We're entering a "new era of science"--we finally have enough data and technology to truly enable better drugs for patients, says insitro CEO Daphne Koller.

We’re entering a “new era of science”--we finally have enough data and technology to truly enable better drugs for patients, says insitro CEO Daphne Koller.

As a venture investor, I have the privilege of meeting amazing people. But there's one group of individuals who I think are something else. Women and men who are supremely talented, endlessly curious, passionately committed, and unconstrained by disciplinary boundaries. I think people like these are uniquely designed to solve the world's most critical and intractable problems. I refer to these extraordinary folks as "Missionary Misfits," and every so often, I'll introduce readers to one of them.

In 2022 and beyond, emerging technologies such as AI and machine learning will have a lead role in aiding organisations across sectors to meet changing customer needs and accelerate digital transformation. According to Toolbox research, 42% of tech workers believe artificial intelligence will be the most important technological development in 2022. The need for knowledge exchange has grown significantly in proportion to the rise and rise of the AI/ML industry. AI conferences foster a sense of collaboration and showcase innovation, entrepreneurship, and outstanding leadership across the globe. Though the pandemic had put most conferences on the back burner, most of them are now back with a bang.

In the series, we considered both the teaching of AI and machine learning itself, and the use of AI techniques to improve education in general. You can also find out more about conferences and events, and other interesting research at the intersection of AI and education. There are a number of conferences and workshops that focus on the education side of AI. In our focus series we heard from the co-chairs of the Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence (EAAI), which was held in February this year. This event is held as an independent symposium within the AAAI conference, and provides the opportunity for researchers, educators, and students to share educational experiences involving AI.

Daphne Koller is best known as the cofounder of Coursera, the open database for online learning that launched in 2012. But before her work on Coursera, she was doing something much different. In 2000, Koller started working on applying machine learning to biomedical data sets to understand gene activity across cancer types. She put that work on hold to nurture Coursera, which took many more years than she initially thought it would. She didn't return to biology until 2016 when she joined Alphabet's life science research and development arm Calico.

Ever wondered how data science and machine learning are revolutionizing biotech and healthcare, from drug discovery and agriculture to women's health and prenatal diagnostics? Join us on Oct 8th at Illumina's Foster City campus to find out! Daphne Koller (Insitro), Diane Wu (Trace Genomics), Hana Janebdar (Juno Bio), and Raheleh Salari (Natera) will be sharing their stories on how they're combining their expertise in genomics and machine learning to make the world a better place. The event will be sponsored by the Illumina Accelerator. Food and drinks will be served.

Based on its core scientist team's top-level R&D strength, as well as technological innovation and breakthroughs, Squirrel AI Learning started holding four "man-machine competitions" in Zhengzhou, Chengdu and Dongying in October 2017 in a bid to identify any difference between its adaptive learning system and human teaching. Dr. Kalns demonstrated to the RE-WORK audience the results of the four competitions: surprisingly, machine teaching outperformed human teaching in all the four competitions. Taking the fourth competition, which unfolded in one hundred cities, as an example, students at the same intellectual level were divided into two groups and received human teaching and Squirrel AI Learning respectively. Every student in the machine teaching group learned 42 knowledge points on the average, while every student in the human teaching learned 28 knowledge points on the average; in terms of average scoring in the core part of the competition, the students in the AI teaching group had their scores increased by 5.4 on the average, while the students in the human teaching group just had their scores increased by 0.7 on the average, suggesting that machine teaching enabled students to take a firmer grasp of knowledge points than human teaching and improved the learning efficiency more significantly than human teaching. According to the results, Squirrel AI Learning is basically the same as or better than individualized human teaching.

Jeff Maggioncalda was recently named CEO of Coursera. I have interviewed both founders of the company, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, so I was curious about Maggioncalda's perspective on the company, education technology and the massive open online courses more generally, and his own background as an entrepreneur. Regarding the last point, Maggioncalda was previously the CEO of Financial Engines Inc, a company co-founded by economist and Nobel Prize winner William Sharpe and recently sold for $3 billion. During his 18 years as CEO of Financial Engines Inc, Maggioncalda had to pivot three times from his original idea before becoming a success. Financial Engines would go on to beocme the largest independent online retirement advice platform with more than $100b under management.

Since its inauguration in 1966, the ACM A.M. Turing Award has recognized major contributions of lasting importance to computing. Through the years, it has become the most prestigious award in computing. To help celebrate 50 years of the ACM Turing Award and the visionaries who have received it, ACM has launched a campaign called "Panels in Print," which takes the form of a collection of responses from Turing laureates, ACM award recipients and other ACM experts on a given topic or trend. For our fourth and final Panel in Print, we invited 2014 ACM A.M. Turing Award recipient MICHAEL STONEBRAKER, 2013 ACM Prize recipient DAVID BLEI, 2007 ACM Prize recipient DAPHNE KOLLER, and ACM Fellow VIPIN KUMAR to discuss trends in big data. Gartner estimates that there are currently about 4.9 billion connected devices (cars, homes, appliances, industrial equipment, among others) generating data.