2017 Collected Friday Feed

The Collected Friday Feed, 2017 Anthony Starks

Friday Feed Jaunary 6, 2017 Machine Learning n machine learning,
computers apply statistical learning techniques to automatically identify patterns in data. These techniques can be used to make highly accurate predictions. Keep scrolling. Using a data set about homes, we will create a machine learning model to distinguish homes in New York from homes in San Francisco. Now I get it! This article is a quick summary of a basic design course. It addresses a simple question: How do you design interactive systems that are easy to understand? Well, it all comes down to two things: structure and process. How Scientists Use Slack When geneticist Daniel MacArthur checks into his lab, the first thing he does is fire up Slack, a workplace messaging app. In the system, he zips through the hundreds of messages and files left in different channels by the lab's 23 scientists — some reporting on their projects, others requesting help. The lab's members have posted more than 400,000 messages on Slack since April 2014 — a rate of nearly 500 per day. For MacArthur, who works at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the tool has rendered irrelevant many of the ways that his lab previously used to communicate about papers and projects — especially e-mail. 12 Questions on the Future of Design we made a list of clever thinkers and interesting friends in the design world and sent them a short, open-ended survey about the past, present, and future of their fields Rewriting the code of life Through DNA editing, researchers hope to alter the genetic destiny of species and eliminate diseases. “I became fascinated with the idea that you have these complex systems that constantly evolve, and all in the language of DNA,” he said. “I decided I wanted to spend my life learning how to rewrite the genes of organisms to make some extremely useful and interesting things.”

Friday Feed Januar 13, 2017 Specialty Pharmacies Say Benefit Managers
Are Squeezing Them Out “The question is, why are the P.B.M.s enforcing these contracts more aggressively?” said David A. Balto, an antitrust lawyer in Washington who represents independent specialty pharmacies. “Is it consumer welfare that’s deep in their hearts, or the level of their profits?” Phil Schiller on iPhone’s Launch, How It Changed Apple, and Why It Will Keep Going for 50 Years iPhone was such a drastic departure from anything else—with its MultiTouch screen, its soft keyboard, and its imposing price tag—there was no assurance it would be a hit. There was certainly no indication that we’d reach the mind-set of today, where walking out of the house without one of those things is like venturing into the streets naked. iPhone at ten: the revolution continues January 9 marks the tenth anniversary of iPhone’s blockbuster debut. At Macworld 2007 in San Francisco, Steve Jobs introduced the world to iPhone as three products in one — “a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone and a breakthrough internet communications device.” In the ten years since, iPhone has enriched the lives of people around the world with over one billion units sold. It quickly grew into a revolutionary platform for hardware, software and services integration, and inspired new products, including iPad and Apple Watch, along with millions of apps that have become essential to people’s daily lives. 8 Web Design Trends of 2016 That Will Travel to 2017 (1) Remove the Clutter and Make the Design more Specific (2) Responsive Web Design, (3) Large Presentable Background Image, (4) Rhythmic Web Design with a Virtual Path to Follow, (5) Grid Formation Rule with High Proximity, (6) Video Demonstration and Infographics, (7) Blank Space Balance and Uncrowded Design Setup, (8) Standard Informational Footer Concept Google Infrastructure Security Design Overview Google has a global scale technical infrastructure designed to provide security through the entire information processing lifecycle at Google. This infrastructure provides secure deployment of services, secure storage of data with end user privacy safeguards, secure communications between services, secure and private communication with customers over the internet, and safe operation by administrators.

Friday Feed January 20, 2017 For $149 a Month, the
Doctor Will See You as Often as You Want Imagine if your doctor’s office was more like an Apple Store mashed up with a fancy gym: a modern white-and-wood aesthetic, replete with fancy gadgets and gleaming touch screens, for which you paid a monthly fee to visit as often as you wished. A Global Plan to Defend Against the Future's Deadliest Diseases “My dream would be that 10 to 20 years from now, we have a vaccine for every one of the 37 infections on Mark Woolhouse’s list,” he says. “That won’t be possible for everything, but Ebola showed that there are many infections for which a vaccine is eminently makeable.” The Three Machines A Study of organizational design: (1) the Product machine, (2) the Customer machine, and (3) the Company machine. Rules of Machine Learning This document is intended to help those with a basic knowledge of machine learning get the benefit of best practices in machine learning from around Google. It presents a style for machine learning, similar to the Google C++ Style Guide and other popular guides to practical programming. Weaving Threads A human-centric approach to organizing conversations: These learnings feel obvious in hindsight, but they point to a common problem in product design: some features seem so straightforward that you never actually solve the underlying customer problem. Our initial version of Threads sought to help people reply to each other. But as we iterated, we realized that Threads could help people manage and organize conversations, so that they could work more efficiently in Slack.

Friday Feed January 27, 2017 Predicting Medical AI in 2017
We will see the quantity of phase I research double in 2017, We will see several (3-5) large phase II AI trials published in the medical literature, We won’t see any complete phase III trials in 2017 Machine Vision Helps Spot New Drug Treatments Recursion uses software to read out the results of high-throughput screening, which automates drug testing in cells. That isn’t a new idea, but Recursion uses algorithms that inspect cells at an unusual level of detail. The software measures a thousand features of a cell, such as the size and shape of its nucleus or the distance between different internal compartments. Stop Checking Email So Often we observed a significant reduction in stress when they checked email less frequently. How much less stressed did people feel during their email-minimizing week compared with their email-maximizing week? The reduction in stress was about as large as the benefit people get from learning relaxation techniques (e.g., taking deep breaths, visualizing peaceful imagery). In other words, cutting back on email might reduce stress as much as picturing yourself swimming in the warm waters of a tropical island several times a day. 10 Ways UX Research Is Changing Pull based, just-in-time research, Research is validated continuously, Less linear product development process, Less research in a vacuum, Facilitation, Lightweight presentations, Using both quantitative and qualitative data, Experiment Design, A bigger research library to manage, Evolving role of product managers. This 100-Year-Old Dutch Movement Shaped Web Design Today Primary colors, clean lines, asymmetrical simplicity: You might recognize them from Google, but they come from De Stijl.

Friday Feed February 3, 2017 The year in new drugs
After two years of an open spigot, the flow of new drugs tapered off in 2016. Just 22 new molecular entities were approved in the U.S. last year—less than half the number given the green light in 2015. Industry watchers are left puzzling over how to interpret the drop: as a bad omen for innovation or simply a blip in an otherwise upward trend in productivity? Inside Dropbox’s Identity Overhaul Put it all together and you have, Houston says, a unique effort to unite the two realms of computing between which we hop back and forth today: “File world,” the drives and directories where our work products and documents live, and “cloud world,” the networked environment where we communicate and collaborate. Watch: The paper-airplane drones that may one day save your life DARPA, the United States military’s experimental technology arm, awarded a grant to the aerodynamics research group at Otherlab in San Francisco to develop a disposable glider that can be used to ferry medical supplies or other cargo to places where delivery people can’t go. This is particularly useful in situations where there’s been a disease outbreak and vaccines are urgently needed — or in areas where the road or terrain conditions are so treacherous that it would take far too long for a ground vehicle to make the trek. Socially Sensitive AI Software Coaches Call-Center Workers Some call-center workers are now receiving real-time coaching from software that analyzes their speech and the nature of their dialogue interactions with customers. As they are talking to someone the software might recommend that they talk more slowly or interrupt less often, or warn that the person on the other end of the line seems upset.

Friday Feed February 10, 2017 Doctors See Gains Against ‘an
Urgent Threat,’ C. Diff Though C. diff, as the bug is known, was identified in the 1930s, it became one of the country’s prime health concerns only a few years ago, after a particularly virulent and drug-resistant strain called NAP1 emerged in the 2000s....Vaccines may eventually prevent C. diff infection. Last year, the pharmaceutical company Sanofi began recruiting 15,000 volunteers for a Phase 3 trial of an experimental vaccine in about 20 countries. Pfizer and the French firm Valneva have also completed Phase 2 studies of possible vaccines. Watch: The paper-airplane drones that may one day save your life DARPA, the United States military’s experimental technology arm, awarded a grant to the aerodynamics research group at Otherlab in San Francisco to develop a disposable glider that can be used to ferry medical supplies or other cargo to places where delivery people can’t go. This is particularly useful in situations where there’s been a disease outbreak and vaccines are urgently needed — or in areas where the road or terrain conditions are so treacherous that it would take far too long for a ground vehicle to make the trek. The year in new drugs After two years of an open spigot, the flow of new drugs tapered off in 2016. Just 22 new molecular entities were approved in the U.S. last year—less than half the number given the green light in 2015. Industry watchers are left puzzling over how to interpret the drop: as a bad omen for innovation or simply a blip in an otherwise upward trend in productivity? Inside Dropbox’s Identity Overhaul Put it all together and you have, Houston says, a unique effort to unite the two realms of computing between which we hop back and forth today: “File world,” the drives and directories where our work products and documents live, and “cloud world,” the networked environment where we communicate and collaborate.

Socially Sensitive AI Software Coaches Call-Center Workers Some call-center workers
are now receiving real-time coaching from software that analyzes their speech and the nature of their dialogue interactions with customers. As they are talking to someone the software might recommend that they talk more slowly or interrupt less often, or warn that the person on the other end of the line seems upset.

Friday Feed February 17, 2017 What makes the perfect office?
When workers were empowered to design their own space, they had fun and worked hard and accurately, producing 30 per cent more work than in the minimalist office and 15 per cent more than in the decorated office. When workers were deliberately disempowered, their work suffered and of course, they hated it. “I wanted to hit you,” one participant later admitted to an experimenter. Building Global Community On our journey to connect the world, we often discuss products we're building and updates on our business. Today I want to focus on the most important question of all: are we building the world we all want? Spanner, the Google Database That Mastered Time, Is Now Open to Everyone Now Google wants a different kind of competitive advantage in the cloud computing market. It hopes to convince customers that Spanner provides an easier way of running a global business, a easier way of replicating their data across multiple regions and, thus, guard against outages.

Friday Feed February 24, 2017 Injection could permanently lower cholesterol
by changing DNA The antibody drugs are extremely expensive and need to be injected every two to four weeks, so even if the antibodies work as well as hoped, they cannot be dished out to millions like statins. All attempts to develop conventional drugs to block PCSK9 have failed. But gene editing provides a radical alternative. Using the CRISPR technique, the team at AstraZeneca have disabled human versions of the PCSK9 gene in mice. Amazon’s Friction-Killing Tactics To Make Products More Seamless Friction can be a powerful deterrent between a customer and your product. It’s typically introduced by a lack of familiarity or misalignment with human behavior. Start to combat it by mapping the three stages of friction: before the first contact, the signup process — during which you want the customer to complete one task — and the first moment of delight. Then set up listening posts for observing your customers and teasing counterintuitive insights out of the data to discover where friction is occurring. Finally, cut friction by reducing customer anxiety, cutting avoidable steps and preventing context switching. Inside Facebooks AI Machine “Facebook today cannot exist without AI. Every time you use Facebook or Instagram or Messenger, you may not realize it, but your experiences are being powered by AI.” The Applied Machine Learning group helps Facebook see, talk, and understand. It may even root out fake news. Bad Hospital Design Is Making Us Sicker As a doctor, I’m struck daily by how much better hospitals could be designed. Hospitals are among the most expensive facilities to build, with complex infrastructures, technologies, regulations and safety codes. But evidence suggests we’ve been building them all wrong — and that the deficiencies aren’t simply unaesthetic or inconvenient. All those design flaws may be killing us.

