Collected Friday Feed, 2016

The Collected Friday Feed, 2016 Anthony Starks

Friday Feed January 15, 2016 Searching for Cancer Maps in
Free-Floating DNA These days, scientists are especially excited by the prospect of using cell-free DNA to test for cancer. Instead of relying on invasive biopsies, they hope to find blood-borne fragments that carry distinctive cancer mutations. Gates, Bezos invest in cancer blood test By enabling the early detection of cancer in asymptomatic individuals through a simple blood screen, we aim to massively decrease cancer mortality by detecting the disease at a curable stage. Kathryn McElroy on IBM’s design approach I see the shift from an engineering feature-based product design to a user-centered product design across a 380,000 person company to be the most challenging but most impactful place that I can work. On a day-to-day basis, how this comes through is how we interact with our teams. The Tool We Built To Help Us Work Remotely Fizz keeps everything and everyone out in the open. By focusing on smaller, daily contributions towards milestones we help battle the disgruntlement, negative-spiraling and over-work that can become toxic under-currents in many remote organizations. We work in positivity through the appreciation and praise of team mates and the intrinsic reward of contributing daily to the creation of a beautiful piece of software that our users love; Fizz keeps us woven together. Four Things Working at Facebook Has Taught Me About Design Critique Establish clear roles, focus on the problem, focus on feedback, not critisim, phones and laptops stay closed.

Friday Feed January 22, 2016 Cancer treatment for MS patients
gives 'remarkable' results UK doctors in Sheffield say patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) are showing "remarkable" improvements after receiving a treatment usually used for cancer. Navigating School With Diabetes We asked parents of children with Type 1 diabetes to share their stories about the educational obstacles they have encountered and the steps they took to overcome them. Pharma Paid Physicians $6.5B in 2014 – Looking Into The Open Payments Dataset Out of the $6.5B total payments to physicians in 2014, $3.2B, or almost half, of those payments were for research. We can see this when aggregating the payments by the name of the drug or device manufacturer: companies like Genentech, Pfizer, and Novartis dominate the dollar amount of payments made to physicians, and most of their payments are for “Research” The unsexy IoT There is, however, enormous opportunity in crossing this chasm. The new IoT provides valuable data about its users, their habits, daily routines and preferences. The old IoT generates detailed information about the environment they interact in. Combining both with big data crunching technology will lead to unprecedented (and slightly scary) insights into individual user’s behavioral patterns as well as into the systems they compose. Why UX Designers Should Influence Customer Experience Many successful designers are applying their methods, tools, and approaches to business challenges that stretch beyond making yet another app or website. We’re seeing this first hand when user experience designers are influencing, and in some cases leading the execution of an organization’s customer experience strategy.

Friday Feed January 29, 2016 Sharing Clinical Trial Data: A
Proposal From the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) believes that there is an ethical obligation to responsibly share data generated by interventional clinical trials because participants have put themselves at risk. In a growing consensus, many funders around the world—foundations, government agencies, and industry—now mandate data sharing. Here we outline ICMJE's proposed requirements to help meet this obligation. How Data Brokers Make Money Off Your Medical Records Once upon a time, simply removing a person's name, address and Social Security number from a medical record may well have protected anonymity. Not so today. Straightforward data-mining tools can rummage through multiple databases containing anonymized and nonanonymized data to reidentify the individuals from their ostensibly private medical records. Why Marketers Must Understand the Internet of Things For marketers the IoT will have massive implications on how we develop and execute campaigns, structure our teams and optimize performance. We will shift our focus to gaining access to consumer and product IoT data at scale. We will be required to provide value to our key audiences in exchange for their permission to both capture their data and reach them directly. We will develop and optimize campaigns that use the data to trigger communications that compels action. The Surprising Benefits to Working with Long-distance Design Partners Seeing how much design is influenced by a sense of place, space, and the immediate community, it makes sense that intense cross-country collaboration can only add something exciting to the visual vocabulary of design. Enterprise Apps In The Field: How User Visits Become A Catalyst They showed up in the field office to watch their users, the field representatives, do their jobs. Even though they’d been working on this project for a while.—.for some, it had been years.—.this was their first exposure to how the users did their work. It was amazing to watch. They saw so many things different from what they expected.

Friday Feed February 5, 2016 Open source lessons for synthetic
biology Can a larger firm thus make money from open source biology? We believe so, provided the company uses a method similar to Red Hat, Google, or Tesla, in using the open source component to drive customers toward their own market strength The Complexity of Simple Given all the various options, what will we ship as the default?” Then, I like to say, “That’s our product.” How often do regular people dig around in the settings? People generally just want products that work well. Make journals report clinical trials properly Our group has taken a new approach to trying to fix this problem. Since last October, we have been checking the outcomes reported in every trial published in five top medical journals against the pre-specified outcomes from the registry entries or protocols. Most had discrepancies, many of them major. Then, crucially, we have submitted a correction letter, on every trial that misreported its outcomes, to the journal in question. AI Is Transforming Google Search. The Rest of the Web Is Next Artificial intelligence is the future of Google Search, and if it’s the future of Google Search, it’s the future of so much more. My Bathroom Mirror Is Smarter Than Yours Sometime late last year I realized that I wanted my ordinary bathroom mirror to be more like the future we were promised in the movies.

Friday Feed February 12, 2016 Something is wrong with Annie's
Baby In that record, she found a devastating surprise: the doctors that attended Chase’s birth suspected he had a genetic syndrome from his first days of life. Right at the start, they’d recommended Chase get a spinal MRI, have a consult about his kidneys, and visit a genetics counselor. That last part was especially hard to hear. A genetic specialist would’ve almost certainly identified what was wrong with her baby. It was all right there, but the information never got to her. You can train your body into thinking it’s had medicine The results were part of a well-known and seemingly mundane phenomenon that has been driving a quiet revolution in immunology. Its proponents hope that by cutting drug doses, it will not only minimise harmful side-effects but also slash billions from healthcare costs, transforming treatment for conditions such as autoimmune disorders and cancer. New Online Tools Offer Path to Lower Drug Prices “Why isn’t it possible,” he asked, “to just have a price where anybody who wants to know what that price is can go to a website and see?” How we used design research to launch The New York Times en Español We next conducted a series of one-on-one interviews, meeting with research participants in their homes, their offices, and even joining for their commutes. During these focused conversations we were able to explore what people were doing, loving, and needing when it came to news. We also shared initial prototypes for what would eventually become our new site, and gained helpful feedback that we used to quickly iterate.—.in the field.—.and refine our product approach as we went. The Art of Saying NO Great products have one thing in common: A product leader that says “no” to most ideas. It is that focus.—.that relentless pursuit of mission.—.that achieves the impossible: products that touch millions of lives.

Netflix Shuts Down Final Bits of Own Data Center Infrastructure
Netflix has been one of the big early adopters of AWS who famously went all-in with public cloud. Thursday’s announcement simply marks the completion of a seven-year process of transition from a data center-based infrastructure model to a 100-percent cloud one.

Friday Feed February 19, 2016 New York Times Listening Table
The New York Times invents a conference table that takes notes for you it’s called the listening table, and it not only transcribes meetings, but knows when they’re important. Google Bets on Health: 'The Most You Can Lose Is All Your Money' GV is going further, making bets in sectors overseen by the Food and Drug Administration like drugs and medical devices. Maris says he’s willing to deal with long schedules and regulatory hiccups. Alexa, Unlock the Internet Having a dedicated device for these early days of voice interaction seems key. Because people aren’t yet used to talking to machines, there needs to be a bridge to get there. That bridge, I think, will be Echo. Gearing Up for the Cloud, AT&T Tells Its Workers: Adapt, or Else In 2012, Mr. Stephenson realized, much to his dismay, that his staff was woefully unschooled for the new technology. Vision 2020, as the company calls it, is a program that combines online and classroom-based course work in subjects like digital networking and data science, as well as a look at old skills that can be transferred to new careers. Learning The Alphabet How schools around the country are turning dead Microsoft PCs into speedy Chromebooks

Friday Feed February 26, 2016 A Do-It-Yourself Revolution in Diabetes
Care “Once I got all the pieces together, I remember crying — not quite in sadness, just in utter amazement — the first time I could see her numbers displayed on my computer screen and she was on the other side of the house” Break Up the Insulin Racket Insulin has been around for almost a century. The World Health Organization considers it an essential medicine, which means it should be available “at a price the individual and the community can afford.” So why is this product increasingly too expensive for many Americans? What’s Next in Computing? The product cycle by comparison gets relatively little attention, even though it is what actually drives the computing industry forward. We can try to understand and predict the product cycle by studying the past and extrapolating into the future. What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team As the researchers studied the groups, however, they noticed two behaviors that all the good teams generally shared. First, on the good teams, members spoke in roughly the same proportion […] Second, the good teams all had high ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions, and other nonverbal cues. Data-informed Design in practice DDD is a systematic approach to the development and evolution of digital (and not only) services. As data becomes more accessible, decisions for design can be based on that data. To put it more simply; data complements design.

