The National Institutes of Health is investing about $74.5 million over five years to advance data science, catalyze innovation and spur health discoveries across Africa. Under its new Harnessing Data Science for Health Discovery and Innovation in Africa (DS-I Africa) program, the NIH is issuing 19 awards to support research and training activities. DS-I Africa is an NIH Common Fund program that is supported by the Office of the Director and 11 NIH Institutes, Centers and Offices. … The University of Cape Town (UCT) will develop and manage the initiative’s open data science platform and coordinating center, building on previous NIH investments in UCT’s data and informatics capabilities made through the Human Heredity and Health in Africa (H3Africa) program. UCT will provide a flexible, scalable platform for the DS-I Africa researchers, so they can find and access data, select tools and workflows, and run analyses through collaborative workspaces. UCT will also administer and support core resources, as well as coordinate consortium activities.
A research team led by Professor Lim Chwee Teck from the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) Department of Biomedical Engineering and Institute for Health Innovation & Technology (iHealthtech), in collaboration with clinical partners from Singapore General Hospital, has developed a smart wearable sensor that can conduct real-time, point-of-care assessment of chronic wounds wirelessly via an app. A world’s first, the novel sensor technology can detect temperature, pH, bacteria type and inflammatory factors specific to chronic wounds within 15 minutes, hence enabling fast and accurate wound assessment.
Stanford University announced a new effort to marshal the University’s technological capabilities and teaching and learning expertise to reach students who have been historically underserved by higher education. A newly formed office, Stanford Digital Education, is teaming up with the National Education Equity Lab, a nonprofit organization that works to bridge the gap between high school and college.
In its initial pilot with the Ed Equity Lab, Stanford Digital Education has enrolled more than 220 students nationwide in a credit-bearing introductory course, Computer Science 105, for the fall quarter. The students come from 15 Title 1 high schools (where at least 40 percent of the students are from low-income households). Other Stanford courses are expected to be offered through the Lab’s network of Title 1 high schools later in the academic year.
The 2021 edition of the State of AI Report came out last week. So did the Kaggle State of Machine Learning and Data Science Survey. There’s much to be learned and discussed in these reports, and a couple of takeaways caught my attention.
“AI is increasingly being applied to mission critical infrastructure like national electric grids and automated supermarket warehousing calculations during pandemics. However, there are questions about whether the maturity of the industry has caught up with the enormity of its growing deployment.”
There’s no denying that Machine Learning-powered applications are reaching into every corner of IT. But what does that mean for companies and organizations? How do we build rock-solid Machine Learning workflows? Should we all hire 100 Data Scientists ? Or 100 DevOps engineers?
Apple’s suppliers are currently developing components for next-generation sensors in the Apple Watch Series 8 that will allow users to measure their blood glucose level, according to a new report.
According to a paywalled report from DigiTimes, Apple and its suppliers have begun working on short-wavelength infrared sensors, a commonly used sensor type for health devices. The new sensors, likely to be fitted on the back of the Apple Watch, will enable the device to measure the amount of sugar in a wearer’s blood.
If you are pregnant or hoping to become pregnant, it’s likely that you already understand the importance of tracking your pregnancy. The changes your body is going through are nothing short of miraculous, but it’s critical that you monitor them to make sure both you and your baby are staying healthy. And did you know that you can track your pregnancy with your Garmin smartwatch?
The same women’s health feature that allows you to track your menstrual cycle also allows you to monitor your pregnancy. It’s like a pregnancy app, but with the added convenience of having all of your other body metrics — like heart rate, sleep score, Body Battery™, stress score and more — sent from your wrist to the same, easily accessible Garmin Connect™ app on your compatible phone.
Most cells in the human body can divide and multiply to replace old cells and repair damaged tissue, but in response to certain stresses, cells can lose their ability to proliferate.
The rare cells that lose this ability are called senescent. They accumulate with age and might contribute to cancer and age-related disorders such as chronic lung disease, cardiovascular disease, frailty and dementia by pumping out signals that damage neighboring tissues.
The molecular landscape of senescence has remained relatively uncharted.
To address this knowledge gap, the National Institutes of Health’s Common Fund established the Cellular Senescence Network (SenNet) Program with the goal of creating a “Google Maps” of the aging tissues of the body that any scientist can access. Today, the program announced it will award $125 million to 16 teams to form the new SenNet Consortium — and two of the projects are led by University of Pittsburgh and UPMC researchers, who will receive a combined $31 million over five years.
University of California, Los Angeles; Daily Bruin student newspaper, Maanas Oruganti
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UCLA launched an initiative in September to improve data science literacy among students and promote data-based research across campus.
DataX, the new data science initiative, will hire faculty, design cluster courses and aid with graduate student research over the next three years to help students learn more about conducting research with data analysis. DataX will be funded with $10 million from UCLA during its first three years .
The DataX initiative was designed in response to the increasing impact of data science on research and the need for students to develop fluency with data science for their careers, said Mark Green, a math professor emeritus, and Jacob Foster, an associate professor of sociology, in a joint emailed statement. Green and Foster are the co-leads planning the DataX initiative.