10 Breakthrough Technologies 2017 Reversing Paralysis, Self-Driving Trucks, Practical Quantum
Computers, The 360-Degree Selfie, Hot Solar Cells, Gene Therapy 2.0, The Cell Atlas, Botnets of Things, Reinforcement Learning

Friday Feed March 7, 2017 DNA Fountain enables a robust
and efficient storage architecture Humanity is currently producing data at exponential rates, creating a demand for better storage devices. DNA is an excellent medium for data storage, owing to its demonstrated information density of petabytes of data per gram, high durability, and evolutionarily optimized machinery to faithfully replicate this information (1, 2). Recently, a series of proof-of-principle experiments has demonstrated the value of DNA as a storage medium (3–9). Next-level collaboration: the future of content and design Collaboration is not simply gathering a group of people to meet or brainstorm. It’s not latching on to someone else’s process or finding the next shiny tool that’ll save the day. Much like Ed Catmull found with Pixar, collaboration is about creating the environment where our own magic can emerge. Summary of the Amazon S3 Service Disruption in the Northern Virginia (US-EAST-1) Region The typo heard around the world ("Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended)"

Friday Feed March 10, 2017 This Lab-in-a-Box Could Make Gene
Therapy Less Elitist Miltenyi, the German device maker, says its instrument, called Prodigy, can already largely automate CAR-T production, and is now being tested by a few companies. The instrument, which weighs about 150 pounds, looks a little like a machine from Willy Wonka’s factory, with bright pastel casements, neatly placed dials, and twists and turns of disposable tubing covering its surface. Instead of hot chocolate, a patient’s cells move through the tubes, mixing with chemicals that stimulate them and, eventually, a load of DNA-carrying viruses used to alter their genetic code. How This Medical Student Brought DNA Testing To Women In Trinidad and Tobago Color Genomics is one of a growing number of U.S. companies that leverage DNA sequencing to answer a wide variety of questions about disease. The price of such technologies have dropped significantly over the past few decades. In 2001, it cost $100 million to sequence a human genome. Today, Color offers one of the cheapest offerings on the market, with a test to screen for a set of genes associated with hereditary cancers for just $249. Can Silicon Valley Cure Diabetes With Low Carbs And High Tech? The idea of applying emerging technology to stubborn health challenges, such as diabetes, has long captivated and frequently frustrated entrepreneurs and investors. While it seems blindingly obvious that technology ought to represent a game-changing opportunity for healthcare, figuring out how to do this has proven remarkably difficult--not only because it’s hard to disrupt entrenched incumbents, but also because disease is messy, people are complicated and achieving durable changes in health turns to be far more challenging than persuading users to click on an ad. Six Steps to Superior Product Prototyping: Lessons from an Apple and Oculus Engineer No matter what, always solve for consumer experience. “As a designer and an engineer, I'm constantly trying to think about the customer and how much better or how much worse the product will be depending on the decisions we are making on the product level. That is how you determine your North Star. When I'm thinking about product trade-offs and feature trade-offs, I'm really thinking about the customer.

A Behavioral Economist Tries to Fix Email In this data,
Ariely saw an inefficiency to target. Even though every email, by default, triggers a notification, it’s unlikely that any given email deserves one. So, with the help of some software developers he’d worked with in the past, he tried to come up with a way to tweak the default settings that are baked into email. The result of that work is Filtr, an app that lets users make simple rules, based on the sender, about when an email will show up in their inbox. For example, users can set it up so that emails from family members show up immediately, but non-time-sensitive newsletters show up all at once, at the end of the day.

Friday Feed March 17, 2017 The MVP is dead. Long
live the RAT. There is a flaw at the heart of the term Minimum Viable Product: it’s not a product. It’s a way of testing whether you’ve found a problem worth solving. A way to reduce risk and quickly test your biggest assumption. Instead of building an MVP identify your Riskiest Assumption and Test it. Replacing your MVP with a RAT will save you a lot of pain. Complexity and Strategy The Office competition with Google Apps was (and still is) strongly influenced by these perspectives on complexity. The Office team had made the decision to build web applications just prior to the time Google bought Writely (the original version of Google Docs). As we looked at that product, we were well positioned to understand the competitive strategy from a technical and feature perspective. After a fairly quiet period in the productivity space, new browser-based applications were launching in multiple product areas. Delivering through the browser combined a number of key breakthroughs, especially compared to the consumer PC application environment of the time. Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer Lets first define what the Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer position would entail. The Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer is responsible for identifying and putting into place, intelligent systems and applications that enhance the business workflow. Blockchain 101 - A visual demo This is a very basic visual introduction to the concepts behind a blockchain. We introduce the idea of an immutable ledger using an interactive web demo Design in Tech Report 2017 See also:https://vimeo.com/208035080 Design trends revolutionizing the entrepreneurial and corporate ecosystems in tech. Related M&A activity, new patterns in creativity x business, and the rise of computational design. (presentation and video links below)

John Maeda: If You Want to Survive in Design, You
Better Learn to Code Designers who can code and write have always been attractive to tech companies, but Maeda’s report foretells an inflection point for the field. As the distinction between engineering, writing, and design becomes blurrier, design’s role in technology only stands to become more ingrained in the product development process. In the end, design, as a singular field, could become less visible but more relevant. And someday, design might not need Maeda’s 50-page reports to extol its virtues.

Friday Feed March 24, 2017 Cholesterol-Slashing Drug Can Protect High-Risk
Heart Patients, Study Finds “This is like the era of the statins coming in,” said Dr. Eugene Braunwald, a cardiologist at Harvard Medical School who was the founding chairman of the research group that conducted the study, but was not an investigator on it. Like statins, which were introduced in the 1980s, the new class of drugs has the potential to improve the health and longevity of millions of Americans with heart disease, the nation’s leading killer, accounting for one in four deaths. “It’s a new ballgame,” he said. I’m an MIT professor who used math to help treat diabetes Increased access to troves of genomic information and the rising use of electronic medical records, combined with new methods of machine learning, allow researchers to process large amounts of data. This is accelerating efforts to understand genetic differences within diseases—including diabetes—and to develop treatments for them. The scientist in me feels a powerful desire to take part. Meet The Man Whose Site Mark Zuckerberg Reads Every Day Google Ventures general partner and former TechCrunch writer M.G. Siegler told me most reporters he knows check the site regularly. “The same also seems to be true of many VCs I know,” he said via direct message. “It’s simply the best way to quickly get caught up on what you need to know in our industry.” Joe Brown, the editor-in-chief of Popular Science, described Techmeme as the ultimate insider enthusiast publication. “It’s a small restaurant that serves your favorite dish. And for people that are interested in technology, just knowing about Techmeme is kind of its own reward and carries its own kind of status.” Google Glass Didn't Disappear. You Can Find It On The Factory Floor Google Glass tells her what to do should she forget, for example, which part goes where. "I don't have to leave my area to go look at the computer every time I need to look up something," she says. With Google Glass, she scans the serial number on the part she's working on. This brings up manuals, photos or videos she may need. She can tap the side of headset or say "OK Glass" and use voice commands to leave notes for the next shift worker.

There be dragons: dataviz in the industry Where is the
middle ground of domain-specific, purposefully crafted user interfaces that would truly enable us to see beyond the numbers and data and actually investigate interesting phenomena? There must be a business case for better understanding your own business, right? Why don’t we see more exciting bespoke visual data work from inside tech companies?

Friday Feed March 31, 2017 Amazon Connect Amazon Connect is
a self-service, cloud-based contact center service that makes it easy for any business to deliver better customer service at lower cost. Amazon Connect is based on the same contact center technology used by Amazon customer service associates around the world to power millions of customer conversations. The self-service graphical interface in Amazon Connect makes it easy for non-technical users to design contact flows, manage agents, and track performance metrics – no specialized skills required. How Big Data Can Help Fight Cancer The hope is that this information will reveal a genetic smoking gun, a mutation that can be exploited with the right drug. How to Push Your Team to Take Risks and Experiment Most managers I know want their employees to be curious and experimental, to take the initiative and develop new products and solutions. But, as it turns out, managers also like to micromanage and control outcomes through safe, predictable processes. As a result, managers end up stifling the very experimentation they want to foster....The goal is to gradually change a company’s culture from one of finding the right answer to one of exploring and testing many possible answers. How Aristotle Created the Computer The history of computers is often told as a history of objects, from the abacus to the Babbage engine up through the code-breaking machines of World War II. In fact, it is better understood as a history of ideas, mainly ideas that emerged from mathematical logic, an obscure and cult-like discipline that first developed in the 19th century. Mathematical logic was pioneered by philosopher-mathematicians, most notably George Boole and Gottlob Frege, who were themselves inspired by Leibniz’s dream of a universal “concept language,” and the ancient logical system of Aristotle.

Friday Feed April 7, 2017 Hacking DNA: The Story of
CRISPR, Ken Thompson, and the Gene Drive This revolution in what it means to be human will be enabled by a new genetic technology that goes by the innocuous sounding name CRISPR, pronounced “crisper”. Many readers will already have seen this term in the news, and can expect much more of it in the mainstream media soon. CRISPR is an acronym for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats and is to genomics what vi (Unix’s visual text editor) is to software. It is an editing technology which gives unprecedented power to genetic engineers: it turns them into genetic hackers. Before CRISPR, genetic engineering was slow, expensive, and inaccurate. With CRISPR, genome editing is cheap, accurate, and repeatable. A.I. versus M.D. Thrun was convinced that he could outdo these first-generation diagnostic devices by moving away from rule-based algorithms to learning-based ones—from rendering a diagnosis by “knowing that” to doing so by “knowing how.” Increasingly, learning algorithms of the kind that Thrun works with involve a computing strategy known as a “neural network,” because it’s inspired by a model of how the brain functions. Android overtakes Windows for first time “Windows won the desktop war but the battlefield moved on,” said Cullen. "It will be difficult for Microsoft to make inroads in mobile but the next paradigm shift might give it the opportunity to regain dominance. That could be in Augmented Reality, AI, Voice or Continuum (a product that aims to replace a desktop and smartphone with a single Microsoft powered phone)." Noah Iliinsky on design at Amazon In this week’s Design Podcast, I sit down with Noah Iliinsky, senior UX architect at Amazon’s AWS group, co-author of Designing Data Visualizations, and co-editor of Beautiful Visualization. We talk about how design is organized at Amazon, 17 keys to success, and why being intentional will ensure you are working on the right problems.