Friday Feed March 4, 2016 President Weighs In on Data
From Genes The president said that the success of his Precision Medicine Initiative, which aims to collect genetic data on one million American volunteers so scientists can develop drugs and treatments tailored to individual patients, hinged at least in part on “understanding who owns the data.” Raspberry Pi 3: First Look The Raspberry Pi 3 will replace the Pi 2 in the current lineup, landing at the same price point that the headline model has always occupied. Here, we'll go through what's new in terms of appearance and specifications, and then go through some benchmarks comparing the new Raspberry Pi 3 to the Pi 2 and Pi Zero. Keeping your Sanity Securing Iaas, PaaS and SaaS cloud services It may require a cultural shift in your organization to accept extending trust to your cloud service providers (CSP), that trust is well place. Top tier CSPs understand that they live and die on their reputation. It’s in their best interests to deliver a secure service to you. Voice: the Next UI Layer As voice recognition and, more importantly, AI-driven understanding of the meaning behind voice-based commands and queries all develop to maturity, we’re seeing a dizzying array of voice-driven use cases start to take shape. The Design Research Kit At Medium, we’re trying out a fortnightly Designer Day, where we get out of the building and work on design-initiated projects. One recent project I took on was creating a Design Research Kit: an overview of research for folks who are less familiar, with some helpful tips.

The Problem with Design Thinking In that sense, classical Design
Thinking is like the new waterfall: too linear, too slow, too dumb. Full-Stack Design Thinking is more potent because it brings people from a range of disciplines.—.business strategists, technologists, product managers, human insights and interaction designers.—.together into a unified, weaponised, team that brings cross-disciplinary thinking to bear on a problem all at once.

Friday Feed March 11, 2016 Genetic Test Firm to Put
Customers’ Data in Public Domain In an unusual move, a leading genetic testing company is putting genetic information from the people it has tested into the public domain, a move the company says could make a large trove of data available to researchers looking for genes linked to various diseases. DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis on how AI will shape the future DeepMind’s stunning victories over Go legend Lee Se-dol have stoked excitement over artificial intelligence’s potential more than any event in recent memory. But the Google subsidiary’s AlphaGo program is far from its only project — it’s not even the main one. As co-founder Demis Hassabis said earlier in the week, DeepMind wants to “solve intelligence,” and he has more than a few ideas about how to get there. The Echo From Amazon Brims With Groundbreaking Promise Yet at the moment, the most promising candidate for the Next Great Gadget isn’t made by Apple, Google, Facebook or Microsoft. Instead, it is the Echo, a screenless, voice-controlled household computer built by Amazon The Prototype Mindset A sprint takes place over just five days. On Monday, you unpack a problem you want to solve. On Tuesday, you sketch competing solutions on paper. On Wednesday, you decide how to turn your ideas into a testable hypothesis. On Thursday, you hammer out a prototype. And on Friday, you test it with real live humans. A brief process for more enlightened brainstorming We encourage people to engage in two distinct modes of thinking: divergent thinking, which involves creating choices, and convergent thinking, which involves making choices.

Friday Feed March 18, 2016 How Gut Bacteria Are Shaking
Up Cancer Research "Five years ago, if you had asked me about bacteria in your gut playing an important role in your systemic immune response, I probably would have laughed it off," Daniel Chen, head of cancer immunotherapy research at Roche’s Genentech division Handful of Biologists Went Rogue and Published Directly to Internet For most of the history of organized scientific research, the limitations of technology made print journals the chief means of disseminating scientific results. But some #ASAPbio advocates argue that since the rise of the Internet, biologists have been abdicating their duty to the public — which pays for most academic research — by not sharing results as quickly and openly as possible. Vic Gundotra, Former Google+ Boss, Is Building a Heart Monitor for the Apple Watch AliveCor, a startup that builds heart-monitoring sensors for smartphones, is building sensors for another mobile device: The Apple Watch. AliveCor is also putting out a new app replete with speech-recognition features that, paired with the watch sensor, the startup hopes will replace the cumbersome, expensive devices for patients with pressing heart conditions. The Amazon Tax Steven Sinofsky is fond of noting that organizations tend to ship their org chart, and while I began by suggesting Amazon was duplicating the AWS model, it turns out that the AWS model was in many respects a representation of Amazon itself (just as the iPhone in many respects reflects Apple’s unitary organization): create a bunch of primitives, get out of the way, and take a nice skim off the top.

Friday Feed March 25, 2016 Medicare Proposal Takes Aim at
Diabetes Under the plan, Medicare would pay for certain “lifestyle change programs” in which trained counselors would coach consumers on healthier eating habits and increased physical activity as ways to prevent Type 2 diabetes, formerly called adult onset diabetes. We’re More Honest With Our Phones Than With Our Doctors But in recent years, mobile technology has granted me and countless others the ability to collect an unprecedented amount of information about our habits and well-being. Our phones don’t just keep us in touch with the world; they’re also diaries, confessional booths, repositories for our deepest secrets. Which is why researchers are leaping at the chance to work with the oceans of data we are generating, hoping that within them might be the answers to questions medicine has overlooked or ignored. Apple Carekit: The more you know about your health, the better you can look after it. Rather than relying solely on doctor visits, you’ll be able to regularly track your symptoms and medications, and even share the information with your care team for a bigger — and better — picture of your health Google’s AI won the game Go by defying millennia of basic human instinct AlphaGo’s moves throughout the competition, which it won earlier this month, four games to one, weren’t just notable for their effectiveness. The AI also came up with entirely new ways of approaching a game that originated in China two or three millennia ago and has been played obsessively since then. Microsoft’s AI millennial chatbot became a racist jerk after less than a day on Twitter Tay started out by asserting that “humans are super cool.” But the humans it encountered really weren’t so cool. And, after less than a day on Twitter, the bot had itself started spouting racist, sexist, anti-Semitic comments.

Machine Learning: An In-Depth, Non-Technical Guide - Part 1 This
series is intended to be a comprehensive, in-depth, and non-technical guide to machine learning, and should be useful to everyone from business executives to machine learning practitioners. It covers virtually all aspects of machine learning (and many related fields) at a high level, and should serve as a sufficient introduction or reference to the terminology, concepts, tools, considerations, and techniques of the field.

Friday Feed April 1, 2016 Mapping a Genetic Strategy to
Fight the Zika Virus But the story of how the Aedes Genome Working Group emerged offers a glimpse at the often ad hoc way science lurches forward, driven by self-interest, new technology and pressing social needs. The pursuits of its members reflect the range of hopes for a new form of genetic combat that may be increasingly called into play as the specter of diseases borne by insects grows along with our ability to parse the details of their DNA. Let Patients Read Their Medical Records A quarter of patients remain unaware of their right to an electronic copy of their medical records. But patients who frequently access their medical records may be more motivated to take control of their health — and in a better position to correct outdated or erroneous information. Why Apple and Google are struggling to design simple software That's not a function of slowing innovation or technological progress -- these features have been developed and shipped in finished products. If most people still don't understand how to use them? That's a design problem. Unintuitive Lessons on Being a Designer The either-or trap is completely false. A design can be easy to understand AND feel exceptionally well-crafted. It’s entirely possible to do good work across multiple dimensions. That should be the bar we aim for.

Friday Feed April 15, 2016 The Quiet Research That Led
to a Resounding Success in Diabetes Prevention Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the secretary of health and human services, announced that Medicare was planning to pay for lifestyle interventions focusing on diet and physical activity to prevent Type 2 diabetes. It’s an example of small-scale research efforts into health services that have worked and that have expanded to reach more people. The backbone of the intervention involved 16 one-hour face-to-face meetings that helped each individual participant set and achieve goals to improve health habits. The second group was treated with metformin, a medication that can lower blood glucose, and the third was the control group, provided with a placebo medication. Sweet drug clears cholesterol, reverses heart disease—and was found by parents Two parents’ quest to save their twin daughters’ lives from a rare, degenerative genetic disorder may end up saving and improving the lives of millions. After digging through medical literature and fitting pieces of data together, the non-medically trained couple contacted German researchers and suggested that a chemical called cyclodextrin may be able to treat atherosclerosis—the hardening of arteries with cholesterol-rich plaques, which is a precursor to heart attack, stroke, and other cardiovascular diseases. Here’s How Google Makes Sure It (Almost) Never Goes Down The billions who use Google hardly stop to consider how Google made something so impressive seem so mundane. Google explains the feat in three words: Site Reliability Engineering. OK, they aren’t the best three words. But that’s the rather unsexy name Google gave to this seminal philosophy more than a decade ago. It’s a rather nuanced and expansive philosophy, but it really boils down to one central idea: Don’t get IT people who specialize in running Internet services to run your Internet services. Have software coders run them instead. Designing a Browser that isn’t a Browser When you think of a browser today, you’re probably thinking of tabs, a location bar and perhaps a bookmarking system. But are those still the best tools for the jobs we are aiming to accomplish on the web? Maybe they are. Maybe they are not. We want to find out.

The Bicycle and The Bumper Car What a beautiful mental
image: A bicycle for the mind. Coasting down the road, wind blowing through your hair, the fresh spring air tickling your lungs.—.your body in harmony with a machine, easily adjusted to the right amount of resistance for your energy level and the terrain. Is this how you feel when you wake up in the morning, and in the process of turning off your alarm, discover a text message from your boss?

