Ed Boyden is a professor of Biological Engineering and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the MIT Media Lab and the MIT McGovern Institute. He leads the Synthetic Neurobiology Group, which develops tools for analyzing and repairing complex biological systems such as the brain, and applies them systematically to reveal ground truth principles of biological function as well as to repair these systems. These technologies, created often in interdisciplinary collaborations, include expansion microscopy, which enables complex biological systems to be imaged with nanoscale precision, and optogenetic tools, which enable the activation and silencing of neural activity with light. Amongst other recognitions, he has received the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2016), the Carnegie Prize in Mind and Brain Sciences (2015), the Schuetze Prize (2014), the Jacob Heskel Gabbay Award (2013), the Grete Lundbeck Brain Prize (2013), the NIH Director's Pioneer Award (2013), and the Perl/UNC Neuroscience Prize (2011). Ed received his Ph.D. in neurosciences from Stanford University as a Hertz Fellow, where he discovered that the molecular mechanisms used to store a memory are determined by the content to be learned.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Moon caves could provide shelter for astronauts exploring Earth's nearest neighbor, researchers say. A new analysis of data gathered by NASA's twin Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) spacecraft, which mapped the moon's gravitational field in unprecedented detail, turned up a number of new candidates for lava tubes -- cave-like structures that could be large enough to house supplies and astronauts. Space is a harsh environment. Radiation from the sun, galactic cosmic rays and constantly falling micrometeorites all present a threat to human explorers. "A lava tube provides a safe haven from all these hazardous environmental conditions," study team member Rohan Sood, a graduate student at Purdue University in Indiana, told Space.com.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Back when activity based working (ABW) was starting to gain real traction in places like Australia in 2013, we ran some research on which companies were most influential on the organisational leaders that were driving adoption of the work style. For many technology vendors and service providers the results from our more than 50 in-depth interviews with ABW adopters (now more than 250) were somewhat of a shock. The leading influencers were: #1 workpace strategy specialists; #2 interior designers; #3 peers that had adopted ABW; #4 real estate management firms and furniture providers. On the contrary, it was considered critical to get right and pretty much underpinned everything (see our checklist for guidance here). But technology providers simply didn't have a vision or narrative that was resonating with organisational leaders that also had to consider how to best use physical space while changing cultures.

Efficient and accurate low-rank approximations of multiple data sources are essential in the era of big data. The scaling of kernel-based learning algorithms to large datasets is limited by the O(n^2) computation and storage complexity of the full kernel matrix, which is required by most of the recent kernel learning algorithms. We present the Mklaren algorithm to approximate multiple kernel matrices learn a regression model, which is entirely based on geometrical concepts. The algorithm does not require access to full kernel matrices yet it accounts for the correlations between all kernels. It uses Incomplete Cholesky decomposition, where pivot selection is based on least-angle regression in the combined, low-dimensional feature space. The algorithm has linear complexity in the number of data points and kernels. When explicit feature space induced by the kernel can be constructed, a mapping from the dual to the primal Ridge regression weights is used for model interpretation. The Mklaren algorithm was tested on eight standard regression datasets. It outperforms contemporary kernel matrix approximation approaches when learning with multiple kernels. It identifies relevant kernels, achieving highest explained variance than other multiple kernel learning methods for the same number of iterations. Test accuracy, equivalent to the one using full kernel matrices, was achieved with at significantly lower approximation ranks. A difference in run times of two orders of magnitude was observed when either the number of samples or kernels exceeds 3000.

The refugee crisis is perhaps the single most challenging problem for Europe today. Hundreds of thousands of people have already traveled across dangerous sea passages from Turkish shores to Greek islands, resulting in thousands of dead and missing, despite the best rescue efforts from both sides. One of the main reasons is the total lack of any early warning-alerting system, which could provide some preparation time for the prompt and effective deployment of resources at the hot zones. This work is such an attempt for a systemic analysis of the refugee influx in Greece, aiming at (a) the statistical and signal-level characterization of the smuggling networks and (b) the formulation and preliminary assessment of such models for predictive purposes, i.e., as the basis of such an early warning-alerting protocol. To our knowledge, this is the first-ever attempt to design such a system, since this refugee crisis itself and its geographical properties are unique (intense event handling, little or no warning). The analysis employs a wide range of statistical, signal-based and matrix factorization (decomposition) techniques, including linear & linear-cosine regression, spectral analysis, ARMA, SVD, Probabilistic PCA, ICA, K-SVD for Dictionary Learning, as well as fractal dimension analysis. It is established that the behavioral patterns of the smuggling networks closely match (as expected) the regular burst and pause periods of store-and-forward networks in digital communications. There are also major periodic trends in the range of 6.2-6.5 days and strong correlations in lags of four or more days, with distinct preference in the Sunday-Monday 48-hour time frame. These results show that such models can be used successfully for short-term forecasting of the influx intensity, producing an invaluable operational asset for planners, decision-makers and first-responders.

Data representation in a stacked denoising autoencoder is investigated. Decoding is a simple technique for translating a stacked denoising autoencoder into a composition of denoising autoencoders in the ground space. In the infinitesimal limit, a composition of denoising autoencoders is reduced to a continuous denoising autoencoder, which is rich in analytic properties and geometric interpretation. For example, the continuous denoising autoencoder solves the backward heat equation and transports each data point so as to decrease entropy of the data distribution. Together with ridgelet analysis, an integral representation of a stacked denoising autoencoder is derived.

We study the tradeoff between the statistical error and communication cost of distributed statistical estimation problems in high dimensions. In the distributed sparse Gaussian mean estimation problem, each of the $m$ machines receives $n$ data points from a $d$-dimensional Gaussian distribution with unknown mean $\theta$ which is promised to be $k$-sparse. The machines communicate by message passing and aim to estimate the mean $\theta$. We provide a tight (up to logarithmic factors) tradeoff between the estimation error and the number of bits communicated between the machines. This directly leads to a lower bound for the distributed \textit{sparse linear regression} problem: to achieve the statistical minimax error, the total communication is at least $\Omega(\min\{n,d\}m)$, where $n$ is the number of observations that each machine receives and $d$ is the ambient dimension. These lower results improve upon [Sha14,SD'14] by allowing multi-round iterative communication model. We also give the first optimal simultaneous protocol in the dense case for mean estimation. As our main technique, we prove a \textit{distributed data processing inequality}, as a generalization of usual data processing inequalities, which might be of independent interest and useful for other problems.

Results of the application of pattern recognition techniques to the problem of identifying Giant Radio Sources (GRS) from the data in the NVSS catalog are presented and issues affecting the process are explored. Decision-tree pattern recognition software was applied to training set source pairs developed from known NVSS large angular size radio galaxies. The full training set consisted of 51,195 source pairs, 48 of which were known GRS for which each lobe was primarily represented by a single catalog component. The source pairs had a maximum separation of 20 arc minutes and a minimum component area of 1.87 square arc minutes at the 1.4 mJy level. The importance of comparing resulting probability distributions of the training and application sets for cases of unknown class ratio is demonstrated. The probability of correctly ranking a randomly selected (GRS, non-GRS) pair from the best of the tested classifiers was determined to be 97.8 +/- 1.5%. The best classifiers were applied to the over 870,000 candidate pairs from the entire catalog. Images of higher ranked sources were visually screened and a table of over sixteen hundred candidates, including morphological annotation, is presented. These systems include doubles and triples, Wide-Angle Tail (WAT) and Narrow-Angle Tail (NAT), S- or Z-shaped systems, and core-jets and resolved cores. While some resolved lobe systems are recovered with this technique, generally it is expected that such systems would require a different approach.