Quantifying the performance of the TPU, our first machine learning
chip The need for TPUs really emerged about six years ago, when we started using computationally expensive deep learning models in more and more places throughout our products. The computational expense of using these models had us worried. If we considered a scenario where people use Google voice search for just three minutes a day and we ran deep neural nets for our speech recognition system on the processing units we were using, we would have had to double the number of Google data centers! Android beats Windows to become the internet’s most used operating system According to research from web statistics firm StatCounter, Android accounted for a larger chunk of overall internet usage than Windows for the first time ever last March, clocking an impressive market share of 37.93 percent ahead of Microsoft’s 37.91 percent.

Friday Feed April 14, 2017 Tackling Weight Loss and Diabetes
With Video Chats “Developing remote care models is going to be the key if we’re going to have some sort of impact on improving glucose control for the millions of people with diabetes,” he said. “It’s a much more scalable model than seeing people in a doctor’s office.” Can “Digital Therapeutics” Be as Good as Drugs? Digital therapeutics, or “digiceuticals,” as some call them, have become a Holy Grail in some quarters of Silicon Valley, where investors see the chance to deliver medicine through your smartphone. Andreessen Horowitz, the venture firm, even predicts digital drugs will become “the third phase” of medicine, meaning the successor to the chemical and protein drugs we have now, but without the billion-dollar cost of bringing one to market. Bezos Says Artificial Intelligence to Fuel Amazon's Success Bezos repeated familiar themes, such as the need to operate a business like it’s always “Day 1” to keep a startup mentality and the ability to act quickly on limited information to stay ahead, what he calls “high-velocity decision making.” His emphasis on artificial intelligence and machine learning was the most concrete indication of areas in which the e-commerce giant will continue to invest. FDA Opens Genetic Floodgates with 23andMe Decision “Consumers can now have direct access to certain genetic risk information,” said Jeffrey Shuren, director of the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, in a statement. “But it is important that people understand that genetic risk is just one piece of the bigger puzzle. It does not mean they will or won’t ultimately develop a disease.” I’m Not Texting. I’m Taking Notes. But when he started to get into specifics, I noticed that other people were pulling out their laptops and notepads. I knew I had better take notes, so I reached for my phone. That’s what I like to use....“Many board members noticed that you were on your phone a lot,” he said. “If you can hold out on texting friends or checking your Twitter feed until the breaks, that would be great.”

Friday Feed April 21, 2017 The Cost of Not Taking
Your Medicine Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop put it bluntly: “Drugs don’t work in patients who don’t take them.” This partly explains why new drugs that perform spectacularly well in studies, when patients are monitored to be sure they follow doctors’ orders, fail to measure up once the drug hits the commercial market.....Still, there is hope for improvement, he said. Multiple drugs for a condition could be combined into one pill or packaged together, or dosing can be simplified. Doctors and pharmacists can use digital technology to interact with patients and periodically reinforce the importance of staying on their medication. Slack, an Upstart in Messaging, Now Faces Giant Tech Rivals One advantage Slack does have is focus, Mr. Butterfield maintains. Microsoft, for example, has numerous Slack-like products including Yammer, SharePoint, Skype for Business and now Teams. The executives who run those businesses within Microsoft must “compete for budget and mind share and attention,” he said, providing an opening for Slack to gain users while Microsoft managers wage internal wars. Microsoft said users would embrace Teams because it had strong encryption and global support and worked seamlessly with software they already used, like Excel. “We think customers value coherence,” said Bryan Goode, the general manager of Office 365 at Microsoft. meet-the-man-who-makes-facebooks-machines-think For these reasons and others, FAIR isn’t your typical Facebook team. Its members do not work directly on the $410 billion company’s collection of mega popular products: Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Facebook proper. Its ultimate goal is likely decades off, and may never be reached. And it’s led not by your typical polished Silicon Valley overachiever but by Yann LeCun, a 56-year-old academic who’s experienced real failure in his life and managed to come back. His once-rejected theories about artificial intelligence are today considered world-class, and his vindication is Facebook’s bounty. What is ‘Site Reliability Engineering’? So SRE is fundamentally doing work that has historically been done by an operations team, but using engineers with software expertise, and banking on the fact that these engineers are inherently both predisposed to, and have the ability to, substitute automation for human labor.

We Need a GitHub for Academic Research Von Muhlen’s proposal
focused on using the social web to quickly reward innovative scientists, using GitHub as a model. A full GitHub for science could go even further, focusing on increasing transparency to improve reproducibility. In a GitHub for science, each “paper” that researchers produce would reflect the complete and full record of an experiment—every lab note, every statistical script, every audio file, and every bit of computer code. To the greatest extent possible, this evidence would be shared in real time. The research process is rife with trial and error, and it’s not as linear as the version of events recorded in a paper. A GitHub for science would emphasize the preliminary and evolving nature of the data, and of scientific understanding itself. Google’s Health Study Seeks 10,000 Volunteers to Give Up Their Medical Secrets The project will scrutinize spit, tears, stool, heartbeats, and genomes to search for new predictors of disease.

Friday Feed April 28, 2017 Smartphone-Controlled Cells Could Pump Insulin
for Diabetics Scientists in China have used a smartphone and a technique called optogenetics to precisely control cells to deliver insulin to diabetic mice. The approach could be used to continuously monitor blood glucose levels in human diabetics and automatically produce necessary insulin, a hormone that converts sugar from food into energy the body can use. A Virtual Goldmine: Why Criminals Target Patient Data One of the main reasons that patient information is so difficult to protect is that, within a healthcare organization, the EHR must be easily accessed and widely available, especially in the case of emergencies. In order to make records easily accessible, employees use many different systems and devices – including computers and mobile devices – to access the EHR. Moreover, third party vendors, such as equipment and drug suppliers, as well as insurance companies often have minimally necessary access to ePHI. Deep Learning Is a Black Box, but Health Care Won’t Mind In a statement, the FDA says that over the past 20 years it has approved “a number of image analysis applications that rely on a variety of pattern recognition, machine learning, and computer vision techniques.” The agency confirmed that it’s seeing more software powered by deep learning and notes that companies are allowed to keep the details of their algorithms confidential. The AI Cargo Cult: The Myth of Superhuman AI If the expectation of a superhuman AI takeover is built on five key assumptions that have no basis in evidence, then this idea is more akin to a religious belief.—.a myth. In the following paragraphs I expand my evidence for each of these five counter-assumptions, and make the case that, indeed, a superhuman AI is a kind of myth. The Race To Build An AI Chip For Everything Just Got Real After acquiring a startup called Nervana, Intel is now building a chip specifically for machine learning. IBM is too, creating a hardware architecture that mirrors the design of a neural network. And more recently, Qualcomm has started building chips specifically for executing neural networks, according to LeCun, who is familiar with Qualcomm’s plans because Facebook is helping the chip maker develop technologies related to machine learning.

Immunotherapy Pioneer James Allison Has Unfinished Business with Cancer The
answers can’t come too soon for some. The pharmaceutical industry and research institutions are in the midst of a pell-mell sprint into thousands of clinical trials based on new immunotherapy agents. As of October, by one tally, more than 166,736 patients were being sought to fill slots in studies of drugs involving a single protein, called PD-1. The overall number of immunotherapy trials probably tops 3,000, says Jeff Bluestone, an immunologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who also serves as president and CEO of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy.

Friday Feed May 5, 2017 Oscar Is Disrupting Health Care
In A Hurricane Oscar has built an interface to health care that, at its best, is as refreshing as other experiences transformed by tech. One might assume that Oscar might be in line for similar success as friction-reducing internet powers like Amazon or Uber. Open Sourcing My Personal Medical Record As I dug into my research, I was shocked to learn it takes years of preclinical work and then around a decade of clinical trials for a treatment to make it to market. I’m not a scientist—I certainly will not be the one to cure Osteonecrosis. But I wanted to build something that could expedite the time between lab-work and market. And as I continued to research, I found an inefficiency in the system I could actually affect. An AI-Driven Genomics Company Is Turning to Drugs The rush to apply AI techniques to medicine and drug development is partly driven by the emergence of powerful new algorithms, but also by cost-effective new ways of sequencing whole genomes, the entire readout of a person’s DNA. “There’s an opening of a new era of data-rich, information-based medicine,” Frey says. “There’s a lot of different kinds of data you can obtain. And the best technology we have for dealing with large amounts of data is machine learning and artificial intelligence.” IBM uses deep learning to better detect a leading cause of blindness IBM on Thursday announced its latest breakthrough in combating eye disease, with new research methods that could help doctors diagnose and classify diabetic retinopathy (DR). DR is a complication of diabetes and one of the leading causes of blindness in the US. Using deep learning and visual analytics technology, IBM researchers were able to classify the severity of patients' DR with 86-percent accuracy Meet your new lab assistant You could take off your gloves and look up the protocol in your lab notebook, but with each precious second that passes, the reaction is more likely to fail. Then you remember your lab assistant—a black cylinder sitting on a shelf across the lab. “Alexa, ask Helix for the protocol for the coupling reaction,” you say. A ring on top of the cylinder glows blue as Alexa rattles off the correct order of addition. Crisis averted.

Friday Feed May 12, 2017 Apple’s Watch can detect an
abnormal heart rhythm with 97% accuracy, UCSF study says According to a study conducted through heartbeat measurement app Cardiogram and the University of California, San Francisco, the Apple Watch is 97 percent accurate in detecting the most common abnormal heart rhythm when paired with an AI-based algorithm. The study involved 6,158 participants recruited through the Cardiogram app on Apple Watch. Most of the participants in the UCSF Health eHeart study had normal EKG readings. However, 200 of them had been diagnosed with paroxysmal atrial fibrillation (an abnormal heartbeat). Engineers then trained a deep neural network to identify these abnormal heart rhythms from Apple Watch heart rate data. The shock tactics set to shake up immunology An experimental procedure is exposing the links between the nervous and immune systems. Could it be the start of a revolution? Making "Push on Green" a Reality With the complexity and interconnectedness of modern systems, some development/rollout best practices have evolved which attempt to minimize problems and downtime [2, 3]. To better understand the issues involved in creating a Push on Green system, an outline of a typical Google development environment and deployment process provides a useful introduction. Amazon officially unveils touchscreen Echo Show The Show has the same basic capabilities as the regular, voice-only Echo (like setting timers and listening to music), but the built-in display adds plenty of new functionality. The Show’s screen will give users more information about their Alexa queries (displaying a full weather report or the steps in each recipe, for example), and can be used to play videos, including news briefings from the likes of CNN, and content from YouTube and Amazon Video. Microsoft introduces Azure Cosmos DB, a new database with a broad money-back guarantee “Data isn’t just a core part of apps – increasingly it’s becoming the most mission critical aspect and fundamental to developing intelligent apps. As cloud-based applications increasingly scale, reach global users, and power AI experiences, we have come to a place where we need data at planet scale,”

