Wellness
Study identifies brain-based dimensions of mental health disorders using machine learning
A new study using machine learning has identified brain-based dimensions of mental health disorders, an advance towards much-needed biomarkers to more accurately diagnose and treat patients. A team at Penn Medicine led by Theodore D. Satterthwaite, MD, an assistant professor in the department of Psychiatry, mapped abnormalities in brain networks to four dimensions of psychopathology: mood, psychosis, fear, and disruptive externalizing behavior. The research is published in Nature Communications this week. Currently, psychiatry relies on patient reporting and physician observations alone for clinical decision making, while other branches of medicine have incorporated biomarkers to aid in diagnosis, determination of prognosis, and selection of treatment for patients. While previous studies using standard clinical diagnostic categories have found evidence for brain abnormalities, the high level of diversity within disorders and comorbidity between disorders has limited how this kind of research may lead to improvements in clinical care.
Amanuensis: The Programmer's Apprentice
Dean, Thomas, Chiang, Maurice, Gomez, Marcus, Gruver, Nate, Hindy, Yousef, Lam, Michelle, Lu, Peter, Sanchez, Sophia, Saxena, Rohun, Smith, Michael, Wang, Lucy, Wong, Catherine
Suppose you could merely imagine a computation, and a digital prostheses, an extension of your biological brain, would turn it into code that instantly realizes what you had in mind. Imagine looking at an image, dataset or set of equations and wanting to analyze and explore its meaning as an artistic whim or part of a scientific investigation. I don't mean you would use an existing software suite to produce a standard visualization, but rather you would make use of an extensive repository of existing code to assemble a new program analogous to how a composer draws upon a repertoire of musical motifs, themes and styles to construct new works, and tantamount to having a talented musical amanuensis who, in addition to copying your scores, takes liberties with your prior work, making small alterations here and there and occasionally adding new works of its own invention, novel but consistent with your taste and sensibilities. Perhaps the interaction would be wordless and you would express your objective by simply focusing your attention and guiding your imagination, the prostheses operating directly on patterns of activation arising in your primary sensory, proprioceptive and associative cortex that have become part of an extensive vocabulary that you now share with your personal digital amanuensis. Or perhaps it would involve a conversation conducted in subvocal, unarticulated speech in which you specify what it is you want to compute and your assistant asks questions to clarify your intention and the two of you share examples of input and output to ground your internal conversation in concrete terms. More than thirty years ago, Charles Rich and Richard Waters published an MIT AI Lab technical report [68] entitled The Programmer's Apprentice: A Research Overview. Whether they intended it or not, it would have been easy in those days for someone to misremember the title and inadvertently refer to it as "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" since computer programmers at the time were often characterized as wizards and most children were familiar with the Walt Disney movie Fantasia, featuring music written by Paul Dukas inspired by Goethe's poem of the same name
Assessing the impact of machine intelligence on human behaviour: an interdisciplinary endeavour
Gรณmez, Emilia, Castillo, Carlos, Charisi, Vicky, Dahl, Verรณnica, Deco, Gustavo, Delipetrev, Blagoj, Dewandre, Nicole, Gonzรกlez-Ballester, Miguel รngel, Gouyon, Fabien, Hernรกndez-Orallo, Josรฉ, Herrera, Perfecto, Jonsson, Anders, Koene, Ansgar, Larson, Martha, de Mรกntaras, Ramรณn Lรณpez, Martens, Bertin, Miron, Marius, Moreno-Bote, Rubรฉn, Oliver, Nuria, Gallardo, Antonio Puertas, Schweitzer, Heike, Sebastian, Nuria, Serra, Xavier, Serrร , Joan, Tolan, Songรผl, Vold, Karina
This document contains the outcome of the first Human behaviour and machine intelligence (HUMAINT) workshop that took place 5-6 March 2018 in Barcelona, Spain. The workshop was organized in the context of a new research programme at the Centre for Advanced Studies, Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, which focuses on studying the potential impact of artificial intelligence on human behaviour. The workshop gathered an interdisciplinary group of experts to establish the state of the art research in the field and a list of future research challenges to be addressed on the topic of human and machine intelligence, algorithm's potential impact on human cognitive capabilities and decision making, and evaluation and regulation needs. The document is made of short position statements and identification of challenges provided by each expert, and incorporates the result of the discussions carried out during the workshop. In the conclusion section, we provide a list of emerging research topics and strategies to be addressed in the near future.
