Data Science newsletter – August 25, 2021

Newsletter features journalism, research papers and tools/software for August 25, 2021

 

How AI-powered tech landed man in jail with scant evidence

Associated Press; Garance Burke, Martha Mendoza, Juliet Linderman and Michael Tarm


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Michael Williams’ wife pleaded with him to remember their fishing trips with the grandchildren, how he used to braid her hair, anything to jar him back to his world outside the concrete walls of Cook County Jail.

His three daily calls to her had become a lifeline, but when they dwindled to two, then one, then only a few a week, the 65-year-old Williams felt he couldn’t go on. He made plans to take his life with a stash of pills he had stockpiled in his dormitory.

Williams was jailed last August, accused of killing a young man from the neighborhood who asked him for a ride during a night of unrest over police brutality in May. But the key evidence against Williams didn’t come from an eyewitness or an informant; it came from a clip of noiseless security video showing a car driving through an intersection, and a loud bang picked up by a network of surveillance microphones. Prosecutors said technology powered by a secret algorithm that analyzed noises detected by the sensors indicated Williams shot and killed the man.

“I kept trying to figure out, how can they get away with using the technology like that against me?” said Williams, speaking publicly for the first time about his ordeal. “That’s not fair.”


Campus funding for sponsored research tops $1 billion for first time

University of California-Berkeley, Berkeley News


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Despite the ongoing pandemic, it has been a banner year for University of California, Berkeley, research.

The campus’s budget for sponsored projects, involving mostly research and training, rose by 30% in the fiscal year ending June 30 — an increase of $240 million from the previous year. This was due primarily to a nearly 50% increase in funding from the federal government and robust growth in support from private foundations.

As a result, UC Berkeley’s funding for research and other sponsored projects — including $70 million in federal funds to offset the financial impacts of the pandemic — topped $1 billion for the first time in campus history, totaling $1.05 billion.


Agtech startup Dewey Scientific raises $3.2M to further advance cannabis industry innovations

GeekWire, Kurt Schlosser


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The startup, which provides scientific services to cannabis cultivators as well as proprietary cannabis genetics, was founded in 2018 by three PhD plant scientists out of Washington State University. Dewey CEO Dr. Jordan Zager and co-founder Dr. Paul Mihalyov studied at WSU under Dr. Mark Lange, who serves as Dewey’s chief scientific officer. Lange is known as an expert on terpenes, which are scented compounds secreted by plants that may play a role in the effects that different cannabis strains have on people.


UO, OHA partner to provide free COVID-19 testing to K-12 schools

University of Oregon, Around the O


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The University of Oregon, working with the Oregon Health Authority, has received a $17.1 million letter of intent to provide free COVID-19 testing to public and private K-12 schools in southwestern Oregon during the 2021-22 school year.

The program will offer voluntary weekly testing for students in participating schools throughout Lane, Douglas, Coos, Curry, Josephine and Jackson counties. It is funded through a grant to the state from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and is free to participating schools and students.


Physicist Mukherji awarded $1.97 million to study cellular design

Washington University in St. Louis, The Source


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Cells are the basic units of structure and function in all forms of life on Earth, from humans and animals to yeasts and bacteria. But a cell itself is made up of even smaller working pieces called organelles. Understanding how a cell commits resources to building new parts — and eventually divides into two cells — is the focus of a new grant for physicist Shankar Mukherji of Washington University in St. Louis.

Mukherji was awarded a five-year $1.97 million grant for his project, “The design principles of the eukaryotic cell: uncovering the coordination of systems-level organelle dynamics, metabolism and growth.” The research project is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

“Our first order of business is to map out the relationship between the organelle biogenesis program within the cell as it relates to the growth and size of cells,” said Mukherji, assistant professor of physics in Arts & Sciences.


A country-wide collaboration to address the maternal health crisis

STAT, Kimberlee McKay and Peter Shamamian


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A new collaboration, led by the Office on Women’s Health at the Department of Health and Human Services, is taking a data-first approach to this urgent problem. Using a system that captures health information for nearly one-third of U.S. births, the initiative draws on this data to understand care delivery and outcomes. A network of 200 hospitals will then use this intelligence to implement and test solutions in real-world hospital settings.

This network targets hospitals caring for underserved populations, including the health systems we work for, Avera Health (K.M.) and Montefiore Health System (P.S.). Avera serves a 72,000-square-mile territory across South Dakota and neighboring states, with one tertiary care center in Sioux Falls and 15 small hospitals in rural settings. Montefiore is the dominant health care provider in the Bronx, a borough of New York City comprising one of the poorest and most diverse communities in the country.