Friday Feed May 19, 2017 Apple CEO Tim Cook test-drove
a device that tracks his blood sugar, hinting at Apple's interest in the space Tim Cook has been spotted at the Apple campus test-driving a device that tracks blood sugar, which was connected to his Apple Watch. A source said that Cook was wearing a prototype glucose-tracker on the Apple Watch, which points to future applications that would make the device a "must have" for millions of people with diabetes -- or at risk for the disease. Apple has a team in Palo Alto working on the “holy grail” for diabetes: Non-invasive and continuous glucose monitoring. The current glucose trackers on the market rely on tiny sensors penetrating the skin. Sources said the company is already conducting feasibility trials in the Bay Area. Wannacry About Business Models This is exactly what is necessary for good security: vendors need to keep their applications (or in the case of Microsoft, operating systems) updated, and end users need to always be using the latest version. Moreover, pricing software as a service means it is no longer a capital cost with all of the one-time payment assumptions that go with it: rather, it is an ongoing expense that implicitly includes maintenance, whether that be by the vendor or the end user (or, likely, a combination of the two). Videos, Pictures & Highlights from The 2017 New York R Conference Every April, we welcome a sold-out crowd of over 300 people for 2 full days of leading talks from some of the best data scientists in the world, connecting diverse domains and industries from the world's leading startups to Fortune 1000s and academia. Making AI work for everyone We are now witnessing a new shift in computing: the move from a mobile-first to an AI-first world. And as before, it is forcing us to reimagine our products for a world that allows a more natural, seamless way of interacting with technology. Think about Google Search: it was built on our ability to understand text in webpages. But now, thanks to advances in deep learning, we’re able to make images, photos and videos useful to people in a way they simply haven’t been before. Your camera can “see”; you can speak to your phone and get answers back—speech and vision are becoming as important to computing as the keyboard or multi-touch screens.

Google Reveals a Powerful New AI Chip and Supercomputer The
new chip and a cloud-based machine-learning supercomputer will help Google establish itself as an AI-focused hardware maker. Cloud Spanner is now production-ready; let the migrations begin We’ve carefully designed Cloud Spanner to meet customer requirements for enterprise databases — including ANSI 2011 SQL support, ACID transactions, 99.999% availability and strong consistency — without compromising latency. As a combined software/hardware solution that includes atomic clocks and GPS receivers across Google’s global network, Cloud Spanner also offers additional accuracy, reliability and performance in the form of a fully-managed cloud database service.

Friday Feed May 26, 2017 Rare Gene Mutations Inspire New
Heart Drugs What if you carried a genetic mutation that left you nearly impervious to heart disease? What if scientists could bottle that miracle and use it to treat everyone else? Google Made A $5,000 Whiteboard — And It’s Weirdly Fun See also:https://blog.google/products/g-suite/lets-jam-jamboard-now-available/ Working in a modern office can be pretty strange. I go hours without speaking to my co-workers, yet I'm in constant communication with them through a chat app. I know some of my colleagues only as digital avatars, and my meetings are sometimes filled with more faces on a screen than people in chairs surrounding me. This is the state of office collaboration in 2017, and in many ways it's sorely lacking. Google has been improving this space for years with tools like Docs and Drive, and it's now taking a step into the physical world with an alternative to Microsoft's digital whiteboard, the Surface Hub. Google's take is called the Jamboard. It's a digital, internet-connected “whiteboard” that looks like a blown-up children’s tablet, and we got a chance to test it out ahead of its launch today GraphScape: Modeling Similarity & Sequence among Charts While skilled designers can manually craft effective sequences, we wondered what underlying principles might help guide (and even automate) such decisions. Considering this question drew us to a more fundamental question: how might we model the relationships among charts? This led us to develop GraphScape, a model for automatic reasoning about chart similarity and sequence. GraphScape models can be used to search the space of visualization designs, suggest related alternatives, and recommend chart sequence orders that audiences can more easily interpret.

Friday Feed June 2, 2017 Mary Meeker's Internet Trends 2017
The huge (353 slide) annual review of Internet Trends has arrived: The Healthcare section (slides 288-319) outlines a "Digital Inflection Point", and discusses (1) Digital Inputs = Rapid Growth in Sources of Digital Health Data (2) Data Accumulation = Proliferation of Digitally-Native Data Sets (3) Data Insight = Generated Following Accumulation and Integration of Data (4) Translation = Impact on Therapeutics and Healthcare Delivery (5) Outcomes = Measure Outcomes and Iterate, Innovation Cycle Times Compressing Mossberg: The Disappearing Computer I expect that one end result of all this work will be that the technology, the computer inside all these things, will fade into the background. In some cases, it may entirely disappear, waiting to be activated by a voice command, a person entering the room, a change in blood chemistry, a shift in temperature, a motion. Maybe even just a thought. Your whole home, office and car will be packed with these waiting computers and sensors. But they won’t be in your way, or perhaps even distinguishable as tech devices. This is ambient computing, the transformation of the environment all around us with intelligence and capabilities that don’t seem to be there at all. How Airbnb Democratizes Data Science With Data University The key ingredients needed for data informed decision making included having accessibility to data, a comprehensive set of data tools and user knowledge of how to utilize the data and tools. As we spoke to people throughout Airbnb, it became more and more apparent that the bottleneck to scaling data informed decisions was actually data education for users. Data University is data education for anyone at Airbnb that scales by role and team. Our vision is to empower every employee to make data informed decisions. Visualize data instantly with machine learning in Google Sheets Explore in Sheets, powered by machine learning, helps teams gain insights from data, instantly. Simply ask questions—in words, not formulas—to quickly analyze your data. For example, you can ask “what is the distribution of products sold?” or “what are average sales on Sundays?” and Explore will help you find the answers.

Drug Is First to Treat Cancer Based on Genetics, Not
Location Precision medicine is the idea that medical treatments should be personalized to an individual’s genetic makeup, or other information about them. But up until now, cancer therapies have all been approved to treat cancer based on where it is located, such as in the breast or lung.

Friday Feed June 9, 2017 A Dilemma for Diabetes Patients:
How Low to Push Blood Sugar, and How to Do It? A particular drug’s effect on blood sugar does not predict its effects on the heart. Even understanding the chemistry at work — the drugs act in very different ways to lower blood sugar — does not predict whether a particular medication will increase heart risk in a particular patient, researchers say. “We can’t predict what happens to people just based on the mechanisms of these drugs,” said Dr. Kasia J. Lipska, a diabetes expert at Yale University who wrote a recent paper on the issue. “We have to study large groups of patients and examine what drugs reduce complications of diabetes such as heart attacks, and in which patients.” Safe Visual Data Exploration Exploring data via visualization has become a popular way to understand complex data. Features or patterns in visualization can be perceived as relevant insights by users, even though they may actually arise from random noise. Moreover, interactive data exploration and visualization recommendation tools can examine a large number of observations, and therefore result in further increasing chance of spurious insights. Thus without proper statistical control, the risk of false discovery renders visual data exploration unsafe and makes users susceptible to questionable inference. To address these problems, we present QUDE, a visual data exploration system that interacts with users to formulate hypotheses based on visualizations and provides interactive control of false discoveries. Data Sketching In response to this challenge, the model of streaming data processing has grown in popularity. The aim is no longer to capture, store, and index every minute event, but rather to process each observation quickly in order to create a summary of the current state. Following its processing, an event is dropped and is no longer accessible. The summary that is retained is often referred to as a sketch of the data. Introducing ARKit iOS 11 introduces ARKit, a new framework that allows you to easily create unparalleled augmented reality experiences for iPhone and iPad. By blending digital objects and information with the environment around you, ARKit takes apps beyond the screen, freeing them to interact with the real world in entirely new ways.

The Future of the World's Most Boring Software, the Word
Processor "The reasons we have traditionally used word processors has slowly been eroded away," he explained. "LinkedIn is replacing the resume, Github is replacing documentation, and blogging (and respective tools) have chipped into journalism. Even documents that are meant to be printed are largely being standardized and automated. Most letters in your physical mailbox today are probably from some bank that generated and printed it without touching Word."

Friday Feed June 23, 2017 The 4 Types of Innovation
and the Problems They Solve In researching my book, Mapping Innovation, I found that every innovation strategy fails eventually, because innovation is, at its core, about solving problems — and there are as many ways to innovate as there are types of problems to solve. There is no one “true” path to innovation. The Innovation Matrix has these quadrants (1) Sustaining innovation. Most innovation happens here, because most of the time we are seeking to get better at what we’re already doing (2) Breakthrough innovation. Sometimes, we run into a well-defined problem that’s just devilishly hard to solve. In cases like these, we need to explore unconventional skill domains (3) Disruptive innovation: when the basis of competition changes, because of technological shifts or other changes in the marketplace, companies can find themselves getting better and better at things people want less and less. When that happens, innovating your products won’t help — you have to innovate your business model. (4) Basic Research: Pathbreaking innovations never arrive fully formed. They always begin with the discovery of some new phenomenon. A Cyberattack ‘the World Isn’t Ready For’ “The world is burning about WannaCry, but this is a nuclear bomb compared to WannaCry,” Mr. Ben-Oni said. “This is different. It’s a lot worse. It steals credentials. You can’t catch it, and it’s happening right under our noses.” And, he added, “The world isn’t ready for this.” How An Entire Nation Became Russia's Test Lab For Cyberwar For the past 14 months, Yasinsky had found himself at the center of an enveloping crisis. A growing roster of Ukrainian companies and government agencies had come to him to analyze a plague of cyberattacks that were hitting them in rapid, remorseless succession. A single group of hackers seemed to be behind all of it. How to use BeyondCorp to ditch your VPN, improve security and go to the cloud With BeyondCorp, we no longer have a binary access model, where you are either inside the whole corporate network, with all the access that allows, or outside and completely locked out of applications. Our new approach provides a better, more convenient, and less risky way: access to individual services as you need them, based on who you are and what machine you're using. At Google, we’ve been on our BeyondCorp journey for several years, gradually shifting more of our traffic and services away from a segmented, privileged corporate network and onto the public internet and cloud.

