Petrie-Flom Center at Harvard Law School, Sara Gerke
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According to one estimate, over 318,000 health apps are available in app stores, and over 200 health apps are added each day. Of these, only a fraction are regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA); those classified as “medical devices,” which typically pose a moderate to high risk to user safety.
In this final installment of our In Focus Series on Direct-to-Consumer Health Apps, we asked our respondents to reflect on this largely unregulated space in health tech.
Specifically, we asked: How can/should regulators deal with the assessment of health apps? For apps not currently regulated by the FDA, should they undergo any kind of review, such as whether they are helpful for consumers?
Two state government websites in Georgia recently stopped posting updates on covid-19 cases in prisons and long-term care facilities, just as the dangerous delta variant was taking hold.
Data has been disappearing recently in other states as well.
Florida, for example, now reports covid cases, deaths and hospitalizations once a week, instead of daily, as before.
Semiconductor Engineering, Mark LaPedus and Ed Sperling
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SE: Intel recently disclosed its new logic roadmap. Beyond Intel 3, the company is working on Intel 20A. With Intel 20A, you plan to introduce a RibbonFET in 2024. What is a RibbonFET and how does that propel Intel forward?
Kelleher: RibbonFET is our name for what other people in the industry call gate-all-around. Some people also call it a nanosheet or nanoribbon. It’s the next transistor architecture that takes us beyond finFET. We’re utilizing finFET until Intel 3 and will continue to improve finFET for that process. When we go to Intel 20A, we will be utilizing RibbonFET at approximately the same equivalent node as the rest of the industry.
Colby College has hired a language processing expert to lead its newly formed Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
Amanda Stent, considered one of the country’s leading authorities on natural language processing – which gives computers the ability to understand human text and spoken words – will start in October.
Stent most recently served as the natural language processing architect at Bloomberg L.P., where she led the People and Language AI Team.
Even after billions in stimulus cash, cracks are forming in America’s higher education system. Nowhere are those problems more prominent than in Pennsylvania.
In just the past year: Philadelphia’s two-century-old pharmacy and healthcare school, The University of the Sciences, proposed a merger with nearby Saint Joseph’s University after facing multimillion-dollar deficits. La Salle University’s credit rating was cut to junk after posting an operating shortfall. And Washington & Jefferson College outside of Pittsburgh faces growing operating deficits after a double-digit percentage drop in enrollment over the last two years.
[Manuvir Das] recently spoke with EnterpriseAI through a videoconference to discuss where Nvidia is today in its short-term and long-term AI strategies and how he and the company are continuing to work on delivering AI technologies to its customers.
Some of those ideas are particularly intriguing, such as his vision that GPUs will commonly come to enterprise servers in the next five years to make AI even more accessible and achievable for users. Keep reading for more insights and views about the rapidly changing and maturing world of AI from the leader of Nvidia’s enterprise computing division.
An intensive push to improve energy efficiency in buildings throughout the United States could prevent 1,800 to 3,600 premature deaths every year, according to a new modeling study. What’s more, combining this with efforts to achieve better indoor air quality in homes could prevent 2,900 to 5,100 deaths annually.
Building energy efficiency is important for fighting climate change because buildings represent 40% of total energy demand in the United States. Reducing that energy demand doesn’t just cut greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels though – it also reduces other air pollutants that can harm human health. So improving building energy efficiency could have health benefits as well as climate ones.
But here’s where it gets complicated: one of the main strategies to improve energy efficiency is to seal up buildings so that heated air stays inside in winter and cooled air stays inside in summer. Less exchange of air between inside and out can also lead to a buildup of air pollutants inside, with the potential for negative health effects.
The new study is the first to comprehensively examine how this all nets out by modeling the effects of increased building energy efficiency on both indoor and outdoor air quality across the entire United States.
Don Norman, the godfather of UX, is holding up his phone on Zoom. “It’s a Google Pixel,” he says, “but it doesn’t matter, they’re all the same.” He explains that if you add less than an inch, you could put in a bigger battery. A little more than that, and you’d make that battery replaceable. But smartphones weren’t meant to last. And like myriad other things we use in our daily lives—our cars, our clothes, the fridge, even our lightbulbs—this is by design.