Friday Feed April 22, 2016 Hope for Reversing Type 2
Diabetes Many experts believe Type 2 diabetes is an incurable disease that gets worse with time. But new research raises the tantalizing possibility that drastic changes in diet may reverse the disease in some people. Creativity Is Much More Than 10,000 Hours of Deliberate Practice Creators are not mere experts. Instead of deliberately practicing down an already existing path, they often create their own path for others to follow Three Eras of Design Research That Influence Business Today Tracing its path from the early 1990s through periods that include the Internet Bubble, New Economy, Web 2.0, Design Thinking, and Social Entrepreneurship we find three significant eras of Design Research. Each one reveals a change in attitude about the role that human conditions play in increasingly networked and global lifestyles and a restructuring of “experience” using new design methods. The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo When it launched, Amazon’s critics jumped to mock the company. Some called it a useless gimmick; others pointed to it as evidence of Amazon’s Orwellian tendencies. Then something weird happened: People decided they loved it. Amazon never releases data about how its products are selling, but Consumer Intelligence Research Partners issued a report this month saying that Amazon had sold more than 3 million devices, with 1 million of those sales happening during the 2015 holiday season. The Echo may have seemed like a superfluous toy at first, but it now looks like a way for Amazon to become the default choice in a whole new era in the way people interact with computers and the Internet. An Introduction to Serverless Architecture Using virtualized infrastructure services and PaaS providers makes us rethink how we design our applications. Similarly, this ephemeral per-request model where you weave your application out of a myriad of cloud-based services requires thinking differently about the design, testing and deployment of applications. The tradeoffs involved are different. This approach to application design and the tradeoffs involved, then, constitute serverless architecture.

Friday Feed April 29, 2016 Flu vaccine four times more
effective if given in morning The flu vaccine is four times more effective if given in the morning, scientists have discovered, a finding which could help prevent the deaths of thousands of people each year. Recursion Pharmaceuticals: Approach Recursion generates human cellular models of many diseases and uses computer vision to extract thousands of morphological measures at the level of individual cells. Molecules are then screened for their ability to rescue phenotypic defects associated with each disease. Is Anything Worth Maximizing Metrics are how an algorithm or an organization listens to you. If you want to listen to one person, you can just sit with them and see how they’re doing. If you want to listen to a whole city.—.a million people.—.you have to use metrics and analytics. This happens whenever we scale up in society. If you want to serve lots of people you need to listen to lots of people. Doesn’t matter if you’re a business, a government, a nonprofit, or an algorithm. IoT in Healthcare: What are the Biggest Hurdles? While accuracy is not the biggest hurdle facing the adoption of IoT in healthcare, trickier issues including questions regarding privacy, security, defining the standards of care, and ultimately changing behaviors – in consumers and in healthcare professionals – remain. Introducing Jelly, A New Search Engine Jelly is the only search engine in the world with an attitude, an opinion, and the experience of people to back it all up. Only Jelly can say you asked the wrong question. Only Jelly can give you answers you wanted but didn’t think to ask. Only Jelly will deliver a thoughtful answer to your anonymous question. This is all because Jelly is humanity plus technology.

Friday Feed May 6, 2016 Apple and SAP to Develop
IPhone, IPad Apps for Businesses SAP will develop hundreds of apps specifically designed for Apple’s iOS operating system for doctors, industrial field technicians and retailers. The two companies will release a software development kit by the end of the year to let SAP customers and consultants write native apps for Apple devices that take advantage of features such as location and touch sign-in. Google AI has access to huge haul of NHS patient data The data that DeepMind is collecting will let it make predictions about any disease it wants, says Smith. “What DeepMind is trying to do is build a generic algorithm that can do this for anything – anything you can do a test for.” IBM Is Now Letting Anyone Play With Its Quantum Computer This new service is hardly something the everyday consumer will use, but it’s a big deal for the many researchers now working to build a practical quantum computer—a computer that moves beyond just 1s and 0s to become exponentially more powerful than today’s machines. In that sense, IBM is indeed striving to bring quantum computing to the world at large. OOUX: A Foundation for Interaction Design These days, a lot happens before I begin sketching user flows (in this article, I use “user flow” and “interaction flow” interchangeably). I first define my user, asking, “Who’s Sally?” Next, I figure out her mental model, meaning all the things (objects) that the problem is made of, all the things she sees as part of the solution, and how they relate to one another. Finally, I design the interactions. Once I understand that Sally is a ninja armed with only a broomstick, and that she is faced with a team of zombies, I can better design the actions she’ll take. Claude Shannon, the Father of the Information Age, Turns 1100100 “It would be cheesy to compare him to Einstein,” James Gleick, the author of “The Information,” told me, before submitting to temptation. “Einstein looms large, and rightly so. But we’re not living in the relativity age, we’re living in the information age. It’s Shannon whose fingerprints are on every electronic device we own, every computer screen we gaze into, every means of digital communication.

Friday Feed May 13, 2016 The Improvisational Oncologist The thought
that every individual cancer might require a specific individualized treatment can be profoundly unsettling. Michael Lerner, a writer who worked with cancer patients, once likened the experience of being diagnosed with cancer to being parachuted out of a plane without a map or compass; now it is the oncologist who feels parachuted onto a strange landscape, with no idea which way to go. The genomic era arrives. And this time it’s probably real Genomics is already having an impact on the treatment of cancers such as this. Foundation Medicine, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, offers a test for 300 genes that are often mutated in solid tumours. This lets oncologists try to match treatments with patients. In the future, DNA from patients’ tumours is likely to be sequenced completely for diagnostic purposes. The Panic Sign With the Panic Sign, I wanted to do something similar — not just feel cool about seeing our name on a thing but also build in a little magic for the city, something special for the observant, curious, and knowledgable. And I thought we could take it one step further: we’d put the magic in your hand. Amazon now has a programmable Dash Button for the IoT Amazon has revealed a programmable Dash Button which can be assigned to any product or purpose, a customizable version of its one-touch reordering gadgets. The AWS IoT Button looks just like the existing Dash Buttons, which allow products from more than 100 brands to be ordered with a single tap - no web browser required - and delivered to a preset address, but is designed for developers and Internet of Things tinkerers to dig into. In Oracle v. Google, a Nerd Subculture Is on Trial “The G part stands for GNU?” Alsup asked in disbelief. “Yes,” said Schwartz on the stand. “That doesn’t make any sense,” said the 71-year-old Clinton appointee.

Friday Feed May 20, 2016 An Old Idea, Revived: Starve
Cancer To Death In the early 20th century, the German biochemist Otto Warburg believed that tumors could be treated by disrupting their source of energy. His idea was dismissed for decades — until now. Intel Culture Just Ate 12,000 Jobs A spreadsheet isn’t a window through which to view the future. Google’s CEO sums up his AI vision: “Hi. How can I help?” It’s as if Google is transferring its very essence from that sparse white homepage into every piece of tech you own (your phone, car, smartwatch) and online service you use. Unlike today’s search box, this assistant will learn about you from your behavior. It will know you’re a vegetarian, so won’t recommend steakhouses for dinner. It will understand context Soon We Won’t Program Computers. We’ll Train Them Like Dogs Over the past several years, the biggest tech companies in Silicon Valley have aggressively pursued an approach to computing called machine learning. In traditional programming, an engineer writes explicit, step-by-step instructions for the computer to follow. With machine learning, programmers don’t encode computers with instructions. They train them. Microsoft and SAP expand partnership: Office 365 integrations, HANA on Azure Microsoft is announcing today that it has deepened its partnership with fellow enterprise software vendor SAP. The HANA in-memory database from SAP will become available on top of Microsoft’s Azure public cloud on top of machines packed densely with RAM. At the same time, SAP’s Ariba, Concur, Fieldglass, and SuccessFactors applications will be integrated with Microsoft’s Office 365 services in various ways.

Friday Feed May 27, 2016 Regeneron Pharmaceuticals to Sponsor Science
Talent Search On Thursday, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, a biotechnology company based in Tarrytown, N.Y., will announce that it is taking over sponsorship of the Science Talent Search with a 10-year, $100 million commitment to the high school competition. what we can learn from Nike and Disney's approach to design I think that probably is the emphasis—that design or design-led companies understand the human, the emotional side, the artful side, and that that has an important value. A lot of these developments in wearables requires an environment that's networked and smart. I see that this is a very exciting new path for wearables, where it's not about just you and the wearable; it's about you, the wearable, and the environment you're in. Fast.com The ultimate dashboard: No click, essential information on your Internet speed Who won Google VS Oracle? Developers won. Well, if you’re developing software.—.or plan to in the future.—.this means that Google’s lawyers just steered you around a massive intellectual property minefield. They were able to prevent Oracle from setting a dangerous precedent: that a company could successfully sue you for writing your own functionally similar implementation of their APIs. The Maker of Things In a good bridge, I see the defiant end result of how some of my favorite engineering stories begin: “I’m sure you can arrange an impressive line of people who say it’s impossible. I take personal joy in ignoring those who say no.” “Yes, halfway through this project we’ll discover the impossible, but we know how to build through the impossible. Impossible is when we do our best work.” “Trust me when I say that I can close my eyes and see the end result, and when you can see it, too, you will be amazed.”