Tim Cook: Apple Isn’t Falling Behind, It’s Just Not Ready
to Talk About the Future People don’t think about well-integrated machine learning. They don’t even know it’s there. The battery lasts longer in your iPhone because of machine learning. There are a ton of things in [an iPhone] today that you wouldn’t think ‘Oh, that’s machine learning’—a whole list of things. We’ve never felt a need or like the consumer really wanted us to lay out the big matrix—“Here are all the ways that we use machine learning”—because it’s not something people care about. We care because we are in the techie sphere, but the user doesn’t care. They just want it to work. Design In The Era Of The Algorithm Machine learning lets the robots interact with all the messy stuff that humans create—pictures, speech, and text. The promise is that this allows us to create software that does its best to understand us in the language of our own creative domains, or in the course of our everyday lives. I have ideas. Here are ten design principles for conceiving, designing, and managing data-driven products. (1) Favor accuracy over speed, (2) Allow for ambiguity, (3) Add human judgment, (4) Advocate sunshine, (5) Embrace multiple systems, (6) Make it easy to contribute (accurate) data, (7) Root out bias and bad assumptions, (8) Give people control over their data, (9) Be loyal to the user, (10) Take responsibility

Friday Feed June 30, 2017 Why France Is Taking a
Lesson in Culture From Silicon Valley The vast project in the heart of Paris, Station F, is a symbol of France’s ambitions to be the start-up capital of Europe. Under an arc of glass and curved concrete, it aims to amass the largest group of entrepreneurs, venture capital firms, incubators and accelerators anywhere in the world. Apple’s Architect Says the Future of Offices Must Be Flexible It’s easy to assume a strict adherence to vision would stifle flexibility. “The reverse is actually true,” Foster said. The best buildings, he contends, require a strong point of view. They must be thoughtfully designed to adapt to the ways humans and society will inevitably change, and that requires more than just building open-plan layouts. Data Visualization Pitfalls to Avoid Computer-based visualization systems provide visual representations of datasets designed to help people carry out tasks more effectively. Visualization is suitable when there is a need to augment human capabilities rather than replace people with computational decision-making methods. Petya: "I want to Believe" So, taking the default position of “it does what it says on the tin”, what evidence would convince us to change our minds? (Fans of the scientific method.) We didn’t really know what evidence was needed until we started looking. And, so, over the past 48 hours, we’ve bombarded our colleagues with questions (a lot of which we’ve seen others asking). So, without further ado, let’s start. Perfect Ten The iPhone changed the world. There is no way to overstate it. The iPhone was the inflection point where “personal computing” truly became personal. Apple had amazing product introductions before the iPhone, and it’s had a few good ones after. But the iPhone was the only product introduction I’ve ever experienced that felt impossible.

Friday Feed July 7, 2107 Cancer Isn’t a Logic Problem
Silicon Valley wants to solve cancer by hacking it. Here’s why its approach fails. The Machines Are Getting Ready to Play Doctor An algorithm that spots heart arrhythmia shows how AI will revolutionize medicine—but patients must trust machines with their lives. Supporting Responsive Cohabitation Between Virtual Interfaces and Physical Objects on Everyday Surfaces In this project, we use an elicitation study and interviews to synthesize a list of ten interactive behaviors that desk-bound, digital interfaces should implement to support responsive cohabitation with physical objects. When Not To Use Deep Learning In this post, I wanted to visit use cases in machine learning where deep learning would not really make sense to use as well as tackle preconceptions that I think prevent deep learning to be used effectively, especially for newcomers. Technology has Become Water I have a four inch block in my pocket. Chances are, if you’re reading this, you do too. What it can do is in many respects indistinguishable from magic.

Friday Feed July 14, 2017 Who Needs Hard Drives? Scientists
Store Film Clip in DNA With the new research, he and other scientists have begun to wonder if it may be possible one day to do something even stranger: to program bacteria to snuggle up to cells in the human body and to record what they are doing, in essence making a “movie” of each cell’s life. A Conversational Agent for Data Science Iris supports interactive command combination through a conversational model inspired by linguistic theory and programming language interpreters. Our approach allows us to leverage a simple language model to enable complex workflows. The Iris interface is a cross between a chat application like Facebook messenger and a development environment like RStudio (Figure 2). In the bottom left, users issue commands to the system, which will then appear in the window above, along with system responses. Data structures created in the course of a conversation appear in the upper right. Why Product Thinking is the next big thing in UX Design When thinking of User Experience, we often think of a simple, beautiful, and easy to use feature-set of a product, that makes the user’s life easier. But as a matter of fact, features are merely a small, fragile part of the product. They are only a few of many thinkable solutions for a user’s problem the product tries to solve. Thinking in products means thinking in specific user’s problems, in jobs to be done, in goals, and in revenues. It's Time To Make Code More Tinker-Friendly we need new tools that let everyone see, understand, and remix today’s web. We need, in other words, to reboot the culture of View Source.

Friday Feed July 21, 2017 Why Pharma Wants to Put
Sensors in This Blockbuster Drug This month, the Food and Drug Administration accepted an application to evaluate a new drug-sensor-app system that tracks when a pill’s been taken. The app comes connected to a Band Aid-like sensor, worn on the body, that knows when a tiny chip hidden inside a pill is swallowed—so if patients aren’t keeping up with their meds, the program can alert their doctors. Google Glass 2.0 Is A Startling Second Act Yes, that’s Google Glass on her frames. But she’s not using it to check her Facebook, dictate messages, or capture a no-hands video while riding a roller coaster. Erickson is a 30-year-old factory worker in rural Jackson, Minnesota. For her, Glass is not a hip way to hang apps in front of her eyeballs, but a tool—as much a tool as her power wrenches. It walks her through her shifts at Station 50 on the factory floor, where she builds motors for tractors. Cloud Data Transfer: Move your data to Google Cloud Platform fast Google today announced the launch of its Transfer Appliance, a new hardware appliance and service for moving large amounts of data from corporate data centers to its cloud via FedEx. Google not Amazon. Make fantastic savings in a server-less world Why is IT ignoring Google’s server-less cloud infrastructure? They’re playing with their toys on Amazon and it’s costing tens of millions in missed business automation opportunities. Global analysis of protein folding using massively parallel design, synthesis, and testing We combined computational protein design, next-generation gene synthesis, and a high-throughput protease susceptibility assay to measure folding and stability for more than 15,000 de novo designed miniproteins, 1000 natural proteins, 10,000 point mutants, and 30,000 negative control sequences. This analysis identified more than 2500 stable designed proteins in four basic folds—a number sufficient to enable us to systematically examine how sequence determines folding and stability in uncharted protein space. Iteration between design and experiment increased the design success rate from 6% to 47%

Apple Machine Learning Journal Welcome to the Apple Machine Learning
Journal. Here, you can read posts written by Apple engineers about their work using machine learning technologies to help build innovative products for millions of people around the world.

Friday Feed July 28, 2017 AI May Soon Replace Even
the Most Elite Consultants But the financial services industry is just the beginning. Over the next few years, artificial intelligence may exponentially change the way we all gather information, make decisions, and connect with stakeholders. Hopefully this will be for the better and we will all benefit from timely, comprehensive, and bias-free insights (given research that human beings are prone to a variety of cognitive biases). It will be particularly interesting to see how artificial intelligence affects the decisions of corporate leaders — men and women who make the many decisions that affect our everyday lives as customers, employees, partners, and investors. DNA Logic Gets Much Faster Microsoft has taken quite an interest in the potential of DNA in computing over the years. Last year Microsoft researchers set a record for DNA data storage. (Its record was beaten this year). Now Microsoft is turning its attention to the other half of DNA computing, the processor. Researchers at Microsoft have teamed up with scientists at the University of Washington to find a way toward creating super fast computations using DNA molecules. Making Engineering Team Communication Clearer, Faster, Better it’s very important to make sure you have a process that actually gets people to read the document. The write-only document fired off into the void is a common problem, and this talks about how to solve it (for design documents, but the principles translate). Tech firms are forgetting about STEM and focusing on STEAM A new acronym has come to the fore, pioneered by advocates like the US’s Rhode Island School of Design, which has developed lessons on it for primary-school and high-school educators. It’s called STEAM, and though it might look and feel very much like its predecessor, the addition of the letter “A” is significant. It represents the “Arts” and tech firms are quickly realizing its importance.

Amazon has a secret health tech team called 1492 working
on medical records, virtual doc visits The new team is currently looking at opportunities that involve pushing and pulling data from legacy electronic medical record systems. If successful, Amazon could make that information available to consumers and their doctors. It is also hoping to build a platform for telemedicine, which in turn could make it easier for people to have virtual consultations with doctors, one of the people said.

Friday Feed August 4, 2017 CRISPR skin grafts could replace
insulin injections for diabetes Genetically modified skin grafts have protected mice from developing diabetes, suggesting the technique may help people with the condition. The method makes use of the gene that encodes a hormone called glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1). This hormone decreases appetite and helps regulate blood sugar levels by triggering the release of insulin, which removes excess glucose from the blood. Another Lens: A research tool for conscientious creatives How can you design for everyone without understanding the full picture? This Matrix Helps Growing Teams Make Great Decisions Psychological safety is a combination of empathy, time management and good conversational turn-taking. This blend makes people feel heard and appreciated. What Is Ray Kurzweil Up To At Google? Writing Your Emails His team is experimenting with empowering Smart Reply to elaborate on its initial terse suggestions. Tapping a Continue button might cause “Sure I’d love to come to your party!” to expand to include, for example, “Can I bring something?” He likes the idea of having AI pitch in anytime you’re typing, a bit like an omnipresent, smarter version of Google’s search autocomplete. “You could have similar technology to help you compose documents or emails by giving you suggestions of how to complete your sentence,” The digital native is a myth The younger generation uses technology in the same ways as older people — and is no better at multitasking. Cargo Cult Data Science Data science is becoming an important competitive advantage for companies of all kinds. With the introduction of a new set practices, there’s an increased risk of “cargo cults” emerging within organizations. Cargo cults describe situations where people emulate a set of behaviours, without understanding their underlying motivations. When this happens with data-science, organizations will emulate the technology behind data science, without creating a data-driven organizational culture.

Friday Feed August 14, 2017 Head of Google's "Brain Team"
describes Google's use of AI Jeff Deen lectures on Google's use of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (for example image analysis for detecting Diabetic Retinopathy) How Blockchain Optimizes Health IT Software Development and Health Related Research Among the advantages blockchain provides medical researchers is the creation of a single storage location for all health information, tracking personal data in real-time and the ability to set data access permissions at a granular level. Health researchers need broad and complete data sets so they can better understand diseases, speed up biomedical discoveries, accelerate the development of drugs and provide customized individual treatment plans based on patient genetics, environment and lifecycle. Announcing the Coco Framework for enterprise blockchain networks Microsoft is committed to bringing blockchain to the enterprise—and is working with customers, partners, and the blockchain community to continue advancing its enterprise readiness. Our mission is to help companies thrive in this new era of secure multi-party computation by delivering open, scalable platforms and services that any company—from ledger startups to retailers to health providers to global banks—can use to improved shared business processes. Airbnb's Director of Experience, Katie Dill, tells us why Airbnb uses "stories" to design "Storytelling can be used at any stage of the development process... It's a powerful one because every individual can identify with, you can tell a story of what a person can go through How Information Got Re-Invented The story behind the birth of the information age.