Inflatable robotic hand gives amputees real-time tactile control

MIT News


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For the more than 5 million people in the world who have undergone an upper-limb amputation, prosthetics have come a long way. Beyond traditional mannequin-like appendages, there is a growing number of commercial neuroprosthetics — highly articulated bionic limbs, engineered to sense a user’s residual muscle signals and robotically mimic their intended motions.

But this high-tech dexterity comes at a price. Neuroprosthetics can cost tens of thousands of dollars and are built around metal skeletons, with electrical motors that can be heavy and rigid.

Now engineers at MIT and Shanghai Jiao Tong University have designed a soft, lightweight, and potentially low-cost neuroprosthetic hand. Amputees who tested the artificial limb performed daily activities, such as zipping a suitcase, pouring a carton of juice, and petting a cat, just as well as — and in some cases better than —those with more rigid neuroprosthetics.


Switzerland’s ‘Silicon Valley of smell’ prospers in age of big data

Financial Times, Sam Jones


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Is artificial intelligence already deciding how you smell?

Before the pandemic, it was popular in America to smell sweet: a growing trend for fruit — even caramel — scents in consumer products such as shampoo or detergent had become notable. Quite what was driving this unpleasantness is not clear.

But there are signs of a shift. The Covid-19 pandemic has changed how people want themselves, their clothes and their homes to smell — and not just in America. Now people want to believe everything they touch is squeaky clean — even antiseptically so. The astringent ubiquity of rubbing alcohol has lodged itself in the public smell consciousness, sitting alongside citruses, menthols and such as a signifier of hygiene.

What people like to smell changes all the time — more gradually than seismically but with huge business consequences. Rarely do we stop to think about how much of our environment — and the products we consume in it — is scented. But almost everything is.


Where IBM Watson AI Went Wrong

Equities News, Jeff Kagan


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I got the sense this disaster would happen when I was at the World of Watson.

As amazing as the technology was, the people in charge of generating excitement and creating sizzle were not marketing specialists.

They were technology people. And technology people don’t know how to communicate with the average person.

Watson was the breakthrough technology that was going to completely transform industries like healthcare. IBM spent a fortune on this conference and on creating a bigger than life image with itself positioned as the leader in this new industry, and in fact other industries.


Using Artificial Intelligence for early detection and treatment of illnesses: TU Dresden researchers develop an implantable AI system

TU Dresden, News Portal


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Artificial intelligence (AI) will fundamentally change medicine and healthcare: Diagnostic patient data, e.g. from ECG, EEG or X-ray images, can be analyzed with the help of machine learning, so that diseases can be detected at a very early stage based on subtle changes. However, implanting AI within the human body is still a major technical challenge. TU Dresden scientists at the Chair of Optoelectronics have now succeeded for the first time in developing a bio-compatible implantable AI platform that classifies in real time healthy and pathological patterns in biological signals such as heartbeats. It detects pathological changes even without medical supervision. The research results have now been published in the journal ‘Science Advances’.


Schools, colleges brace for cyberattacks as students return

TheHill, Maggie Miller


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Hackers are ready to pounce on schools and universities as they attempt to restart classes 18 months into the coronavirus pandemic while already dealing with controversial subjects such as mask mandates and hybrid learning.

Both K-12 schools and colleges have been increasingly subjected to ransomware attacks, class interruptions on virtual learning platforms, phishing emails and identity theft, further disrupting an already challenging learning environment.

“Last year was quite rough,” Doug Levin, the national director of the K-12 Security Information Exchange, told The Hill. “This year unfortunately, given the continuing challenge of responding to COVID, I think we are likely to see some school districts bouncing back and forth again between in-person and remote learning, or at least making that option available.”


Cal State students are failing or withdrawing at high rates

Los Angeles Times, Edsource, Larry Gordon


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California State University students are failing or withdrawing at high rates from many courses — including chemistry, calculus, English and U.S. history — prompting renewed efforts for systemwide reform.

New attention is being placed on classes that for years have shown failure or withdrawal rates of 20% or more — sometimes reaching as high as half the students. Efforts to overhaul the courses and improve teaching are now seen as a crucial way to help more students pass and graduate.


$3.8M Seed Round for Computer Science Education Platform

Building Indiana Business, News Release


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EduLab Capital Partners, a seed-stage venture capital firm focused on learning and workforce technologies, and Allos Ventures, a venture capital firm focused on seed and early-stage technology companies, announced that they have led a $3.8 million round of seed funding for Carmel, IN-based computer science curriculum platform Codelicious. Additional investors included Sixty8 Capital, GRE Capital, and Elevate Ventures.

Codelicious provides full-year computer science curriculum to K-12 schools and districts around the country, currently serving more than 100 schools and districts in 23 states. Codelicious’ patented technology tailors instructional assets to a school or district’s unique instructional cadence to deliver customized computer science courses.