Friday Feed June 3, 2016 Mary Meeker's 2016 internet trends
report: All the slides, plus analysis See also:http://dq756f9pzlyr3.cloudfront.net/file/2016_internet_trends_report_final.pdf At 213 pages, there's a ton of data, but here are our Top 3 takeaways. (1) The internet itself is seeing slowing growth. In the past two decades, the internet economy was affected by macroeconomic trends, but it was external issues like the housing crisis and the financial crisis that were driving the slowdown. Now it is global internet growth itself that is slowing down. (2) Typing text into a search bar is so last year. In five years, at least 50 percent of all searches are going to be either images or speech. (3) The home screen has acted as the de facto portal on mobile devices since the arrival of the iPhone and even before. Messaging apps, with context and time, have a chance to rival the home screen as the go-to place for interaction. Building Products Instead, make a separate, intentional decision about what the bar is for full launch when it comes to polish and additional functionality. What’s acceptable to test and what’s acceptable to ship broadly should have different criteria. What do normal and abnormal heart rhythms look like on Apple Watch? Almost every month, a news story pops up about somebody whose life was saved by their Apple Watch. As part of the mRhythm Study, we’re analyzing a lot of heart rate data, and decided to write a brief primer what both normal and abnormal heart rhythms look like when measured on an Apple Watch. User Experience is everybody’s job User Experience is also about solving the right problems for the user, and solving them with the right priority. Facebook is using artificial intelligence to become a better search engine With this new project, Facebook is essentially building the capacity to track all the information put into the network, just as Google crawls the entire web for information and indexes it. What that means for users is that useful information among those trillions of posts might be a little easier to find—just as Google has started to use artificial intelligence to understand the questions we ask of it, and surface the right sort of information for us in its search results.

Friday Feed June 10, 2016 Microsoft Finds Cancer Clues in
Search Queries Microsoft scientists have demonstrated that by analyzing large samples of search engine queries they may in some cases be able to identify internet users who are suffering from pancreatic cancer, even before they have received a diagnosis of the disease. The Web¹s Creator Looks to Reinvent It “It controls what people see, creates mechanisms for how people interact,” he said of the modern day web. “It’s been great, but spying, blocking sites, repurposing people’s content, taking you to the wrong websites — that completely undermines the spirit of helping people create.” So on Tuesday, Mr. Berners-Lee gathered in San Francisco with other top computer scientists — including Brewster Kahle, head of the nonprofit Internet Archive and an internet activist — to discuss a new phase for the web. Amazon's Alexa virtual assistant tested in Boston hospital The hospital dove into voice-assisted software last month, when it released an Alexa-based app called KidsMD that gives parents advice when their children catch a fever. Children’s “is leading the way when it comes to hands-free work in hospitals” using Alexa, an Amazon spokeswoman said. The Barbell Effect of Machine Learning This means that machine learning will likely have a profound barbell effect on the technology landscape. On one hand, it will democratize basic intelligence through the commoditization and diffusion of services such as image recognition and translation into software broadly. On the other, it will concentrate higher-order intelligence in the hands of a relatively small number of incumbents that control the lion’s share of their industry’s data.

Friday Feed June 17, 2016 The newest tool in the
fight against cancer is a huge genetic database driven by algorithms Cancer scientists can understand different tumors better if they have easy access to a huge, unified database they can query with questions and get meaningful, reliable answers. If someone wanted to study kidney cancer, for example, the GDC has profiled 1,700 types of kidney tumors. Its power comes from bringing all that information together in one place and smooth it out with algorithms, according to Simon Forbes, a cancer scientist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. Microsoft and Apple Double Down What is potentially transformative about this deal is a future where Microsoft retains its focus on enterprise while shifting the locus of its business from companies to employees. I have written at length about the importance of owning the end user, but we the end users have multiple identities. Apple’s WWDC announcements, meanwhile, were perhaps most notable for that they didn’t include...Instead the keynote was about enhancing and deepening the value that comes from living the full Apple lifestyle: now your Watch unlocks your Mac, and your desktop is available on your iPhone. You can pay for things on your Mac’s browser using the iPhone, and control your house via the Apple TV from your lock screen. Apple’s announcement on artificial intelligence is a big shift for the company For Apple, more AI and more integrations with third party services will mean less fatigue for consumers, who are already overwhelmed with too many apps, too many devices, and too much data. Ultimately, artificial intelligence behind-the-scenes could make it easier for users to organize their ever-growing photo collections, communicate and use online services more efficiently and toggle less between devices. The moves also come at a time when tech giants and a wave of new start-ups are racing to create similar artificial-intelligence based products. 9 Things Microsoft Could Do With LinkedIn LinkedIn is one of our favorite subjects at Postlight—and this feels like an amazing opportunity for some uninformed speculation. Obviously we’re taking “LinkedIn will retain its brand, culture and independence” with a Redmond-sized grain of salt. So…what could happen now? (Note that “could” is emphatically not the same as “should.”) (1) Microsoft could embed LinkedIn into Windows as a service. (2) Microsoft could embed LinkedIn into Microsoft Office. (3) Microsoft could embed LinkedIn into other tools across the MSFT ecosystem as a “workplace” API....

The Organic UX Process Behind Slack’s Success Valued at over
$3 billion dollars with 600,000+ paying customers at the start of 2016, Slack is on a mission to humanize team communication. The 400-plus employee company has a rare internal resource: a huge, constant pool of employees to user test with. Since all employees across the company dogfood Slack every day for 8+ hours a day, the Slack design team enjoys unprecedented access to constant user feedback and an intimate knowledge of the product. People Centered Internet: Building The Coalition For Data-Driven Good We are entering a period when artificial intelligence as a service is becoming a reality in the cloud computing domain. The Internet facilitates access to highly advanced applications – even if the users are not located in proximity to such computing resources. As information accumulates in the Internet, more and more elaborate and sophisticated processing methods increase the value of the data contained in and accessible through the network.

Friday Feed June 24, 2016 Food Banks Take On a
Contributor to Diabetes: Themselves Inconsistent access to food worsens the disease, and so can the offerings at the pantries many low-income people must rely on. Now researchers have begun pursuing innovative new methods to address Type 2 diabetes among people who rely on food banks. Crispr Wins Key Approval to Fight Cancer in Human Trials Genetic engineering, which for decades never quite lived up to expectations, is being transformed thanks to Crispr. Scientists can use it to manipulate the genes of any living creature with unprecedented ease. Editas Medicine is hoping to begin human trials next year using Crispr to treat a rare form of blindness. The cancer trial approved on Tuesday may come sooner than many in the field had anticipated, and for a broader potential group of patients. How Google is Remaking Itself as a “Machine Learning First” Company For many years, machine learning was considered a specialty, limited to an elite few. That era is over, as recent results indicate that machine learning, powered by “neural nets” that emulate the way a biological brain operates, is the true path towards imbuing computers with the powers of humans, and in some cases, super humans. Google is committed to expanding that elite within its walls, with the hope of making it the norm. Drug Company Lunches Have Big Payoffs A free lunch may be all it takes to persuade a doctor to prescribe a brand-name drug instead of a cheaper generic, a new study suggests. Elegant tools: Why B2B and enterprise design is the next frontier of design impact Facebook's Margaret Stewart shares four key principles for designing quality business products and explains why designing elegant tools may be the highest-impact opportunity that exists for designers today.

Typography for User Interfaces Since my early days in the
industry, I’ve grown to love type and all the little nuances that go into setting it. In this article, I want to share some of the fundamentals that I’ve learned, and hopefully help you get better at setting type for user interfaces.

Friday Feed July 1, 2016 AI, Deep Learning, and Machine
Learning: A Primer From types of machine intelligence to a tour of algorithms, a16z Deal and Research team head Frank Chen walks us through the basics (and beyond) of AI and deep learning in this slide presentation. Power to the People: How One Unknown Group of Researchers Holds the Key to Using AI to Solve Real Human Problems What’s needed for AI’s wide adoption is an understanding of how to build interfaces that put the power of these systems in the hands of their human users. What’s needed is a new hybrid design discipline, one whose practitioners understand AI systems well enough to know what affordances they offer for interaction and understand humans well enough to know how they might use, misuse, and abuse these affordances. The Future Is Simple People often ask me what the future of technology is going to be. First I tell them the truth, I don’t know. Then I tell them what I hope will be true. My hope for the future of technology is that it seemingly disappears, it gets out of the way, and it somehow amplifies the best qualities of humanity. We won’t see clunky gadgets all around us, yet technology surrounds us and can be summoned at any point like a Jedi using “The Force.” Hackers are coming for your healthcare records -- here’s why Enterprises with legacy systems are trying to connect to and integrate EHRs. Security is not always considered as a part of that, and patching systems is always fraught with peril. You're always a little behind with that," Gallagher said. "It's a formula for being behind." How To Break Open The Web Fast forward, through the emergence of giant web-centric companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Salesforce. We find ourselves in the silo era. Data and service silos hold what we do—our work, our play, our very thoughts— hostage, even as they provide genuine convenience and value in other ways. Mobile devices exacerbate the problem. Many mobile apps are essentially browsers that work on a single website. Add government and telecom control-freakery to the mix, and it’s all too easy to worry that we may already have lost.