Norman knows a thing or two about design, both good and bad. In The Design of Everyday Things, his seminal critique of VCRs no one could use, and doors that left us perpetually unsure about whether we should push them or pull them, he argued every object should be intuitive to use. A behavioral scientist and engineer by background, Norman in the 1990s was a vice president at Apple, where he coined the now ubiquitous term “user experience.” He cofounded the UX consulting firm Nielsen Norman group. And he has taught at several schools, including the University of California in San Diego, Northwestern University, and the IIT Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
“During e-learning, because I didn’t have access to resources to help me succeed online, like good internet or technology, I relied heavily on cheating to complete homework assignments and get through tests,” Sam, a rising junior at Palisades Charter High School who asked to be referred by only her first name for anonymity, said. “My reliance on cheating instead of actually learning the required material has made me nervous about how I will perform during the Fall when cheating resources won’t be as accessible.”
Perhaps the most blatant effect of cheating is that students don’t learn. Despite being online, students were still required to comprehend and be tested on rigorous course material.
Yet, due to cheating, many students still missed out on grasping foundational concepts that will be built upon in the upcoming school year. Precalculus students entering AP Calculus, Spanish 1 students entering Spanish 2, honors chemistry students entering AP Chemistry — these are just some of the scenarios where students will be required to know basic concepts to succeed in their upcoming courses.
The American Dental Association Science & Research Institute, together with other US and international collaborators, has been awarded a three-year, $3.5 million grant to create a cell atlas of the nose, mouth, and airways from birth through adolescence.
The research team received the grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative as part of a $33 million announcement supporting groups of researchers and pediatricians as they seek to better understand, prevent, and treat childhood diseases. The research funded by these grants will generate healthy, single-cell reference data from pediatric tissue samples for the Human Cell Atlas, an international consortium that aims to map every cell type in the human body.
Kevin M. Byrd, DDS, PhD, who is the Anthony R. Volpe Research Scholar and manager of oral and craniofacial research at the ADA Science & Research Institute, will serve as one of the principal investigators of the grant. Over the course of three years, 10% of the grant funding will be devoted to Byrd’s activities.
University of Southern California, USC Viterbi School of Engineering
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The Surfside, Florida condo building collapse in June signaled a warning about our buildings: we need to be vigilant and clear about proactively monitoring their health. Structural health is a key area that Assistant Professor Audrey Olivier, of the Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, will be researching. This Fall, she will also be bringing a new class.
The class, “Uncertainty Quantification Concepts in Civil and Environmental Engineering,” will introduce students to the field of uncertainty quantification and probabilistic data learning. This aligns with Olivier’s main passion as a researcher: using data to better understand the health of urban systems from buildings to bridges. “My core focus is on how to use data and data analytics to solve some of the problems of civil engineering,” she said.
The course is an introduction for students that Olivier hopes will be part of a larger structures and mechanics program that she is planning to build with other faculty in the department, which could also include a specific course on structural health monitoring.
The Wireless Information Network Laboratory (WINLAB) at Rutgers University-New Brunswick has received a three-year, $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to build a nationwide, community-based mobile edge sensing and computing infrastructure.
The collaborative effort will be led by Rutgers along with Indiana University, Temple University and New York Institute of Technology.
Building upon the data science minor and the “Introduction to Data Science” sequence taught by Franklin and Dan Nicolae, professor and chair in the Department of Statistics and the College, the major will include new courses and emphasize research and application. Through the new Data Science Clinic, students will capstone their studies by working with government, non-profit and industry partners on projects using data science approaches in real world situations with immediate, substantial impact.
“The courses will take students through the whole data science lifecycle, with all the concepts that they need to know: data collection, data engineering, programming, statistical inference, machine learning, databases, and issues around ethics, privacy and algorithmic transparency,” Nicolae said. “But for data science, experiential learning is fundamental. Students will partner with organizations on and beyond campus to advance research, industry projects and social impact through what they have learned, transcending the conventional classroom experience.”
