A group of researchers from the Skoltech Center for Computational and Data-Intensive Science and Engineering (CDISE) took 4th place in the international MRI-based adolescent intelligence prediction competition. For the first time ever, the Skoltech scientists used ensemble methods based on deep learning 3-D networks to deal with this challenging prediction task. The results of their study were published in the journal Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Neurocognitive Prediction. In 2013, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) launched the first grand-scale study of its kind in adolescent brain research, Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD, abcdstudy.org/), Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a common technique used to obtain images of human internal organs and tissues.

New research at Case Western Reserve University could help better determine which patients diagnosed with the pre-malignant breast cancer commonly referred to as stage 0 are likely to progress to invasive breast cancer and therefore might benefit from additional therapy over and above surgery alone. Once a lumpectomy of breast tissue reveals this pre-cancerous tumor, most women have surgery to remove the remainder of the affected tissue and some are given radiation therapy as well, said Anant Madabhushi, the F. Alex Nason Professor II of Biomedical Engineering at the Case School of Engineering. "Current testing places patients in high risk, low risk and indeterminate risk--but then treats those indeterminates with radiation, anyway," said Madabhushi, whose Center for Computational Imaging and Personalized Diagnostics (CCIPD) conducted the new research. "They err on the side of caution, but we're saying that it appears that it should go the other way--the middle should be classified with the lower risk. "In short, we're probably overtreating patients," Madabhushi continued.

Will 2020 be the year of drone taxis? I'm going to peg it on'unlikely.' Drone taxi company EHang, which made its debut on the stock market in December 2019 with a public offering price of $12.50 per share, opened on its first trading day of 2020 in the $10 realm. But $10 might not be too shabby. While EHang stock hit as high as $13.70 per share, it has also dipped as low as $7.84 in the short timespan that it's been on the public market.

Technology is global, but ideas are local. The same IoT technology is being deployed all over the world, but a small Japanese startup might be who helps us make sense of it all. There is amazing work being done in user experience design, but most designers are operating with the contract of keeping users engaged. This is a fundamental shift from the traditional user-centered and functional design approaches. Today we sit down with Kaz Oki, founder of Mui Lab, and we talk about user design can actually improve our lives and help us disengage. We also talk about the challenges of getting VCs to invest in hardware startups, why Kyoto might be Japan's next innovation hub, and what it takes for a startup to successfully spin out of a Japanese company It's a great discussion, and I think you will really enjoy it. Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan's most successful entrepreneurs. If you're a fan of Disrupting Japan, you know that I have a strong dislike for attempts to make Japan sound too exotic and this goes in both directions. On one side, we have consultants who claim that Japanese business practices are so unique, arcane, and confusing that the only way westerners can possibly understand them is by paying large sums of money to consultants such as themselves. And on the other side, of course, we have people insisting that foreigners can't really understand Japanese anime without a thorough and nuanced knowledge of Japanese language and history. I mean, there are differences, of course, and those differences should be acknowledged and respected, but whether an idea is coming from Japan or America, or Germany, one true measure of the value of that idea is its universality. The most important achievements might emerge out of cultural biases or sensitivities but they address something universally true, something deeply human. Today, we sit down with Kaz Oki of Mui Lab and we're going to talk about Mui's radical rethinking of how we should interact with computers and the different contexts for that interaction. The Mui itself is a tactile and visual user interface that literally fades into the furniture when you're not using it.

A newly developed artificial intelligence (AI) model is able to spot breast cancer better than a clinician, new research has suggested. Google DeepMind, in partnership with Cancer Research UK Imperial Centre, Northwestern University and Royal Surrey County Hospital, has developed the model which can spot cancer in breast screening mammograms in a bid to improve health outcomes and ease pressure on overstretched radiology services. Initial findings, published by the technology giant in the journal Nature, suggest the AI can identify the disease with greater accuracy, fewer false positives and fewer false negatives. The model, trained on de-identified data of 76,000 women in the UK and more than 15,000 women in the US, reportedly lowered false positive results by 1.2% and false negatives by 2.7% in the UK, but is yet to be tested in clinical studies. When tested, the AI system processed only the latest available mammogram of a patient, whereas clinicians had access to patient histories and prior mammograms to make an informed screening decision.