University of Waterloo Applying AI to Update Masonry
Artificial intelligence is being harnessed by voice-controlled personal assistants, chatbot financial services, and even smart thermostats--now the University of Waterloo is applying algorithms to improve an age-old profession: bricklaying. Researchers at the university used AI software to study how masons position their body during bricklaying, revealing new insights into the safest poses and most productive way to work through machine learning. "The people in skilled trades learn or acquire a kind of physical wisdom that they can't even articulate," said Carl Haas in a statement. Hass is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Waterloo. The study was published in Automation in Construction today and analyzed 21 masons with varying levels of expertise.
Second annual Women in Data Science conference showcases research, explores challenges
Two hundred students, industry professionals, and academic leaders convened at the Microsoft NERD Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts for the second annual Women in Data Science (WiDS) conference on March 5. The conference grew from 150 participants last year, and highlighted local strength in academics and health care. "The WiDS conference highlighted female leadership in data science in the Boston area," said Caroline Uhler, a member of the WiDS steering committee who is an IDSS core faculty member and assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) at MIT. "This event is particularly important to encourage more female scientists in related areas to join this emerging area that has such broad societal impact." Regina Barzilay, Delta Electronics Professor of EECS, gave the first presentation on how data science and machine learning approaches are improving cancer research. Barzilay said her experiences as a breast cancer survivor motivates her work.
Design in Tech Report 2018
For this year's report, I took a stab at learning all the CSS/JS that I've always wanted to know, and then went after the task of making a fully responsive report. I've succeeded in doing so, and so this PDF version isn't as good as the real thing. In the next few days I will be sharing a link to the real digital experience. But for now -- enjoy this static version of the report which has a few parts that couldn't render to static form. Because ... this year's report is truly computationally designed and therefore needs to be expressed appropriately (smile). Expect a video version on my new YouTube channel "John Maeda is Learning." What can I do about it? As the marginal return on computing power (a la Moore's law) diminishes and technology is less of a differentiating factor, the value of design has entered the foreground. Five (20%) of the top cumulative-funded VC- backed ventures that have raised additional capital since 2013 are noted to have designer co-founders.
The wilder shores of brain boosting
Transcranial direct current stimulation has been claimed to enhance learning.Credit: Liz Hafalia/Polaris/eyevine Is there a common element that binds diverse mental abilities, from language to mental arithmetic? Or do these skills compete for our brains' limited resources? In The Genius Within, Dav...
Long-term Blood Pressure Prediction with Deep Recurrent Neural Networks
Su, Peng, Ding, Xiao-Rong, Zhang, Yuan-Ting, Liu, Jing, Miao, Fen, Zhao, Ni
As a result, these models suffer from accuracy decay over a long time and thus require frequent calibration. In this work, we address this issue by formulating BP estimation as a sequence prediction problem in which both the input and target are temporal sequences. We propose a novel deep recurrent neural network (RNN) consisting of multilayered Long Short-T erm Memory (LSTM) networks, which are incorporated with (1) a bidirectional structure to access larger-scale context information of input sequence, and (2) residual connections to allow gradients in deep RNN to propagate more effectively. The proposed deep RNN model was tested on a static BP dataset, and it achieved root mean square error (RMSE) of 3.90 and 2.66 mmHg for systolic BP (SBP) and diastolic BP (DBP) prediction respectively, surpassing the accuracy of traditional BP prediction models. On a multi-day BP dataset, the deep RNN achieved RMSE of 3.84, 5.25, 5.80 and 5.81 mmHg for the 1st day, 2nd day, 4th day and 6th month after the 1st day SBP prediction, and 1.80, 4.78, 5.0, 5.21 mmHg for corresponding DBP prediction, respectively, which outperforms all previous models with notable improvement. The experimental results suggest that modeling the temporal dependencies in BP dynamics significantly improves the long-term BP prediction accuracy.