influences on behaviour, science communication, moral decision-making, leadership, and stress and coping. In each section, we note the nature and quality of prior research, including uncertainty and unsettled issues. We identify several insights for effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic and highlight important gaps researchers should move quickly to fill in the coming weeks and months. [full text]
As Russia’s surging coronavirus infections have turned it into a global epidemic hotspot second only to the U.S., one thing puzzles health experts: Why is it reporting so few deaths?
Russian officials say 2,305 people have died so far from Covid-19 out of 252,245 confirmed cases since the epidemic erupted. Russia’s total cases on Tuesday overtook those of Spain, which has reported close to 27,000 deaths, after passing the U.K. and Italy, which have more than 13 times the Russian level of fatalities.
The World Health Organization said it’s in talks with Russia about the country’s statistics for coronavirus deaths, which at 0.9% is far below the global average and the lowest among nations with the highest numbers of infections.
Timothy Sheahan, a virologist studying COVID-19, wishes he could keep pace with the growing torrent of new scientific papers about the disease and the novel coronavirus that causes it. But there are just too many—more than 4000 alone last week. “I’m not keeping up,” says Sheahan, who works at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. “It’s impossible.”
A loose-knit army of data scientists, software developers, and journal publishers is pressing hard to change that. Backed by large technology firms and the White House, they are racing to create digital collections holding thousands of freely available papers that could be useful to ending the pandemic, and scrambling to build data-mining and search tools that can help researchers quickly find the information they seek. And the urgency is growing: By one estimate, the COVID-19 literature published since January has reached more than 23,000 papers and is doubling every 20 days—among the biggest explosions of scientific literature ever.
We see a spectrum where some states had single (early) introductions that fueled the majority of the epidemic, while in others the epidemic appears to be driven by a larger number of separate introductions. 2/14
National Library of Medicine, NLM Musings from the Mezzanine blog
from
Since our last blog post, our coders have been hard at work preparing for the full transition to the new and improved PubMed. The latest features have been added, and beginning May 18, you can experience the new PubMed too!
The new PubMed features a modern interface with enhanced search results, including highlighted text snippets to help you preview an abstract while scanning your results list, and updated web elements for easier navigation. The new Best Match sort order uses advanced machine-learning technology and a new relevance search algorithm to bring you the top-ranked results.
A high-profile infectious disease researcher warns COVID-19 is in the early stages of attacking the world, which makes it difficult to relax stay-at-home orders without putting most Americans at risk.
Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said the initial wave of outbreaks in cities such as New York City, where one in five people have been infected, represent a fraction of the illness and death yet to come.
“This damn virus is going to keep going until it infects everybody it possibly can,” Osterholm said Monday during a meeting with the USA TODAY Editorial Board. “It surely won’t slow down until it hits 60 to 70%” of the population, the number that would create herd immunity and halt the spread of the virus.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office officially selected a new partner to support its increasing adoption of artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities.
General Dynamics Information Technology on Monday announced it was awarded a contract worth up to $50 million through USPTO’s Intelligent Automation and Innovation Support Services blanket purchase agreement.
GDIT is the latest of more than a dozen companies the agency tapped under the future-facing BPA. Other businesses who’ve made their own recent announcements detailing partnerships via the agreement include Octo and Steampunk.
Can the winner of a season be identified in advance by the edit each character receives? These superfans are determined to try. Welcome to the sabermetrics of ‘Survivor.’
University of California-Los Angeles, Daily Bruin student newspaper; Radhika Ahuja, Charlotte Huang, Sydney Kovach, Laurel Wood
from
What would happen if UCLA students returned in the fall to take in-person classes? We explore the potential spread of COVID-19 among students on UCLA’s campus.
Online “On May 30-31, NASA, along with the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), are inviting coders, entrepreneurs, scientists, designers, storytellers, makers, builders, artists, and technologists to participate in a virtual hackathon. During a period of 48 hours, participants from around the world will create virtual teams and use Earth observation data to develop solutions to issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic.” [registration required]
Online May 20, starting at 3 p.m. EDT. “Laurie Leshin, President of Worcester Polytechnic Institute: Laurie has sent robots to Mars, overseen NASA’s largest science center, and even has a piece of the solar system named after her. Cool. She now oversees WPI, offering the first undergraduate program in robotics. Learn how robotics is being taught and the many career paths you can pursue with a robotics degree.” [registration required]
Online May 20, starting at 5 p.m. CDT. “With the rapid spread in the novel Corona-virus worldwide, the World Health Organization (WHO) and several countries have published results on the impact of COVID-19 over the past few months. We will be using the data repository curated by John Hopkins University, together with nCoV2019 dataset and other public data, to analyze the COVID-19 epidemic data and create interactive dashboards using Python. We will visualize the emergence of the COVID-19 epidemic, including analysis on infection, mortality, and recovery rates, at different times and geographical location.” [registration required]
We are organizing a @NeurIPSConf
competition around the challenge, hosted by @drivendataorg
, with $100k in prize money! We know that new benchmarks play an important role in driving progress in AI, and we hope this challenge will do the same and spur innovation. (5/7)
Salt Lake City, UT October 25. “The MoVIS ’20 workshop is situated in a larger body of research on geovisualization, geospatial data analytics and exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA). This body of work includes mapping spatial datasets using different visual techniques, and assessing how humans interact and gain insights from spatial data. Spatial flow data is a special type of data that presents issues like the “haystack” problem of overlapping flows, edge effects, issues of using polygon centroids as origins or destinations, and issues of scale and modifiable areal units.” Deadline for submissions is July 10.
“ACM logoACM has established a special category of the ACM Gordon Bell Prize to recognize outstanding research achievements that use high performance computing (HPC) applications to understand the COVID-19 pandemic, including the understanding of its spread. The ACM Gordon Bell Special Prize for High Performance Computing-Based COVID-19 Research will be presented in 2020 and 2021.” Deadline for nominations is October 8.
The coronavirus pandemic has left higher-education leaders facing difficult decisions about when to reopen campuses and how to go about it. The Chronicle is tracking individual colleges’ plans. Currently the vast majority say they are planning for an in-person fall semester.
“In response to the novel coronavirus, Vera researchers in the In Our Backyards Project have been publishing jail populations. The most recent available data for each jail jurisdiction is presented in a simple table at the Vera Institute of Justice website along with information on COVID-19 cases. This page provides access to the complete set of jail data since January 1, 2020.”
Learned this early on from @IBMResearch
‘s Salim Roukos. You can read more in the @mlpowered
book, which is full of practical ML advice missing from textbooks: https://mlpowered.com/book/
Dolby Laboratories, Inc. (NYSE DLB), a leader in immersive entertainment experiences, today announced Dolby.io, an API platform that further broadens the opportunities to create in Dolby for the enterprise and application development space. Dolby.io will enable businesses, developers, and content creators to enhance every interaction and every piece of content in order to deliver spectacular communications, collaboration, and audiovisual experiences in their apps and services.
We surveyed researchers and reviewed publications and found management and sharing practices for social media data similar to other social science data (e.g. surveys): focus on acquisition more than sharing or documentation, concerns about ethical reuse.