Last year, IBM announced a Data Science Elite team whose only job is to help big enterprise companies push their first AI models into production. Now, more than a year after the program's launch, Rob Thomas, the IBM executive overseeing the AI SWAT team, reports that it has been a "huge success." The team has increased from 30 data scientists to 100, and there are plans to grow significantly next year. "We hire them wherever we can, actually," Thomas said, noting that these data scientists operate all over the world. Companies as diverse as Harley Davidson, Lufthansa, Experian, Sprint, Carrefour, and Siemens used the team for a necessary kickstart on AI projects. And the best part: It's all for free -- or at least there are no contractual obligations to pay.

As consumers become more comfortable with voice commerce, "The Phantom of the Opera" aims to give Broadway audiences another way to connect with the show through their smart speakers and other Alexa-powered devices. Only about one out of five consumers have shopped using a voice assistant, according to a study by digital commerce firm Sumo Heavy, suggesting that this type of skill is still in the early stage of adoption. The musical "Wicked" last summer worked with the company on a chatbot that boosted ROI by 700% and sold tickets for 20% higher than the weekly average. Amazon had an installed base of 76 million smart speakers in the U.S. earlier this year, per Consumer Intelligence Research Partners data cited by MarketingLand, giving marketers potentially broad reach on the platform. Alexa supports 100,000 skills, as apps for the platform are known, indicating that many companies are supporting the company's voice-powered technology.

Before a rapt, standing-room-only audience of more than 300 students, faculty, and other members of the Law School community, Microsoft President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith '84 returned to campus on October 1 to discuss his new book, Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age (cowritten with Carol Ann Browne). The event with Gillian Lester, Dean and the Lucy G. Moses Professor of Law of Columbia Law School, and Professor Tim Wu, a leading authority on antitrust law who advocates for breaking up Big Tech companies, was the season's first installment of the Dean's Distinguished Speaker Series. "Brad may be the only tech executive who would willingly share the stage with Professor Wu, given Tim's strong and well-articulated position on the perils associated with the bigness of today's technology companies," said Dean Lester in her introduction. The conversation touched on a number of pressing concerns, including cybersecurity, government regulation, ethics, and human rights. Smith's book addresses the untold ramifications of digital technology's ubiquity in our personal lives, our societies, and our economies.

The year 2019 saw unprecedented growth in AI research, development and deployment. Great technical progress has been achieved in image recognition, image generation, natural language understanding and other fields; while challenges remain with data management, efficiency measurement, computational capacity and other issues. To welcome 2020 with some fresh AI perspectives, Synced spoke with global researchers from Google Brain, Sony AI, Alibaba affiliate Ant Financial (formerly known as Alipay), Israel-based AI processor company Habana (recently acquired by Intel), Russian tech giant Yandex, Vietnam's newly established research lab VinAI Research, French deep learning inference acceleration startup Mipsology, and China-based remote sensing data platform TerraQuanta. Colin Raffel, Senior Research Scientist, Google Brain In 2019 the community made huge progress on learning from limited labels. MixMatch, UDA, S4L, and ReMixMatch produced huge gains on standard semi-supervised learning benchmarks.

The number one AI hype story this year had to be Tesla's robotaxi fleet. While other autonomous vehicle companies are dialing back their claims of near-future glory, Tesla has been pushing the propaganda volume up to an ear-splitting 11. Tesla has been touting its cars' "self-driving" abilities since 2016. At the end of last year, after selling "self-driving" vaporware for several years as an add-on feature, it looked like the company was going to take the responsible approach and stop selling the feature. They pulled the option from their web site, and basically stopped talking about it.