Friday Feed July 8, 2016 Why Microsoft is betting its
future on AI "It's the modern era — you don't have to be an expert in speech and language understanding," Connell says. "Just use our tools. Go build your branded bot with our tools and put it on whatever canvas — it might be Slack, it might be Facebook Messenger. We hope it might be Skype or Windows. But you choose." Getting Up to Speed on Deep Learning Behind the scenes, deep learning is an active, fast-paced research area that’s proliferating quickly among some of the world’s most innovative companies. We are asked frequently about our favorite resources to get up to speed on deep learning and follow its rapid developments. As such, we’ve outlined below some of our favorite resources A Designer’s Scientific Method The scientific method starts with a question.—.“why is the sky blue?” From that question a hypothesis is developed.—.“because… molecules”.—.then predictions are made and tested. From those tests, an analysis is given as to whether or not their hypothesis holds true. In a designer’s process we ask many questions, define a problem, propose a variety of solutions, test them, and assess how well they’ve solved the problem. Design method toolkit Set your goals, choose your methods, work your magic.Design Method Toolkit for agile, team-based projects The visualizations transforming biology A smart visualization can transform biologists' understanding of their data. And now that it's possible to sequence every RNA molecule in a cell or fill a hard drive in a day with microscopy images, life scientists are increasingly seeking inventive visual ways of making sense of the glut of raw data that they collect.

Friday Feed July 15, 2016 Why genetic research must be
more diverse Ninety-six percent of genome studies are based on people of European descent. The rest of the world is virtually unrepresented — and this is dangerous, says geneticist and TED Fellow Keolu Fox, because we react to drugs differently based on our genetic makeup. Pokémon Go Mania Could Signal a Bright Future for Augmented Reality Unlike other viral games, though, Pokémon Go has not kept players cooped up inside staring at their screens. Instead, it sends people out to streets, parks, beaches and beyond because the game uses augmented reality, a technology that fuses the digital world with the real world, write Nick Wingfield and Mike Isaac. To play Pokémon Go, users need to walk around their neighborhoods or towns with their smartphones looking for Pokémon characters to pop up on their screen and then capture those characters. Pokémon Go’s popularity...could mean a tipping point for augmented reality, particularly because the game is easy to download and play. It doesn’t involve fancy new headsets or other equipment, which virtual reality typically requires. Satya Nadella just fixed Microsoft’s biggest problem To get to this point, Nadella reset his management team and mandated collaboration. He drove smart acquisitions (Mojang and LinkedIn are good examples) and merged nonsensically separate product groups into four cohesive pillars: Operating System, Apps, Cloud, and Devices. Learning to code as a 30-year-old kid with Apple’s Swift Playgrounds As a relatively inexperienced programmer (I can poke around in HTML or CSS, but doing anything more serious is beyond me), I appreciated how gradually and clearly Playgrounds introduced basic concepts like “debugging” and “functions.” And within just a few lessons it drives home one important idea—as any programmer will tell you, there’s rarely just one “right” way to solve a problem, though some ways of doing things are more efficient than others.

The SIEUFERD Project SIEUFERD is a general-purpose user interface for
relational databases. It takes its inspiration from two decades' worth of graphical database applications that were developed, at great expense, to serve niche markets such as seafood trading, music school administration, and refugee camp management, and attempts to generalize their standard UI idioms into a single, universal application that provides most of their features in a schema-independent manner.

Friday Feed July 22, 2016 Hotlines Faster Than Hospitals in
Pinpointing Dengue, Study Says Calls to public health hotlines can predict dengue fever outbreaks two or three weeks earlier than local hospitals can confirm them, according to a new study from Pakistan. The study looked at 300,000 calls to a health hotline in Lahore over two years. By asking callers to describe their symptoms and give their addresses, operators were able to pinpoint which districts in the city were having dengue outbreaks. The DIY diabetes kit that's keeping us alive "I was sending a seven-year-old to school with a drug that could kill him," says Alistair Samuelson, whose son George, now nine, has type 1 diabetes. Frustrated with traditional monitoring and its risks, Mr Samuelson and George have since joined a growing group of T1 sufferers who are building their own solutions to manage their diabetes - even though they come with their own uncertainties. Emotional Design. Adding a little cherry on top of your product’s UX. Last year I took part in a workshop about emotional intelligence with a group of software engineers. Engineers believe in systematic thinking, algorithms and analytics. They don’t believe in emotions. When the workshop’s instructor asked if psychology was a science, they giggled. That’s a very common reaction. Emotional design is not a design discipline, like graphic design or car design. It’s also not a step in the UX design process, like interaction or visual design. Emotional design is a layer, a perspective. It should be sprinkled on top of the whole experience. It’s the little cherry on top, the extra mile that makes people love a product. Apple Scores GlaxoSmithKline Study in Key Test of Health Apps GlaxoSmithKline Plc has started a rheumatoid arthritis study using Apple Inc.’s ResearchKit, marking the first time a drugmaker has used the health system for the iPhone to conduct clinical research. Microsoft Stream Engage and inspire your workforce. Upload and share videos across your organization to improve communication, participation, and learning.

Friday Feed July 29, 2016 Artificial Pancreas Is First To
Raise $1 Million Under New Crowdfunding Rules Beta Bionics, a startup created by Boston University biomedical engineer Ed Damiano, hit the benchmark Wednesday night after 775 members of the public put up an average of $1,300 each to back its idea for a new kind of pacemaker for diabetics. While some diabetics already use implanted sensors to read levels of glucose in their blood, Beta Bionics’s device, called the iLet, would also automatically pump insulin into the body when needed, creating a hands-off system. IBM steps up efforts in fight against Zika International Business Machines said on Wednesday it would provide its technology and resources to help track the spread of the Zika virus. Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), a leading research institution affiliated with the Brazilian Ministry of Health, plans to use IBM’s technology to analyze information from official data about human travel patterns to anecdotal observations recorded on social media. How the most connected hospitals will use chatbots Sure, chatbots are useful for service industries like hospitality and food delivery, but in health care? Some groups are testing the use of chatbots to retrieve medical information from within a messaging app. At first glance, that seems a bit impersonal, but a closer look reveals a wide range of use cases where bots could make your next visit to the hospital, doctor’s office, or pharmacy faster and more effective. Dollar Shave Club And The Disruption Of Everything There was another product launch in 2006 that I’m sure no one at P&G even noticed: Amazon Web Services. Even if they did notice, I doubt the executives focused on the Fusion launch appreciated that P&G’s seemingly unassailable advantages were on the verge of declining precipitously. AWS made it easy and cheap to start an online company; YouTube, launched a year earlier, made it cheap and easy to share video; Facebook, launched in 2004, made it possible to spread said video to millions of people. All three came together with the 2011 founding of Dollar Shave Club and its 2012 launch with one of the best introductory videos of all time:

Using Design Thinking to Embed Learning in Our Jobs The
telecomm company used design thinking to come up with a different approach: Rather than inject “training” into employees, it studied the job of a retail sales agent over the first nine months and developed a “journey map” showing what people need to know the first day, the first week, the first month, and then over the first few quarters.

Friday Feed August 5, 2016 Setting the Body’s ‘Serial Killers’
Loose on Cancer The patient’s T-cells, the soldiers of the immune system, are extracted from the patient’s blood, then genetically engineered to recognize and destroy cancer. The redesigned cells are multiplied in the laboratory, and millions or billions of them are put back into the patient’s bloodstream, set loose like a vast army of tumor assassins. This is an unusual pharmaceutical — a drug that is alive and can multiply once inside the body. Dr. June calls these cells “serial killers.” A single one can destroy up to 100,000 cancer cells. Harnessing the Immune System to Fight Cancer Harnessing the immune system to fight cancer, long a medical dream, is becoming a reality. Remarkable stories of tumors melting away and terminal illnesses going into remissions that last years — backed by solid data — have led to an explosion of interest and billions of dollars of investments in the rapidly growing field of immunotherapy. Pharmaceutical companies, philanthropists and the federal government’s “cancer moonshot” program are pouring money into developing treatments. Medical conferences on the topic are packed. Moore’s Law Is About to Get Weird his information and the hardware that processes it can take an almost endless variety of physical forms. Over nearly two centuries, scientists and engineers have experimented with designs that use mechanical gears, chemical reactions, fluid flows, light, DNA, living cells, and synthetic cells. Die Dashboards Die! Why Conversations Will Reinvent Software In years to come, conversations will breathe new life into software.—.particularly the boring enterprise tools millions of knowledge workers begrudgingly use every day. Conversational user interfaces (CUIs) work because of our familiarity with messaging. Even the most technically complex interactions can look as simple as getting an SMS text when presented as a conversation. Dashboards today pump out data and expect the user to do the rest. However, tomorrow’s conversational interfaces will surface insights first, then back them up with data as needed.

There’s a simple way to have meetings that result in
something meaningful But Claudia Williams, a senior policy advisor for OSTP and one of the leaders of the workshop, did something ingenious as the meeting came to a close. She set aside time for everyone in the room to share an appreciation, extend an offer, or make an ask. People raised their hands and spoke ad-hoc. No one had anything prepared but a few people expressed gratitude, some made asks, and many more put forth offers.