Friday Feed August 18, 2017 Multiple Perspectives On Technical Problems
and Solutions In this post, I’d like to focus on the architecture review working group’s role in facilitating dialogue about technology decision-making. You might be thinking: “but where and when does a decision get made?” The ARWG’s role was not to make a decision. The ARWG’s role was to create and sustain the conditions where a dialogue can take place, with as many perspectives on both the problem and solution as can be had within a given period of time, and then to facilitate a discussion around a decision to be made. A Start-Up Suggests a Fix to the Health Care Morass Aledade, which has raised about $75 million from investors, has an agenda so ambitious it sounds all but impossible: Dr. Mostashari wants to reduce the cost of health care while improving how patients are treated. He also wants to save the independent primary care doctor, whose practices have been battered by the perverse incentives of the American health care system. How Hardware Drives The Shape Of Databases To Come With OLTP, if you want to do 1 million transactions per second, it is no big deal. Your favorite cluster will do that on things like VoltDB and MemSQL. Oracle, DB2, MySQL, SQL Server and the others can’t do 1 million transactions per second no matter what. There is just too much overhead in the software...To get rid of that overhead, you have to rearchitect everything, which is what the in-memory OLTP systems have done. ...The CFO at GE concluded that if these procurement systems could operate in tandem and demand most favored nation status with vendors, that would be worth about $1 billion in savings a year to the company. But they have to integrate 75 independently constructed supplier databases. 8 Lessons from 20 Years of Hype Cycles (1) We're terrible at making predictions. Especially about the future. (2) An alarming number of technology trends are flashes in the pan. (3) Lots of technologies just die. Period. (4) The technical insight is often correct, but the implementation isn't there (5) We've been working on a few core technical problems for decades (6) Some technologies keep receding into the future (7) Lots of technologies make progress when no-one is looking (8) Many major technologies flew under the Hype Cycle radar

Friday Feed August 25, 2017 A Cancer “Atlas” to Predict
How Patients Will Fare Researchers use a big-data approach to find links between different genes and patient survival. Dear iPhone: Here’s Why We’re Still Together After 10 Years “People spend hours on it every day, so they can justify paying more for what they believe to be the best device,” said Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, who has studied Apple for years and called the company’s positioning of the iPhone “unique.” It's Time To Think Beyond Cloud Computing “It’s a foregone conclusion that giant, centralized server farms that take up 19 city blocks of power are just not going to work everywhere,” says Zachary Smith, a double-bass player and Juilliard School graduate who is the CEO and cofounder of a New York City startup called Packet. Smith is among those who believe that the solution lies in seeding the landscape with smaller server outposts—those edge networks—that would widely distribute processing power in order to speed its results to client devices, like those cars, that can’t tolerate delay. How to Keep Email from Ruining Your Vacation At Thrive Global, that was our thinking for why we created Thrive Away, our vacation email tool. The way it works is simple: While you’re away on vacation, people who email you get a message, letting them know when you’ll be back. And then — the most important part — the tool deletes the email. If the email is important, the sender can always send it again. If it’s not, then it’s not waiting for you when you get back, or, even worse, tempting you to read it while you’re away. So the key is not just that the tool is creating a wall between you and your email; it’s that it frees you from the mounting anxiety of having a mounting pile of emails waiting for you on your return — the stress of which mitigates the benefits of disconnecting in the first place. Deep Learning for Siri’s Voice: On-device Deep Mixture Density Networks for Hybrid Unit Selection Synthesis Siri is a personal assistant that communicates using speech synthesis. Starting in iOS 10 and continuing with new features in iOS 11, we base Siri voices on deep learning. The resulting voices are more natural, smoother, and allow Siri’s personality to shine through. This article presents more details about the deep learning based technology behind Siri’s voice. (Be sure to scroll down and compare the Siri voices in iOS 9, 10 and 11)

Friday Feed September 1, 2017 Why AI is the Future
of Marketing Artificial Intelligence will help companies, and moreover, CMOs build a corporate culture with utmost customer focus, and help optimize marketing goals such as personalization, understanding customer behavior to customize the engagement and pitching process, making more accurate predictive analyses, and saving time on finding and converting leads. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: Policy Paper The paper explains the basics of the technology behind AI, identifies the key considerations and challenges surrounding the technology, and provides several high-level principles and recommendations to follow when dealing with the technology. Chat Bots Aren’t A Fad. They’re A Revolution. https://www.wired.com/2016/09/chat-bots-arent-a-fad-theyre-a-revolution What We Get Wrong About Technology Whatever the technologies of the future turn out to be, they are likely to demand that, like the factories of the early 20th century, we change to accommodate them. Genuinely revolutionary inventions live up to their name: they change almost everything, and such transformations are by their nature hard to predict. Data Science on a Chromebook I have been using two Samsung Chromebook Plus computers, one of which I keep at home and one which I keep at work. One of the best parts about the fully cloudy/Chrome OS requirement is this means that from the user perspective everything is always in sync. I log off the computer at home, come to work, log on and its like I’m on the same computer. So my total monthly cost comes to something like $35 a month for various cloud services. At first doing this was sort of like writing a Haiku. I could still write, but the constraints made me think hard about how I did things. But after a while I have gotten so used to the form that it feels natural and I don’t miss my (really expensive) Apple products anymore.

Friday Feed September 8, 2017 IBM pitched its Watson supercomputer
as a revolution in cancer care. It’s nowhere close But three years after IBM began selling Watson to recommend the best cancer treatments to doctors around the world, a STAT investigation has found that the supercomputer isn’t living up to the lofty expectations IBM created for it. It is still struggling with the basic step of learning about different forms of cancer. Only a few dozen hospitals have adopted the system, which is a long way from IBM’s goal of establishing dominance in a multibillion-dollar market. And at foreign hospitals, physicians complained its advice is biased toward American patients and methods of care. Apple’s Bet On AR and The Future of UI Design As humans increasingly let technology into more areas of their lives, their interactions with technology will begin to evolve. It’s not too far off that we may live a life without the screens we know now. AR will become an integrated part of our environment, with the information we need placed just at the right position. Why Wework Thinks It's Worth $20 Billion Over time, this could be a much bigger opportunity than coworking spaces, one in which everything WeWork has built so far will simply feed an algorithm that will design a perfectly efficient approach to office space. WeWork aspires to be the de facto source to which businesses will turn when they need help figuring out how to spend the least amount possible for an environment that will delight employees and entice new ones. IBM and MIT to pursue joint research in artificial intelligence, establish new MIT–IBM Watson AI Lab The new lab will be one of the largest long-term university-industry AI collaborations to date, mobilizing the talent of more than 100 AI scientists, professors, and students to pursue joint research at IBM's Research Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts — co-located with the IBM Watson Health and IBM Security headquarters in Kendall Square — and on the neighboring MIT campus.

Friday Feed September 15, 2017 The IoT Attack Vector “BlueBorne”
Exposes Almost Every Connected Device Armis Labs revealed a new attack vector endangering major mobile, desktop, and IoT operating systems, including Android, iOS, Windows, and Linux, and the devices using them. The new vector is dubbed “BlueBorne”, as it spread through the air (airborne) and attacks devices via Bluetooth. Armis has also disclosed eight related zero-day vulnerabilities, four of which are classified as critical. BlueBorne allows attackers to take control of devices, access corporate data and networks, penetrate secure “air-gapped” networks, and spread malware laterally to adjacent devices. Armis reported these vulnerabilities to the responsible actors, and is working with them as patches are being identified and released. Thoughts and Observations on the Products Announced at This Week’s iPhone X Introductory Event I did not get a chance to try Face ID. But I spent time — both officially, as a member of the media, and unofficially, as a friend — with several Apple employees who are already carrying an iPhone X as their daily-use phone, and from what I observed and from what they told me — and again, several of these employees are engineers, not PR or product marketing folks — it just works. You don’t have to think about it. According to them, you get used to not thinking about it very quickly, and when you go back to a Touch ID device, it feels broken that you have to touch the button to unlock the device. THe Lessons And Questions Of The iPhone X And The iPhone 8 That is why I find this launch so fascinating, and will be watching the upcoming quarter’s results so closely: Jobs built Apple to be the best, and the company has succeeded by being exactly that. Does that foreclose the possibility of being really good, and the gains from market segmentation that follow? The Myth of the Objective Objectives can, ironically, be obstacles to innovation and creativity. Who Will Build the Health-Care Blockchain? Decentralized databases promise to revolutionize medical records, but not until the health-care industry buys in to the idea and gets to work.

Slack partners with ServiceNow, and more from Frontiers ServiceNow CTO
Allan Leinwand, who announced the partnership with Slack VP of Product April Underwood, shared that when the integration is available later this year, users will be able to add Slack as a notification channel in ServiceNow’s UI and have new incidents piped into any Slack channel. Their team can see a detailed view of the incident and collaborate in real time to get it resolved, and the conversation becomes a searchable archive that is visible to the whole team.

Friday Feed September 22, 2017 Cells programmed like computers to
fight disease Cells can be programmed like a computer to fight cancer, influenza, and other serious conditions – thanks to a breakthrough in synthetic biology by the University of Warwick. New research has discovered that a common molecule - ribonucleic acid (RNA), which is produced abundantly by humans, plants and animals - can be genetically engineered to allow scientists to program the actions of a cell. Satya Nadella Rewrites Microsoft’s Code Nadella has not only restored Microsoft to relevance; he’s generated more than $250 billion in market value in just three and a half years... How Nadella turned things around comes back to the book he had his top lieutenants read, and the culture that took hold from there. He has inspired the company’s 124,000 employees to embrace what he calls “learn-it-all” curiosity (as opposed to what he describes as Microsoft’s historical know-it-all bent) that in turn has inspired developers and customers—and investors—to engage with the company in new, more modern ways. Nadella is a contemporary CEO able to emphasize the kinds of soft skills that are often derided in the cutthroat world of corporate politics but are, in today’s fast-moving marketplace, increasingly essential to outsize performance. Ready or Not, Facial Recognition is Here to Stay Facial recognition is creeping its way into daily life. Learn how different industries, from travel to retail, are innovating with facial recognition. You might use AI, but that doesn’t mean you’re an AI company As AI rises in popularity, there are a slew of businesses new and old looking to market themselves as “AI companies.” But Andrew Ng, one of the founders of the Google Brain team and a luminary in the space, said that there’s more to being an AI company than just using a neural net Escaping e-mail hell So, how can you stop having inbox-zero FOMO, get your points across succinctly, and save your marriage? Read on.