Peter Enns Named Director of Center for Social Sciences

Cornell University, Cornell Research


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The Cornell Center for Social Sciences is introducing the CCSS Accelerated Research Fellows Program to support social scientists involved in multiphase research grants. To better support research that influences societal-level changes at a rapid pace, funding opportunities increasingly follow a two-phased approach. After a phase-one award, research teams have a short window to complete the proposed research and compete for an even more ambitious phase-two award for the project. Examples of two-phase funding opportunities include the NSF Convergence Accelerator and the NSF SBIR/STTR programs.

The Cornell Center for Social Sciences has developed the CCSS Accelerated Research Fellows Program to support Cornell researchers during their phase-one research. This program is designed to help maximize the opportunities for a successful phase-two proposal. As a CCSS Accelerated Research Fellow, faculty will receive one course buyout during their phase-one year and up to $10,000 (per team) to support unanticipated costs during phase one. See the CCSS website for complete details.


Why You May Have More Friends Than Your Friends Do

Nautilus, Joshua Holden


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It is a mathematical fact that if you average over all of the net popularities in a network, then that average will be negative: Your friends have more friends than you do. You are more likely to be Carolina’s friend than Annika’s, exactly because Carolina has more friends. If someone has lots of friends, one of them is more likely to be you. In his paper, Feld suggested that this might be psychologically significant. People, when they wonder how many friends they ought to have, could be looking at the number of friends their friends have as a point of comparison, which will almost always leave them feeling inadequate. A 2017 paper identified a “happiness paradox” and suggested that it might be related to the friendship paradox—perhaps your friends are also happier than you are because they are more popular.

But in a new paper, a trio of researchers from the Santa Fe Institute and the University of Michigan, who study physics and networks, show that the truth of the friendship paradox isn’t as gloomy as it might seem. There are some networks where the friendship paradox doesn’t meaningfully manifest at all. The authors—George Cantwell, Alec Kirkley, and Mark Newman—confirmed this by comparing their mathematical results against over 30 real-world networks, including among jazz musicians, collaborating scientists, drug users, and dolphins. So, if you were ever bummed out in the way Feld suggested, cheer up—the reality is much more complicated than the headline. You might be more popular than one single number makes it seem.


$2 million trial will measure effect of virtual reality on senior living residents, families

McKnight's Senior Living, Kimberly Bonvissuto


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Boston-based Rendever will use a $2 million National Institute on Aging grant to study the effects of its virtual reality platform on senior living residents and their families.

The company is working with the University of California, Santa Barbara, to research family engagement and the differences in the effects of virtual reality across various levels of cognitive impairment. The Phase II study will collect data through the end of 2022 from approximately 400 participants in 12 senior living communities across the country, including Vista del Monte, Covenant Living at Samarkand, Atterdag Village of Solvang, AlmaVia in Camarillo and several communities operated by Northbridge Companies in Massachusetts.


Events



Metascience 2021 Conference

Center for Open Science, Research on Research Institute


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Online September 16-18, 23-25. “Communities of researchers and stakeholders are the research and development pipeline for improving research practices. The Metascience 2021 meeting is a point of convergence to share knowledge, foster community, and define a roadmap of research and intervention priorities to accelerate science.” [$$]


StateOfTheArt() Conference

Abacus.ai


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San Francisco and Online September 15, starting at 9:30 a.m. Pacific. “We will dive deep into the state of Applied AI today, discuss self-supervised and reinforcement learning, chat about the impending robotics age, large language models and applications of AI in e-commerce, supply chain and social media. We will also be discussing AI ethics and the impact of AI via social media platforms on society.” [free, registration required]


Deadlines



Rethink EMG Challenge

“The De Luca Foundation is offering four awards, in the form of cash and surface Electromyography (sEMG) equipment, for proposals using sEMG to augment current performance assessment methods in professions (PT, OT, Athletic Training, Fitness, Geriatrics, Speech, Telehealth) in which human assessment of movement in health and disease are needed.” Deadline for submissions is October 31.

SPONSORED CONTENT

Assets  




The eScience Institute’s Data Science for Social Good program is now accepting applications for student fellows and project leads for the 2021 summer session. Fellows will work with academic researchers, data scientists and public stakeholder groups on data-intensive research projects that will leverage data science approaches to address societal challenges in areas such as public policy, environmental impacts and more. Student applications due 2/15 – learn more and apply here. DSSG is also soliciting project proposals from academic researchers, public agencies, nonprofit entities and industry who are looking for an opportunity to work closely with data science professionals and students on focused, collaborative projects to make better use of their data. Proposal submissions are due 2/22.

 


Tools & Resources



We’re excited to announce that we’ve just launched the CDS Monthly Research Feature

Twitter, NYU Center for Data Science


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an email that will go out to our subscribers once a month with our most recent research highlights from the CDS blog. Check out our first feature!

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