Friday Feed August 12, 2016 Gene-Therapy Cure Has Money-Back Guarantee
The most expensive drugs in history, or medicine’s biggest bargains? Gene therapy could be both. I Want to Know What Code Is Running Inside My Body “I felt like I was going to die,” she says. “It was a horrible feeling. I had no breath left, I didn’t know what was happening.” Back in Norway, it took her cardiac technicians months to figure out what had happened: The heart rate limits on her pacemaker had been set incorrectly, so that as she exerted herself, the pacemaker’s default safety mode switched on, cutting her heart rate instantaneously from 160 beats per minute to 80. Beyond CRISPR: A guide to the many other ways to edit a genome But for all the devotion, CRISPR–Cas9 has its limitations. It is excellent at going to a particular location on the genome and cutting there, says bioengineer Prashant Mali at the University of California, San Diego. “But sometimes your application of interest demands a bit more.” The lost infrastructure of social media. More than a decade ago, the earliest era of blogging provided a set of separate but related technologies that helped the nascent form thrive. Today, most have faded away and been forgotten, but new incarnations of these features could still be valuable. Playing The Long Game Inside Tim Cook's Apple What Apple has accomplished with Maps is an example of the kind of grind-it-out innovation that’s happening all the time at the company. You don’t hear a lot about it, perhaps because it doesn’t support the enthralling myth that innovation comes in blinding flashes that lead to hitherto unimaginable products. When critics ding Apple for its failure to introduce "breakthrough" devices and services, they are missing three key facts about technology: First, that breakthrough moments are unpredictable outcomes of ongoing, incremental innovation; second, that ongoing, behind-the-scenes innovation brings significant benefits, even if it fails to create singular disruptions; and, third, that new technologies only connect broadly when a mainstream audience is ready and has a compelling need. "The world thinks we delivered [a breakthrough] every year while Steve was here," says Cue. "Those products were developed over a long period of time."

What one assistant principal learned from shadowing a student for
a day High school students and parents sometimes say principals and teachers don’t quite understand what it’s like to be a student these days. It turns out there’s an effort to change that. Some 1,300 principals recently took a day off from their usual role and instead followed one of their students for a day. The approach came from two groups outside the traditional field of public education, the Design School at Stanford University, and IDEO, a design company based in Palo Alto, California.

Friday Feed August 19, 2016 What Is Immunotherapy? The Basics
on These Cancer Treatments Some of the most promising advances in cancer research in recent years involve treatments known as immunotherapy. These advances are spurring billions of dollars in investment by drug companies, and are leading to hundreds of clinical trials. Here are answers to some basic questions about this complex and rapidly evolving field. The Difference Between AI, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning? Artificial intelligence is the future. Artificial intelligence is science fiction. Artificial intelligence is already part of our everyday lives. All those statements are true, it just depends on what flavor of AI you are referring to. John Maeda’s Next Gig? Design Kingpin of the Open Web Maeda’s description of the new role is still vague, but his first few days at Automattic see him sweating the details. He’s doing a three-week stint as a customer service rep (Automattic calls them “happiness engineers” and requires every new hire to spend time in the role). If a WordPress user has trouble, say, navigating a menu, Maeda receives the ticket and replies with instructions—a baby steps approach to becoming acquainted with a service’s overall user experience The First and Last ‘One-to-One’ Device My point is simply that not too long ago, the notion of everyone owning a cell phone was probably far-fetched at best. The notion of everyone owning a device that does everything that our smartphones now do would have been ludicrous; pure science fiction.³ Personal computers at the time were fairly large, expensive devices used mainly for business. Today, we all have supercomputers in our pockets. Supercomputers that are connected to each other and to the collective knowledge of the human race at all times. But I just refuse to believe that the smartphone will be the be-all, end-all of mass-scale technology. The “what’s next” may not have been invented yet. Or maybe it is out there, just waiting to be chiseled and perfected to take it to such a scale.

Solid (social linked data) Solid is an exciting new project
led by Prof. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, taking place at MIT and the Qatar Computing Research Institute. The project aims to radically change the way Web applications work today, resulting in true data ownership as well as improved privacy. Solid (derived from "social linked data") is a proposed set of conventions and tools for building decentralized social applications based on Linked Data principles. Solid is modular and extensible and it relies as much as possible on existing W3C standards and protocols.

Friday Feed August 26, 2016 How Parents Harnessed the Power
of Social Media to Challenge EpiPen Prices She went online to Petition2Congress.com, a service that collects signatures and then sends them to designated lawmakers, and created the petition “Stop the EpiPen Price Gouging,” which went live on July 11. Then Ms. Kantayya shared the link with her 836 Facebook friends, with a post that began, “Stupid pharmaceutical company!” What happened next is a lesson in the power of social media to create a groundswell, particularly among a group as committed and motivated as the parents of children with food allergies, who must often buy multiple pens for home, school and day care. In just 45 days, Ms. Kantayya’s petition grew from a few dozen signatures to more than 70,000 people who sent more than 100,000 letters to Congress. An Exclusive Look at How AI and Machine Learning Work at Apple Machine learning, my briefers say, is now found all over Apple’s products and services. Apple uses deep learning to detect fraud on the Apple store, to extend battery life between charges on all your devices, and to help it identify the most useful feedback from thousands of reports from its beta testers. Machine learning helps Apple choose news stories for you. It determines whether Apple Watch users are exercising or simply perambulating. It recognizes faces and locations in your photos. It figures out whether you would be better off leaving a weak Wi-Fi signal and switching to the cell network. It even knows what good filmmaking is, enabling Apple to quickly compile your snapshots and videos into a mini-movie at a touch of a button. Computers trounce pathologists in predicting lung cancer type, severity The researchers found that a machine-learning approach to identifying critical disease-related features accurately differentiated between two types of lung cancers and predicted patient survival times better than the standard approach of pathologists classifying tumors by grade and stage. If you don't pay attention, data can drive you off a cliff You’re a hotshot manager. You love your dashboards and you keep your finger on the beating pulse of the business. You take pride in using data to drive your decisions rather than shooting from the hip like one of those old-school 1950s bosses. This is the 21st century, and data is king. You even hired a sexy statistician or data scientist, though you don’t really understand what they do. Never mind, you can proudly tell all your friends that you are leading a modern data-driven team. Nothing can go wrong, right?

Eleven Reasons To Be Excited About The Future of Technology
Self-driving cars, Clean Energy, Virtual and Augmented Reality, Drones and Flying Cars, Artificial Intelligence, Pocket Supercomputers for Everyone, Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains, High-Quality Online Education, Better Food through Science, Computerized Medicine, A New Space Age

Friday Feed September 16, 2016 Apple’s AirPods aren’t just wireless
earbuds. They’re the future of computing. I'm talking about the AirPods, those $159 wireless earpieces that Apple offered as the priciest of several alternatives to the audio dilemma it created for its own users. And no, I’m not joking. In essence, Apple has launched a new device category in the guise of an overpriced iPhone accessory. The AirPods are the company’s first ear computer. G.E., the 124-Year-Old Software Start-Up Jeffrey R. Immelt, chief executive of General Electric, recalls the June day in 2009 that got him thinking. He was speaking with G.E. scientists about new jet engines they were building, laden with sensors to generate a trove of data from every flight — but to what end? That data could someday be as valuable as the machinery itself, if not more so. But G.E. couldn’t make use of it. “We had to be more capable in software,” Mr. Immelt said he decided. Maybe G.E. — a maker of power turbines, jet engines, locomotives and medical-imaging equipment — needed to think of its competitors as Amazon and IBM. The Art of Designing With Heart The problem is…with so much to think about, and so many logistics to obsess over, it’s easy to forget the reason you’re doing any of this in the first place: YOUR SOFTWARE EXISTS TO HELP PEOPLE! Designers usually call this notion User Experience or Empathy. I think those names stink. They’re buzzwordy and vague enough to mean different things in different contexts. I think we should call it what it really is: Designing With Heart. This isn’t something that’s the responsibility of one specific team in your company, or one step in a process that you can check off. It’s a core value that informs every decision you make. Making design core to the agile process – Salesforce UX At Salesforce, the agile process is central to how we deliver products. It’s a framework that’s allowed us to develop rapidly through incremental improvements, iterate quickly upon feedback, and steadily develop. But how does a team strive to make major innovations within an agile process and create transformative change at scale? At Salesforce, we faced this question head on. Here’s a look into how we took a new approach to build the Lightning Experience and make design core to our process.