Last year, a team of computational social scientists tested the idea on an unprecedented scale. The researchers used machine learning to create an algorithm that automatically analyzed a dataset of 24,000 dream reports. Their findings, published in Royal Society Open Science, support the continuity hypothesis and are actively ushering in a new era of dream analysis.
Luca Maria Aiello, an associate professor at the IT University of Copenhagen in Denmark, and his colleagues examined subgroups of dreamers to identify patterns. They found that a Vietnam War veteran’s dreams, for example, contained more aggressive behavior than those of a control group. And the dreams of an adolescent girl named Izzy experienced an increase in “negative emotions and aggression” during her teenage years — followed by the appearance of sexual interactions when she reached adulthood.
Kyle Cranmer, a University of Wisconsin–Madison alumnus who played a significant role in the discovery of the Higgs boson, will become the next director of the American Family Insurance Data Science Institute.
“We are excited to welcome Kyle back to UW–Madison, where he earned his PhD in physics in 2005,” says Amy Wendt, associate vice chancellor for research in the physical sciences. “Kyle brings a background to the position of director that will facilitate research synergies throughout campus, connecting data scientists and domain experts working to address present-day challenges ranging from health care to education, the sciences and beyond.”
Virginia Commonwealth University Massey Cancer Center and Virginia State University have received a “team science” grant from the National Cancer Institute focused on reducing cancer disparities and providing hands-on research opportunities to students who are historically underrepresented in science. The total award amount is $1.7 million over the course of four years.
This is the first time that a Virginia-based cancer center and a historically Black college or university have joined forces to win such a grant, which will enable cross-institutional work among multiple teams of scientists, robust community engagement and in-person research training at an NCI-designated cancer center for budding scientists whose home institution is classified as an HBCU.
Genes aren’t only inherited through birth. Bacteria have the ability to pass genes to each other, or pick them up from their environment, through a process called horizontal gene transfer, which is a major culprit in the spread of antibiotic resistance.
Cornell researchers used machine learning to sort organisms by their functions and use this information to predict with near-perfect accuracy how genes are transferred between them, an approach that could potentially be used to stop the spread of antibiotic resistance.
The team’s paper, “Functions Predict Horizontal Gene Transfer and the Emergence of Antibiotic Resistance,” published Oct. 22 in Science Advances. The lead author is doctoral student Hao Zhou.
Launching a startup as a student is hard enough, but creating an organization that helps students launch companies is an even greater feat.
Last year, a group of undergraduates noticed that Duke was lacking a student-run accelerator to support the launch of student startups. To fill this gap, they created the Duke Innovation Studio, a branch of the Duke Applied Machine Learning group.
“What we’re doing is basically offering professional mentorship, structured programming, awesome connections to [Venture Capital firms], founders and mentors within and beyond the Duke community,” said junior Daniel Marshall, one of the three founding partners of the Innovation Studio.
Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science blog, Andrew Gelman
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Peter Dorman points us to this brilliant article, “Miasmas, mental models and preventive public health: some philosophical reflections on science in the COVID-19 pandemic,” by health research scholar Trisha Greenhalgh, explaining what went wrong in the response to the coronavirus by British and American public health authorities.
Greenhalgh starts with the familiar (and true) statement that science proceeds through the interplay of theory and empirical evidence. Theory can’t stand alone, and empirical evidence in the human sciences is rarely enough on its own either. Indeed, if you combine experimental data with the standard rules of evidence (that is, acting as if statistically-significant comparisons represent real and persistent effects and as if non-statistically-significant comparisons represent zero effects), you can be worse off than had you never done your damn randomized trial in the first place.
Greenhalgh writes that some of our key covid policy disasters were characterized by “ideological movements in the West [that] drew—eclectically—on statements made by scientists, especially the confident rejection by some members of the EBM movement of the hypothesis that facemasks reduce transmission.”
Miami University alumnus Richard McVey, founder of leading electronic trading venue MarketAxess, will visit the Oxford campus Monday for the groundbreaking ceremony of the McVey Data Science Building, which is expected to open in 2024.
McVey is funding the project with a $20 million donation. Officials said McVey’s gift is one of the top five largest single gifts in Miami’s history.
“We are extremely excited for what the future will bring with the Richard M. McVey Data Science Building,” Tom Herbert, senior vice president of university advancement, said in a news release. “Rick’s generosity and passion for helping our students is creating an innovative, collaborative environment that will bring Miami to the front of an increasingly important field.”
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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.
The Windows AI team is excited to announce the first preview of DirectML as a backend to PyTorch for training ML models! This release is our first step towards unlocking accelerated machine learning training for PyTorch on any DirectX12 GPU on Windows and the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).
In order for you to take advantage of DirectML within PyTorch, today we are releasing a preview PyTorch-DirectML package, which provides scoped support for convolutional neural networks (CNNS).