Friday Feed September 29, 2017 The Board Directors You Need
for a Digital Transformation Although there continues to be a need for digital disruptors at the board level (think Stacy Brown-Philpot, CEO of TaskRabbit and director at HP and Nordstrom), increasingly we’re seeing and encouraging the appointment of leaders from the fourth category. As companies now look to incorporate their early digital investments into a more systematic, data-driven, end-to-end strategy, their leadership needs have evolved. Rather than placing an emphasis on disruptive forces, boards are increasingly seeking directors who bring operational capabilities and who could guide the re-engineering of the entire organization. Apple Watch Series 3 First Impression: Mindblown.gif Going phoneless. I was born in 1981, so I’ve got one foot on either side of the tech revolutions of the ‘90s and '00s. As far as I can recall, this is the first time since I first got a cellphone (let alone a smartphone) that I am deliberately leaving the house without any device in my pocket. It’s a refreshing feeling. I took a four-mile walk for exercise, drove an hour to my parents’ and back to pick up the kid, and picked up my wife from the airport. Apple Watch with cellular supports a critical slice of the features a smartphone provides, which means I get to enjoy best of both the old and new worlds: I am free from the temptation to waste quiet moments on social media and soul-crushing national news, but not at the expense of missing out on texts and phone calls from friends and family, or getting directions home, or triaging the occasional urgent email. This newfound flexibility is, simply put, mind-blowing. Apple, Fitbit to Join FDA Program to Speed Health Tech The Food and Drug Administration, which oversees new drugs, medical devices and much of the U.S. food supply, said Tuesday that it had selected nine major tech companies for a pilot program that may let them avoid some regulations that have tied up developers working on health software and products. Microsoft is using Excel as a gateway drug to AI Spreadsheet jockeys will be able to import machine learning models to analyze data within Excel, and the program will automatically recognize items such as company names and locations, and pull in additional data. The models could predict future sales numbers given different scenarios, or stand in for any number of software-as-a-service analytics tools that have become popular in sales and marketing. This also means Excel will try to understand the connections between your data as you enter it (like whether the words represent companies or people) rather than just determining if they’re numbers or text.

Slack CEO: How We’ll Use AI to Reduce Information Overload
But new competitors—among them Microsoft Teams, Atlassian Stride, Google Hangouts Chat, and Workplace by Facebook—are pushing into the workplace-collaboration market, challenging Slack’s dominance and, in some cases, specifically marketing themselves as more productive options. During a trip to Boston, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield spoke to MIT Technology Review about the ways the company plans to use AI to keep people from feeling overwhelmed with data. FaceID Security With a simple glance, Face ID securely unlocks iPhone X. It provides intuitive and secure authentication enabled by the TrueDepth camera system, which uses advanced technologies to accurately map the geometry of your face. Face ID confirms attention by detecting the direction of your gaze, then uses neural networks for matching and anti-spoofing so you can unlock your phone with a glance. Face ID automatically adapts to changes in your appearance, and carefully safeguards the privacy and security of your biometric data.

Friday Feed October 6, 2017 Gene-Edited Skin Could Be Its
Own Blood-Sugar Sensor In a fascinating mashup of technologies, the Chicago team says it has genetically edited skin cells from a mouse and turned them into a glucose detector that, once grafted onto the animals, works all the time and doesn’t need a battery. It’s the first time living skin has been turned into a sensor, says Wu, adding that “a skin-based technology would have a lot of advantages” over finger pricks or even the continuous monitors some diabetics use. An open letter to Jeff Bezos–you are needed to disrupt the health care sector Leave rationalizing the market for organic foods to one of your sidekicks, and tinkering with driverless cars to a crowded field of tech companies. You are needed to disrupt the health care sector. Only you have the vision, ambition, capital, and computing power this mission requires: Amazon Pharmacy, Amazon Analytic, Amazon Diagnostics Sundar Pichai Says The Future Of Google Is Ai. But Can He Fix The Algorithm? Most executives talk about AI like it's just another thing that's included in the box or in its cloud; it's a buzzword, a tick box on a spec sheet slotted in right after the processor. But Pichai is intent on pressing Google's advantage in AI — not just by integrating AI features into every product it makes, but by making products that are themselves inspired by AI, products that wouldn't be conceivable without it. Forget Killer Robots—Bias Is the Real AI Danger The problem of bias in machine learning is likely to become more significant as the technology spreads to critical areas like medicine and law, and as more people without a deep technical understanding are tasked with deploying it. Some experts warn that algorithmic bias is already pervasive in many industries, and that almost no one is making an effort to identify or correct it Stop doing user interviews. Start having conversations. If you can level up by remembering your user interview skills and also relaxing and having a conversation, the person you’re talking to is going to be that much more engaged. If they’re engaged, what they tell you will be more natural, your insights will be deeper and learnings more nuanced. If they’re disengaged, you’ll get your yes, no answers, but they won’t feel like going deep, sharing their feelings, and opening up to you.

Friday Feed October 13, 2017 Our minds can be hijacked':
the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia Google, Twitter and Facebook workers who helped make technology so addictive are disconnecting themselves from the internet. Paul Lewis reports on the Silicon Valley refuseniks alarmed by a race for human attention Don’t Get Too Comfortable at That Desk The new designs are not about looks. They are an attempt to adapt to the spread of internet-era digital technology — and its hurry-up ways — into every industry. Space drives behavior, experts say, and the goal of the new designs is to hasten the pace of sharing ideas, making decisions and creating new products. They are also meant to appeal to millennial recruits, many of whom are more comfortable working in a Starbucks than in a traditional office. Amazon and Microsoft unveil ‘Gluon’ neural network technology, teaming up on machine learning Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s AI and Research Group this morning announced a new open-source deep learning interface called Gluon, jointly developed by the companies to let developers “prototype, build, train and deploy sophisticated machine learning models for the cloud, devices at the edge and mobile apps,” Playbook for Testing Chatbots Chatbottest is an open source Playbook of 120 questions (and counting) that you can use for free to test your chatbot and its UX. Similar to what you get with an Heuristic Evaluation on traditional interfaces, with this guide you will be able to find out what users will expect from their interaction. What’s Inside Every iPhone, from Retina Displays to Cameras "we got our hands on each iPhone model and opened them up." -- A compelling, interactive presentation of the inner workings the iconic devices.

Friday Feed October 20, 2017 A Diabetes Monitor That Spares
the Fingers The FreeStyle Libre, made by Abbott, is a flash glucose sensor that allows people with diabetes to view our blood sugar every minute of the day without a single finger prick. While there are similar devices on the market — called continuous glucose monitors, or CGMs — the Libre is the least invasive one I’ve seen. It takes readings from a sensor under the skin but doesn’t require finger sticks for calibration, and is about the size of a quarter and as thick as two. And it’s helping me keep my diabetes under better control. RobotReviewer: evaluation of a system for automatically assessing bias in clinical trials Risk of bias assessment may be automated with reasonable accuracy. Automatically identified text supporting bias assessment is of equal quality to the manually identified text in the CDSR. This technology could substantially reduce reviewer workload and expedite evidence syntheses. How AI Will Change Strategy: A Thought Experiment How will AI change strategy? That’s the single most common question the three of us are asked from corporate executives, and it’s not trivial to answer. AI is fundamentally a prediction technology. As advances in AI make prediction cheaper, economic theory dictates that we’ll use prediction more frequently and widely, and the value of complements to prediction – like human judgment – will rise. But what does all this mean for strategy? Coda is a next-generation spreadsheet designed to make Excel a thing of the past Mehrotra began to fixate on a question: what would documents and spreadsheets look if they were invented today? Coda, a company Mehrotra co-founded with his fellow former Googler Alex DeNeui, represents his answer to that question. The company, which is announcing a private beta today after three years of secret development, makes a collaborative document editor that combines a word processor and a spreadsheet. Make Product Decisions Without Doubt — My Lessons from Twitter and Slack The power of the hypothesis tree structure is that it not only can weaken or strengthen your beliefs logically, but also help you separate logical concerns from change aversion and other fears around your idea.

Friday Feed October 27, 2017 How Do You Regulate a
Self-Improving Algorithm? For health care, the answer is a matter of life and death --- The science is unstoppable, and so is the flow of funding. But at least one roadblock stands in the way: a big, bureaucratic Cold War–era regulatory apparatus that could prove to be fundamentally incompatible with the very nature of artificial intelligence. The Verge Tech Survey How Americans really feel about Facebook, Apple, and more: Apple Is Not America's Favorite Tech Company, America Doesn't Trust Facebook, Amazon Is The Ruthless Corporate Juggernaut People Love, A Third Of America Wouldn’t Care If Twitter Disappeared IBM Can Run an Experimental AI in Memory, Not on Processors Don’t throw out your CPUs just yet, but there may be a new way to run your neural networks. In the regular world of computing—whether you’re running exotic deep-learning algorithms or just using Excel—calculations are usually performed on a processor while data is passed back and forth to the memory. That works perfectly well, but some researchers have argued that performing calculations in memory itself would save time and energy that is usually used to move data around. This Doctor Diagnosed His Own Cancer with an iPhone Ultrasound Can a smartphone-enabled ultrasound machine become medicine’s next stethoscope? A Spreadsheet Way of Knowledge A generation ago, a tool unleashed the power of business modeling.—.and created the entrepreneurial boom that has transformed our economy

Friday Feed November 3, 2017 Forget The 10,000-Hour Rule; Edison,
Bezos, & Zuckerberg Follow The 10,000-Experiment Rule As you go through your day, following the 10,000-experiment rule means constantly looking for opportunities to collect data rather than just doing what you need to do. It means adding a deliberate reflection process based on reviewing data before the day ends. Pitching a product idea (1) Describe the problem you’re solving, (2) Describe how many people have this problem. (3) Talk about the solution in terms of the experience, not the product. (4) Let go of “mine” or “yours”, embrace “ours” Why Computers Should Be Hidden The joy I used to feel when using computers has turned largely to anguish. These machines once provided a unique and compelling way to do things, from writing to shopping to communication to entertainment. But today, devices and services strive to replace every activity with computer use itself. Now I think about escaping the computer as much as using it. The Improbable Origins of PowerPoint PowerPoint is so ingrained in modern life that the notion of it having a history at all may seem odd. But it does have a very definite lifetime as a commercial product that came onto the scene 30 years ago, in 1987. Remarkably, the founders of the Silicon Valley firm that created PowerPoint did not set out to make presentation software, let alone build a tool that would transform group communication throughout the world. Review: iPhone X Disneyland is a vacation spot that has you using your iPhone like crazy every day. You take pictures, you look up directions, you use it for ticketing and FastPasses for rides. It’s hot and you’re distracted, and if you have kids you’re trying to keep them alive and in proximity while keeping them fed and hydrated enough to actually have fun on vacation...It’s hell week for your phone and still, it just needs to work.

iPhone X Review: Face The Future After months of hype,
endless speculation, and a wave of last-minute rumors about production delays, the iPhone X is finally here. Apple says it’s a complete reimagining of what the iPhone should be, 10 years after the original revolutionized the world. That means some fundamental aspects of the iPhone are totally different here — most notably, the home button and fingerprint sensor are gone, replaced by a new system of navigation gestures and Apple’s new Face ID unlocking system. These are major changes. iPhone X: (Review for Humans) See also:https://www.buzzfeed.com/nicolenguyen/iphone-x-review The all-screen experience is mostly wonderful (even with that controversial notch), Simply put: Face ID is really f'ing impressive. But that’s because it’s invisible.