A Graphical Guide to Prototyping The kind of prototyping you
chose to do is largely determined as a function of fidelity and interactivity. Because of this, I wanted a quick and easy way to visualize this model to give me a better sense of when to use what and what tools would be best to accomplish my goals. Making design core to the agile process – Salesforce UX At Salesforce, the agile process is central to how we deliver products. It’s a framework that’s allowed us to develop rapidly through incremental improvements, iterate quickly upon feedback, and steadily develop. But how does a team strive to make major innovations within an agile process and create transformative change at scale? At Salesforce, we faced this question head on. Here’s a look into how we took a new approach to build the Lightning Experience and make design core to our process. Open Innovation Toolkit The Open Innovation Toolkit is a community sourced set of best practices and principles to help you incorporate human-centered design into your product development process. Whether you have a new idea or a working prototype to test, the Open Innovation Toolkit can help. Rewriting the tablet Lenovo didn’t set out to build just another tablet with the Yoga Book — it wanted to make something that was better for getting work done than what is already out there. But in the process, it made a computer that’s both futuristic and relatable at the same time, just like the original Courier concept. In the future, everyone is going to be a software engineer, but only a few will learn how to code “There are lot of definitions of what a developer is,” says Zach Haehn, head of software engineering at Bloomberg’s San Francisco office. “It’s not just people who write code. People get scared when they see code, but they’ve been doing programming for 20 years, they just don’t think about it as programming…. It’s really just about logical thinking and analysis.” A Push to Lower Drug Prices That Hit Insurers and Employers the Hardest insurers and employers — who pay the bulk of the cost for drugs — say that a bigger financial shock has come from a largely overlooked source: expensive anti-inflammatory medications like Humira and Enbrel, drugs taken by millions of people for conditions like rheumatoid arthritis. In recent years, the prices of the medications have doubled, making them the costliest drug class in the country by some calculations.

Friday Feed September 23, 2016 Freeze-Dried Molecules Can Be Used
to Whip Up Medicines Anywhere Just add water. That’s the appeal of a new freeze-dry method that turns DNA and other molecules into small reaction pellets needed to make a wide range of pharmaceuticals. With freeze-dried molecular machinery portable enough to tote around in a suitcase, it could be possible to make drugs in remote places like developing countries, military outposts, and even outer space. Salesforce Buying Twitter Would Make Perfect Sense As for Salesforce, well, it already tried to buy LinkedIn (Microsoft got it), so it clearly wants a social network. It offers customer service software, market research tools, email marketing systems, and other products. Many of them already use social media. If you’ve ever tweeted a complaint about a company and received a response post-haste, you’ve seen how social networks play into Salesforce’s plans. Bringing Twitter in-house would facilitate building tools that connect sales, marketing and customer service clients directly to Twitter, providing deeper integration with its products. Oracle’s Cloudy Future Oracle’s lock on its existing customers, including the vast majority of the largest companies and governments in the world, remains very strong. And to that end its strategy of basically replicating its on-premise business in the cloud (or even moving its cloud hardware on-premise) makes total sense; it’s the same sort of hybrid strategy that Microsoft is banking on. Give their similarly old-fashioned customers the benefit of reducing their capital expenditures (increasing their return on invested capital) and hopefully buy enough time to adapt to a new world where users actually matter and flexible and focused clouds are the best way to serve them. Customer Service Bots Are Getting Better at Detecting Your Agitation "[Humans] change our behavior in reaction to how whoever we are talking to is feeling or what we think they’re thinking,” says William Mark, who leads SRI International's Information and Computing Sciences Division. “We want systems to be able to do the same thing."

Why Email Refuses to Die And as long as society
demands we officially introduce ourselves before asking for something or offering up something, we’ll need email. As long as individuals are allowed to set the context for interaction rather than jumping blindly into it, email will be around. And when we need to clearly and expansively lay out an idea without immediately inviting the input of others, email is there for us. If anything, email still survives because it protects us from interaction. It slows things down and forestalls online life.

Friday Feed September 30, 2016 A High-Stakes Bet: Turning Google
Assistant Into a ‘Star Trek’ Computer But the Assistant also presents Google with a delicious opportunity. The “Star Trek” computer is no metaphor. The company believes that machine learning has advanced to the point that it is now possible to build a predictive, all-knowing, superhelpful and conversational assistant of the sort that Captain Kirk relied on to navigate the stars. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on how AI will transform his company “With Office 365, we are not just moving to the cloud,” Nadella said. “The most profound shift is in the fact that the data underneath the applications of Office 365 is exposed in a graph structure. And in a trusted, private-preserving way, we can reason over this data and create intelligence. That’s really the profound shift in Office 365.” Snapchat Spectacles And The Future Of Wearables Much more significantly, though, Spectacles have the critical ecosystem and use case components in place: Snapchat has over 150 million daily active users sending over a billion snaps a day and watching an incredible 10 billion videos. All of them are exclusive to Snapchat. Making it easier to add videos — memories, People are digging through their trash and reusing Target’s well-designed prescription pill bottles The celebrated red “ClearRx” design solved many common complaints with the standard plastic vials that use the old “Palm N’ Turn” cap. Target’s bottles were easier to open while remaining child-proof; they had a color ring for each member of the family to avoid confusion among medications; and perhaps most importantly, it had a clear, easy-to-read label with the text sized appropriately for aging eyes. Target touted the bottles as an avatar for its design-minded brand ethos and continued to refine its design with enhancements introduced in 2012. Aetna to Transform Members’ Consumer Health Experience Using iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch Beginning this fall, Aetna will make Apple Watch available to select large employers and individual customers during open enrollment season, and Aetna will be the first major health care company to subsidize a significant portion of the Apple Watch cost, offering monthly payroll deductions to make covering the remaining cost easier.

Friday Feed October 7, 2016 Why Deep Learning Is Suddenly
Changing Your Life Indeed, corporations just may have reached another inflection point. “In the past,” says Andrew Ng, chief scientist at Baidu Research, “a lot of S&P 500 CEOs wished they had started thinking sooner than they did about their Internet strategy. I think five years from now there will be a number of S&P 500 CEOs that will wish they’d started thinking earlier about their AI strategy.” Deep-Fried Data So what’s your data being fried in? These algorithms train on large collections that you know nothing about. Sites like Google operate on a scale hundreds of times bigger than anything in the humanities. Any irregularities in that training data end up infused into in the classifier. WeChat's world As one American venture capitalist puts it, WeChat is there “at every point of your daily contact with the world, from morning until night”. It is this status as a hub for all internet activity, and as a platform through which users find their way to other services, that inspires Silicon Valley firms, including Facebook, to monitor WeChat closely. They are right to cast an envious eye. People who divide their time between China and the West complain that leaving WeChat behind is akin to stepping back in time. Dr. Edward Tufte - The Future of Data Analysis The future grows out of studying great excellence in the past Democratic databases: science on GitHub When the Ebola outbreak in West Africa picked up pace in July 2014, Caitlin Rivers started to collect data on the people affected. Rivers, then a PhD student in computational epidemiology, wanted to model the outbreak’s spread. So every day she downloaded PDF updates released by the ministries of health of the virus-stricken countries, and converted the numbers into computer-readable tables. Rather than keeping these files to herself, she posted them to GitHub.com, a hugely popular website for collaborative work on software code. Rivers thought the postings might attract those interested in up-to-date information from the Ebola outbreak. “I figured if I needed it, other people would, too,” she says.

I Saw Alphabet’s Health Watch The plain display is a
sign that this device exists to collect data, not show it to users. In fact, Verily has said it’s not a consumer gadget at all. Instead, it plans to use the device in medical research such as its Baseline Study, a large-scale project it says will measure and track thousands of individuals in order to look for new signals—in their blood or from wearable monitors—that can predict disease.

Friday Feed October 14, 2016 To Make Vaccines Anywhere, Just
Add Water To get a vaccine from a factory to a child who needs it, you often need to cross countries, if not continents. Across that distance, vaccines are relayed through a “cold chain” of insulated boxes, freezers, vehicles, and depots. The chain is as fragile as it is necessary: If any link fails, the life-saving cargo would rapidly thaw and irreversibly degrade. But if Keith Pardee, from the University of Toronto, and Jim Collins, from MIT, have their way, the cold chain could be a thing of the past. They have developed a technique for making vaccines and drugs at the places where they’re actually needed. And rather than building large manufacturing plants, their method relies on the greatest factories of all: living cells. How I Built This How I Built This is a podcast about innovators, entrepreneurs, and idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. Each episode is a narrative journey marked by triumphs, failures, serendipity and insight — told by the founders of some of the world's best known companies and brands. Chat And The Consumerization Of IT So which definition of the Consumerization of IT is most meaningful? Is it consumer products ported to IT, consumer UI on traditional enterprise products, or a new business model that transforms the relationship between buyers and sellers? Certainly all three factors are important to the rise of software as a service, but the upcoming chat wars will provide an interesting test as to which is the most important. How Microsoft used an office move to boost collaboration we analyzed the metadata attached to employee calendar items in order to calculate the travel time associated with meetings before and after the office move and converted this difference into monetary savings based on time usage. We found that, as a result of the relocation, each employee spent a few minutes less walking to each meeting — a 46% reduction in travel time per meeting that, when added up, resulted in a combined total of 100 hours saved per week across all 1,200 employees involved in the move. This resulted in an estimated cost savings of $520,000 per year in employee time and increased collaboration within teams.

