When Yale’s Howard Forman started rating colleges’ online COVID dashboards on Twitter this past September, he imagined it would remain a personal, ad-hoc exercise. Forman, a professor at the School of Public Health and School of Management, often uses the social media platform to challenge people and institutions.
But when colleague Cary Gross, professor of medicine, read one of Forman’s tweets, he saw the potential for something much bigger.
“He took it from a little exercise to a methodological one,” said Forman, professor of radiology, public health (health policy), economics and management.
Together they created “We Rate COVID Dashboards,” a website that evaluates the online dashboards of over 290 U.S. colleges and universities and counting in response to the pandemic. Their system awards points based on dashboard readability, frequency of updates, separation of student and staff data, inclusion of city and county data, and information about the number of students in quarantine, among other factors.
STAT; By Adam Feuerstein, Damian Garde, and Andrew Joseph
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The success of a second vaccine against Covid-19 means the world is a big step closer to curbing the coronavirus pandemic.
Moderna, joined by U.S. government scientists, announced Monday that their mRNA vaccine candidate was 94.5% effective in preventing Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, according to an interim analysis of a 30,000-patient clinical trial. The news comes exactly one week after Pfizer and BioNTech said their respective Covid-19 vaccine candidate, also created using mRNA technology, was more than 90% effective in its own 60,000-patient clinical trial.
Here’s what we know — and still need to learn — about the two most advanced Covid-19 vaccines and how they might reshape the pandemic that has killed 1.3 million people worldwide and infected at least 54.5 million.
“I think it’s fair to say that public polling as we know it seems to be broken,” said Nicholas Marchio, a lead data scientist at the University of Chicago’s Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation, a hub for urban science.
Marchio previously applied modeling techniques to target voters for Civis Analytics and Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign. Before the election, he explained how good polling works and why it’s useful, while cautioning that data is not “all-powerful.”
In the following Q&A, Marchio reconciles the election’s outcome with pre-election forecasts, and offers suggestions for how polling could be improved before the next election.
Serina Chang, Emma Pierson, Pang Wei Koh, Jaline Gerardin, Beth Redbird, David Grusky, Jure Leskovec
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We model the spread of SARS-CoV-2 within 10 of the largest metropolitan statistical areas in the United States using dynamic mobility networks that encode the hourly movements of 98 million people between 56,945 neighborhoods and 552,758 points of interest (like restaurants, gyms, and grocery stores) using 5.4 billion edges. A video of our model in Chicago, starting from March 1, is shown below: from left, the plots show the total number of visits to points of interest in the mobility data; the model’s predicted fraction of the population in the Susceptible, Exposed, Infectious, and Removed states; and the model’s predicted geographic distribution of infections. After showing that our model accurately fits case counts, we use it to study the equity and efficiency of fine-grained reopening strategies.
UK tech company PIVOT1080 has launched a smart wristband to train people to stop touching their face, a common transmission route for COVID-19.
The ‘Nudge’ band uses behavioural science and AI to differentiate between over 1,000 different hand movements and to psychologically ‘nudge’ the wearer.
On Friday, October 30, Caltech conferred degrees on 51 graduate students by a vote of the Board of Trustees as part of a special allowance made for students impacted by coronavirus-related campus closures.
Conferral is the process by which the Institute officially approves its graduates’ degrees. Traditionally, the trustees only approve degrees once a year, at a meeting held the morning of the commencement ceremony each June. In recognition of the impact the coronavirus pandemic has had on progress toward degree completion, the Institute felt it important to provide this additional opportunity for graduate students who would have been awarded degrees in June 2020 had Caltech not been forced to shut down operations in the spring.
Graduate students who were able to complete their degree requirements by the end of September had their degrees conferred through this October vote of the trustees; 39 PhD and 12 MS degrees were awarded. This group will be invited to participate in a future celebration event for Caltech alumni whose commencements were impacted by the pandemic; the date for this event has not yet been determined.
There are currently more than 170 collegiate varsity gaming programs in NCAA Division I, and the number of clubs is even higher. So even as institutions investment in esports, there are still many misunderstood and overlooked aspects of the potential to drive value (and even revenue) in the collegiate esports space.
College in the 21st century
The college experience today is very different than it was 50 years ago. The pace of change outside of institutions is ever-accelerating, often leaving colleges struggling to keep up. Technology, students’ interests, evolving economies and workplaces, and changes in cultural norms have left colleges and universities in a place of less relevance than at many points in the past.
A fascinating slice of electro-acoustic music history has just come out on the Carrier label. This 1984 concert performance of Rainbow Family by George Lewis — composer, master jazz trombonist, Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians member, computer music explorer — takes us back to an early stage of artificial intelligence (AI) when desktop computers (then known as microcomputers) were starting to interact with live musicians.
After two years of research and experimentation at IRCAM — Pierre Boulez’s new music laboratory underneath the Pompidou Centre in Paris — Lewis put together what he believes was IRCAM’s first commission for microcomputers and musicians improvising together. In his long booklet note, Lewis writes that he did all of the computer programming and “hardware hacking” himself, using the computer language Forth that he learned from his mentor, composer/record producer David Behrman.
The artificial intelligence Maithra Raghu studies at Google Brain doesn’t have a bedside manner. But she’s betting it can still help restore a deeply human, disappearing aspect of modern medicine: personal connection.
In a health care system flooded with paperwork and patient data, Raghu sees a natural place for neural networks, which analyze vast amounts of information to find patterns that escape the human eye and use them to churn out diagnoses or health care predictions. To her, the technology could prove to be a powerful tool for processing data that can spare providers more time to spend with patients one-on-one.
“Machine learning isn’t a magic tool here,” said Raghu, a senior research scientist who was recently named a STAT Wunderkind. “Medicine is fundamentally human. In those times when you’re very scared, the human component is really, really critical.”
Every year, C&EN highlights 10 start-ups developing potentially world-changing chemistry innovations. And while 2020 has felt unlike any other year, the drive of science-based entrepreneurs to bring technologies that benefit people, the environment, and the economy to market hasn’t changed.
The start-ups profiled in this package illustrate the breadth of solutions that chemistry-based innovators can deliver. They’ve found new ways to discover drugs, produce sustainable food and materials, harness quantum computing, and even mimic the human nose.
When you think about it, John Deere’s self-propelled agricultural spraying machines are really just big IoT devices. But big as the products may be, many of the overall design issues and considerations are the same as what every other developer of IoT devices is confronted by—they’re just different in the agricultural space.
Joel Hergenreter, manager of tech stack system test and validation at John Deere, sat down to talk to FierceElectronics about the IoT based technologies his team is working with, the importance of understanding customer needs, and some of the exciting opportunities ahead for the company.
“This collaborative, week-long hackathon offers a unique opportunity for participants to work with Rogers’ groundbreaking, low latency 5G technology. Using real on-ice tracking data from NHL Stanley Cup Playoffs games, participants will devise innovative ways to increase audience engagement and enhance the fan experience for Sportsnet viewers.” Deadline to apply is November 21.
In this post, I offer some tips about the logistics of proposal writing in the field of computer science. The audience of this writeup is senior graduate students who are considering a career in academia, junior faculty members, and others who are simply looking for tips on writing research proposals.