University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, News
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Researchers in the life sciences who use machine learning for their studies should adopt standards that allow other researchers to reproduce their results, according to a comment article published today in the journal Nature Methods.
The authors explain that the standards are key to advancing scientific breakthroughs, making advances in knowledge, and ensuring research findings are reproducible from one group of scientists to the next. The standards would allow other groups of scientists to focus on the next breakthrough rather than spending time recreating the wheel built by the authors of the original study.
Casey S. Greene, PhD, director of the University of Colorado School of Medicine’s Center for Health AI, is a corresponding author of the article, which he co-authored with first author Benjamin J. Heil, a member of Greene’s research team, and researchers from the United States, Canada, and Europe.
Attending college leads to earnings gains on average, but also introduces considerable risks. Nearly half of all college enrollees fail to complete their degrees, and many do not find the high paying jobs they had hoped for. (2/n)
The student loan system does little to insure against these risks – many borrowers end up with low incomes and high levels of debt. Over half of student loan borrowers miss payments, and roughly one in five default within five years of entering repayment. (3/n)
Our paper asks: Why is there no thriving private market for equity and other college financing contracts that would help mitigate the risk of going to college? Should the government help create these alternatives to student loans? (6/n)
From health care, economics and astrophysics to climate change, digital humanities and the promise of smart cities, the world is in the midst of a data revolution. Complex, massive and unique data sets are being generated and analyzed across a broad spectrum of disciplines at an unprecedented rate.
To capitalize on its strengths, the University of Toronto has launched the Data Sciences Institute (DSI), a community of talented faculty members, researchers, staff and students spanning fields and faculties pursuing exciting research that addresses a variety of global challenges.
“The Data Sciences Institute brings together researchers from various disciplines across the University of Toronto and the University Health Network, the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) and the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, establishing Toronto as a leading centre for research into advancing data science,” said Lisa Strug, academic director of the DSI and a professor in the departments of computer science and statistical sciences in the Faculty of Arts & Science.
Designers need to start thinking about AI in design as an augmented intelligence system and a creative partner. As design tools, workflows, and processes will inevitably be molded by AI in the coming decade, we need to shift our mindset from a human versus machine to a human plus machine mindset.
The NSF Quantum Leap Challenge Institute for Robust Quantum Simulation will be led by the University of Maryland, College Park. It will bring together a multidisciplinary team of scientists and engineers to develop quantum systems and develop the methods and tools for large-scale simulators that will enable quantum computation. The institute will also include partnerships with several other institutions, including two Historically Black Colleges and Universities: Morgan State University and North Carolina Central University.
The NSF Quantum Leap Challenge Institute for Quantum Sensing in Biophysics and Bioengineering, will be led by the University of Chicago. It will pursue two goals: 1) pioneering new ways to use quantum technology in biology and 2) developing the quantum workforce through STEM education and outreach.
The University of Chicago will be joined by three other university partners in the effort – Chicago State University, the University of Illinois at Chicago and Harvard University. In addition, the institute will collaborate with the Chicago Public Schools to establish a Quantum Academy program that will provide K-12 students opportunities to study and learn the foundations of quantum science from the institute’s lead researchers.
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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.
Researchers from Brown University and MIT have developed a new data science framework that allows users to process data with the programming language Python — without paying the “performance tax” normally associated with a user-friendly language.
The new framework, called Tuplex, is able to process data queries written in Python up to 90 times faster than industry-standard data systems like Apache Spark or Dask. The research team unveiled the system in research presented at SIGMOD 2021, a premier data processing conference, and have made the software freely available to all.
With our new Master of Environmental Data Science degree program starting at the Bren School (UCSB) in August, a number of faculty and staff in our program wanted to make sure that we were using the most efficient and modern tools to run our classes. Of particular interest was GitHub for some aspects of course management – which we hadn’t used before. After considering a number of options (including the very cool ghclass R package), we settled on getting our feet wet with brand name GitHub Classrooms.