Friday Feed November 10, 2017 Renegades Join Forces for Affordable
Insulin The global insulin market is worth $25 billion. Now a team of DIY biohackers wants to subvert the industry from its home-brew labs in Oakland. This Is How Amazon Could Invade the Pharmacy Business The pharmacy market is one of the biggest potential new targets for Amazon.com... Shoppers filling prescriptions frequently pick up toiletries, beauty supplies and dish soap—all retail items Amazon already sells. And the distribution chain for drugs has lots of middlemen whose markups Amazon can seek to undercut. Amazon could: (1) Use its shipping power to destroy rivals (2) Become the ultimate buyer of cheap generics (3) Turn Whole Foods into Whole Drugs (4) Or buy into the pharmacy business (5) Or launch a startup of its own (6) “Alexa, refill my Lipitor” Low-cost, non-invasive melanoma detector wins award The sKan was chosen as the international winner by James Dyson who says “by using widely available and inexpensive components, the sKan allows for melanoma skin cancer detection to be readily accessible to the many. Google just released its internal tool to collaborate on AI The software works a lot like Google Docs, its document collaboration tool, but with the ability to run code and show that code’s output within the document. Colaboratory is free and built on top of the open-source Jupyter project, software often used in data science. Building A.I. That Can Build A.I. Google and others, fighting for a small pool of researchers, are looking for automated ways to deal with a shortage of artificial intelligence experts.

Friday Feed November 17, 2017 First Digital Pill Approved to
Worries About Biomedical ‘Big Brother’ For the first time, the Food and Drug Administration has approved a digital pill — a medication embedded with a sensor that can tell doctors whether, and when, patients take their medicine. Amish Mutation Protects Against Diabetes and May Extend Life Amish people living in a rural part of Indiana have a rare genetic mutation that protects them from Type 2 diabetes and appears to significantly extend their life spans, according to a new study. Yale Professors Race Google and IBM to the First Quantum Computer Three giants of the tech world — Google, IBM, and Intel — are using a method pioneered by Mr. Schoelkopf, a Yale University professor, and a handful of other physicists as they race to build a machine that could significantly accelerate everything from drug discovery to artificial intelligence. What designers can learn from the iPhone X 1. Turning a constraint into a feature, 2. Making technology human, 3. Towards a gesture driven future. Thinking About Design Thinking I had a great morning convo with my Automattic Design colleague Mike Shelton that took me down the rabbit hole of successive Google image searches for design thinking and design sprinting diagrams

Friday Feed November 24, 2017 Smoke on the water, data
in the DNA Many pundits predict it’s just a matter of time till DNA pips magnetic tape as the ultimate way to store data. It’s compact, efficient and resilient. After all, it has been tweaked over billions of years into the perfect repository for genetic information. It will never become obsolete, because as long as there is life on Earth, we will be interested in decoding DNA. “Nature has optimised the format,” says Twist Bioscience’s chief technology officer Bill Peck. Martonosi sketches a path for a new type of computing As new devices move quantum computing closer to practical use, the journal Nature recently asked Princeton computer scientist Margaret Martonosi and two colleagues to assess the state of software needed to exploit this powerful computational approach. Amazon's cloud is about to announce a huge health-care deal with Cerner, sources say As part of his keynote at re:Invent, AWS CEO Andy Jassy is planning to announce that Amazon is teaming up with Cerner, one of the world's largest health technology companies, to help health-care providers better use their data to make health predictions about patient populations, according to sources familiar with the matter. PC vendors scramble as Intel announces vulnerability in firmware remote attackers could launch commands on a host of Intel-based computers, including laptops and desktops shipped with Intel Core processors since 2015. They could gain access to privileged system information, and millions of computers could essentially be taken over as a result of the bug. Most of the vulnerabilities require physical access to the targeted device, but one allows remote attacks with administrative access. The UX of Storytelling Tools like user stories derived from research and user journey maps help teams reach an understanding of the customer experience. They define areas for improvement. When teams are on the same page about problems to be solved, user scenarios help them explore potential solutions.

Friday Feed December 1, 2017 Apple COO Jeff Williams on
Apple Watch heart study: 'Hopefully we can save a lot of lives' Apple is facilitating a massive heart study that will use the Apple Watch to detect a heart abnormality called atrial fibrillation, responsible for 130,000 deaths a year in the U. Alexa for Business Alexa can also do things around the workplace, like providing directions to a conference room, notifying IT about a broken printer, or placing an order for office supplies. Finding ideas To find ideas, find problems. To find problems, talk to people, Expect more from the world. Opportunities are all around you. Is Compliance Killing Corporate Innovation? (1) Build An Alliance.—.Internally And Externally (2) Reframe The Compliance Hurdle (3) Educate People About The Risks That Are Worth Taking (4) Walk The Talk (5) Experiment. Then Experiment. Then Experiment Again. (6) Never Waste A Good Crisis (7) Break The Rules

Friday Feed December 8, 2017 CVS to Buy Aetna for
$69 Billion in a Deal That May Reshape the Health Industry CVS Health said on Sunday that it had agreed to buy Aetna for about $69 billion in a deal that would combine the drugstore giant with one of the biggest health insurers in the United States and has the potential to reshape the nation’s health care industry. Adapted Crispr gene editing tool could treat incurable diseases, say scientists In the new version a Crispr-style guide is still used, but instead of cutting the genome at the site of interest, the Cas9 enzyme latches onto it. The new package also includes a third element: a molecule that homes in on the Cas9 and switches on whatever gene it is attached to. The new paper, published in Cell, demonstrates how this strategy might be applied to a range of devastating illnesse IBM scientists demonstrate 10x faster large-scale machine learning using GPUs Together with EPFL scientists, our IBM Research team has developed a scheme for training big data sets quickly. It can process a 30 Gigabyte training dataset in less than one minute using a single graphics processing unit (GPU) — a 10× speedup over existing methods for limited memory training. Meet the man behind the most important tool in data science Wes McKinney hates the idea of researchers wasting their time. “Scientists unnecessarily dealing with the drudgery of simple data manipulation tasks makes me feel terrible,” he says. Perhaps more than any other person, McKinney has helped fix that problem. McKinney is the developer of “Pandas”, one of the main tools used by data analysts working in the popular programming language Python. Why Constant Learners All Embrace the 5-Hour Rule For many people, their professional day is measured by how much they get done. As a result, they speed through the day and slow down their improvement rate. The five-hour rule flips the equation by focusing on learning first.

Friday Feed December 15, 2017 Machine Learning 101 slidedeck: 2
years of headbanging, so you don't have to The culmination of almost two years of head banging, so you don't have to. The one stop shop to get answers to common questions you may have around Machine Learning Jim Simons, the Numbers King Algorithms made him a Wall Street billionaire. His new research center helps scientists mine data for the common good. Google Taught an AI That Sorts Cat Photos to Analyze DNA DeepVariant, on the other hand, still does not know anything about DNA-sequencing machines. But it has digested a lot of data. Neural networks are often analogized as layers of “neurons” that deal in progressively more complex concepts—the first layer might respond to light, the second shapes, the third actual objects. As DeepVariant is trained with data, it learns which connections between “neurons” to strengthen and which to ignore. Eventually, it can sort the actual mutations from the errors. An Interactive Introduction To Quantum Computing What Do You Mean They Can Be Both Zero And One At The Same Time! The Amazon machine More than any of the other big tech platform companies, Amazon is a machine that makes the machine. People tend to talk about the famous virtuous circle diagram - more volume, lower costs, lower prices, more customers and so more volume. However, I think the operating structure of Amazon - the machine - is just as important, and perhaps less often talked about.

Friday Feed December 22, 2017 Cloud Computing Technology, Autumn 2017
The largest change in the computer industry over the past five years has arguably been the emergence of cloud computing: organizations are increasingly moving their workloads to managed public clouds and using new, global-scale services that were simply not possible in private datacenters. However, both building and using cloud systems remains a black art with many difficult research challenges. This research seminar will cover industry and academic work on cloud computing and survey key technical issues. Students will read and discuss a paper per class meeting and do a quarter-long project in groups of 2-3. This Is Magic Leap’s AR Headset, Coming 2018 On a new version of its website unveiled Wednesday, Magic Leap showed images of an almost retro-looking pair of black, goggle-like glasses called Magic Leap One, which it says will mix digital images with reality in a way that appears extremely realistic and is comfortable to view for a long time. Competing with BigCo: 2018 Edition The opportunity exists because when big companies becomes successful is when collective leadership becomes most focused on maintaining success. Leadership tends to see more risk in downside of the current plan and than upside in taking on new things. Machine Teaching: A New Paradigm for Building Machine Learning Systems The current processes for building machine learning systems require practitioners with deep knowledge of machine learning. This significantly limits the number of machine learning systems that can be created and has led to a mismatch between the demand for machine learning systems and the ability for organizations to build them. We believe that in order to meet this growing demand for machine learning systems we must significantly increase the number of individuals that can teach machines. We postulate that we can achieve this goal by making the process of teaching machines easy, fast and above all, universally accessible.

How To Grow As A Data Scientist In order for
a data scientist to grow, they need to be challenged beyond the technical aspects of their jobs. Data scientists have the opportunity to sway company decisions. They have a lot of responsibility on their shoulders. That means they need to take ownership of the work they do. They need to question their data sources, be concise in their insights, know their business and help guide their leaders.

Friday Feed December 29, 2017 How Big Tech Is Going
After Your Health Care Apple, Google, Microsoft and other tech giants have transformed the way billions of us communicate, shop, socialize and work. Now, as consumers, medical centers and insurers increasingly embrace health-tracking apps, tech companies want a bigger share of the more than $3 trillion spent annually on health care in the United States, too. The Apple Heart Study reflects that intensified effort. Netflix: What Happens When You Press Play? Netflix seems so simple. Press play and video magically appears. Easy, right? Not so much. So if you are looking for a good introduction to the cloud or know someone who is, please take a look. Dynamticland Our mission is to incubate a humane dynamic medium whose full power is accessible to all people. (1) A communal computer, (2) Agency, not apps. (3) Thinking like a whole human. What We Mean When We Say Evidence-Based Medicine Big data, gene sequencing, artificial intelligence — all of these may provide us with lots of information on how we might be at risk for various diseases. What we lack is knowledge about what to do with what we might learn. If evidenced-based medicine is to live up to its potential, it seems the focus should be on that side of the equation as well, instead of taking best guesses and calling them evidence-based. This, probably more than anything else, has made the term so widely mistrusted. Freed from the iPhone, the Apple Watch Finds a Medical Purpose Kevin Sayer, Dexcom’s chief executive, said that patients could opt for a monitor to communicate directly with the watch for convenience, but that the big payoff could come with combining sleep or activity data from the watch with glucose readings from its device to find correlations.

The Verge 2017 Tech Report Cards how did giants like
Facebook, Google, Nintendo, Uber, Tesla, Samsung, Apple, Microsoft, and more do compared to last year? Find out as we take a look back in our 2017 tech report cards, compiled by The Verge staff.

2017 Collected Friday Feed

2017 Collected Friday Feed

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