Making Remote Work With the tools to work apart under
our belt, what about working together with an ocean and several hours dividing you? The key for us has been creating guidelines and processes which help us collaborate despite not being physically together. Finally, and most importantly, is how we remain rallied around a common goal and purpose despite our distance. At Heroku we have a yearly cadence consisting of four seasons; planning, building, delivering, and reflecting. During each season, teams come together from all over the world and work from one location for a week. Daily Report: Salesforce Has Had Its Eye on Twitter. But Why? This year’s Salesforce shindig comes with a little extra noise: For weeks now, there have been reports that the company, which makes online software to help users manage tasks like sales and marketing, is looking to buy Twitter.

Friday Feed October 21, 2016 Slack CEO describes 'Holy Grail'
of virtual assistants Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield has an audacious goal: Turning his messaging and collaboration platform into an uber virtual assistant capable of searching every enterprise application to deliver employees pertinent information. And if Slack succeeds, it could seal the timeless black hole of wasted productivity enterprise search and other tools have failed to close. The It Era And The Internet Revolution As another example, I wrote last month about the dramatic shift in enterprise software that is being enabled by the cloud. The simple ability to pay-as-you-go has already had a big impact on startups and venture capital, but the initial impact on established companies has been to operationalize costs and increase scalability for established processes; the true transformation — building and selling software in completely new ways — is only getting started. Again, there is a difference between making an existing process more efficient and enabling a completely new approach. The gains from the former are easy to measure; the transformation of the latter is only apparent in retrospect, in part because the old way takes time to die and repurpose. IBM Is Counting on Its Bet on Watson, and Paying Big Money for It But the years of investment and applied-science projects, IBM executives say, are increasingly turning into moneymaking opportunities in sizable markets. They point to a new Watson offering in genomics as a prime example of the company’s strategy. IBM is collaborating with Quest Diagnostics, the medical laboratory company, to offer gene sequencing and Watson diagnostic analysis, as a cloud service, to oncologists treating cancer patients, starting on Monday. The service will also tap the genomics data and expertise of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and the Broad Institute. Apple, Samsung, and Good Design Inside and Out As I read the coverage of the iPhone 7 design, Samsung’s troubles, and the legal rumbles between Apple and Samsung, it became obvious that we, collectively, have a misunderstanding of what design is, especially when it comes to connected devices. Many technology reviewers make the very human mistake of thinking about beauty and design as skin deep, overlooking what’s inside. I look at the new iPhone 7—and particularly the iPhone 7 Plus—and see huge technological leaps.

Bill Belichick Throws In the Tablet A cautionary tale on
building reliable systems.

Friday Feed October 28, 2016 The 11 Bad Habits Killing
Innovation in Your Company Big companies have great execution habits to manage and improve successful business models and value propositions. But the habits that foster execution can easily kill new growth initiatives inside your company. What Last Week’s Internet Shut Down Really Means It turns out that tens of millions of digital video recorders and other devices connected to the internet and protected only by factory-encoded, easily-brute-force-guessable passwords can be harnessed in the service of gigantic distributed denial-of-service attacks. When those devices were instructed to send huge numbers of messages to computers providing pointers to some very popular websites, the computers on the receiving end were brought to their knees—incapable of processing any requests. Why Chat May Be King Of The New Mobile Landscape It seems like chat is going to be at the base of everything we do in a way that even the internet isn’t. What if chat powers the world? Remember When the PC Was Dying? It’s Making a Comeback. At Microsoft’s Windows 10 event on Wednesday, the headliner was neither a tablet nor a notebook computer. The Surface Pro and the Surface Book rated only brief mentions. The main attraction: a massive, gorgeous, $3,000 desktop PC called the Surface Studio. Microsoft bills it as a “new class of device” designed for “creative and professionals.” The ultra-HD 4.5k 28-inch screen, which is just an inch thick, pivots on a hinge from an upright desktop display to a touchscreen “digital canvas.” In this configuration, which Microsoft calls Studio Mode, it reclines at a 20-degree angle, like a drafting table.

Friday Feed November 4, 2016 Mark Zuckerberg Is Funding a
Facebook for Human Cells In September, Quake was named co-president of the BioHub, a new $600 million center funded by Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg. BioHub has as its premier project helping to create a vast directory of human cells, which it calls a “cell atlas.” Quake and BioHub are also part a consortium of researchers around the globe who say mapping the millions of cells in the human body is a feat that could help drugmakers and scientists find new ways to treat disease. Online social integration is associated with reduced mortality risk People who have stronger social networks live longer. However, can we say the same about online social networks? Here, we conduct such a study. Using public California vital records, we compare 12 million Facebook users to nonusers. More importantly, we also look within Facebook users to explore how online social interactions—reflecting both online and offline social activity—are associated with longevity. Mobile and tablet have overtaken desktop's share of page views Crossover The Curious Have Won Theo Epstein overcame 108 years of history to build a championship team in Chicago. In the process, he ended baseball’s long-running analytics war by proving that an objective, data-driven approach can change the game. First Click: Microsoft Teams leaves the office door open for Slack There's still a lot to prove for both Slack and Microsoft Teams, but it certainly looks like there's room for both to compete at different levels. If there's one thing they're both aligned on, it's that the volume of email in the office needs to decrease. If Microsoft and Slack can kill email in the office, that's a great thing for everyone.

Friday Feed November 11, 2016 A USB stick can show
HIV test results in under 30 minutes The new diagnostic tool, co-created by the university and biotech company DNA Electronics, requires simply putting a single drop of blood onto a designated spot on the USB stick. The device contains a mechanism that can detect if there’s any HIV genetic material—RNA—in the drop of blood, and if so, how much. Then, when the stick is connected to a laptop or handheld device, the data are automatically delivered to an app where the patient can quickly read his or her results. Paper Review: Why Does the Cloud Stop Computing? Lessons from Hundreds of Service Outages Availability is clearly very important for cloud services. Downtimes cause financial and reputation damages. As our reliance to cloud services increase, loss of availability creates even more significant problems. Yet, several outages occur in cloud services every year. The paper tries to answer why outages still take place even with pervasive redundancies. Scaling Knowledge at Airbnb A responsibility for the Data team at Airbnb is to scale the ability to make decisions using data. We democratize data access to empower all employees to make data-informed decisions, give everybody the ability to use experiments. As an organization grows, how do we make sure that an insight uncovered by one person effectively transfers beyond the targeted recipient? Internally, we call this scaling knowledge. Office UI Fabric Build apps that extend the familiar Office and Office 365 experience across desktop, web, and mobile platforms.

Friday Feed November 18, 2016 Study Shows Promise for Expensive
Cholesterol Drugs, but They Are Still Hard to Obtain Now, with new drugs on the market that can plunge cholesterol levels lower than ever thought possible, researchers are eagerly waiting for an answer to the next question: Is there a limit to the benefits in high-risk patients? After a certain point, do benefits level off or even reverse? A new study suggests there is no leveling off. But that good news comes in the context of unexpected problems with the new drugs, known as PCSK9 inhibitors. International Human Cell Atlas Initiative An ambitious global initiative to create a Human Cell Atlas - a description of every cell in the human body as a reference map to accelerate progress in biomedical science - was discussed at an International meeting in London on 13-14 October. Ultimately, the Human Cell Atlas would revolutionise how doctors and researchers understand, diagnose and treat disease. Humanity and AI will be inseparable While some predict mass unemployment or all-out war between humans and artificial intelligence, others foresee a less bleak future. Professor Manuela Veloso, head of the machine learning department at Carnegie Mellon University, envisions a future in which humans and intelligent systems are inseparable, bound together in a continual exchange of information and goals that she calls “symbiotic autonomy.” In Veloso’s future, it will be hard to distinguish human agency from automated assistance — but neither people nor software will be much use without the other. CRISPR gene-editing tested in a person for the first time A Chinese group has become the first to inject a person with cells that contain genes edited using the revolutionary CRISPR–Cas9 technique. On 28 October, a team led by oncologist Lu You at Sichuan University in Chengdu delivered the modified cells into a patient with aggressive lung cancer as part of a clinical trial at the West China Hospital, also in Chengdu.

Doctors Still Struggle to Make the Most of Computer-Aided Diagnosis
The stakes are even higher for real-life diagnoses, where doctors always face time pressure. That is why researchers have tried since the 1960s to supplement doctors’ memory and decision-making skills with computer-based diagnostic aids. In 2012, for example, IBM pitted a version of its Jeopardy!-winning artificial intelligence, Watson, against questions from Doctor’s Dilemma. But Big Blue’s brainiac couldn’t replicate the overwhelming success it had against human Jeopardy! players.

Friday Feed November 25, 2016 The Race for a Zika
Vaccine Perhaps never before have so many companies and government organizations worked so quickly to develop a vaccine from scratch. Vaccines usually take a decade or more to develop. But researchers say a Zika vaccine could be available as early as 2018, in what would be a remarkable two-year turnaround. More than a dozen companies are on the hunt, in addition to government stalwarts like the National Institutes of Health. To get ahead, some teams are employing innovative technologies that rely on splicing DNA, a method that has the potential to revolutionize the development of vaccines but that has never before been approved for use in humans Out of Einstein’s Lab: Salesforce Research Unveils Breakthroughs in Deep Learning Artificial intelligence will be at the core of most enterprise products that deal with large amounts of text, structured data and image data. Salesforce Einstein strives to bring AI to use cases in service, sales, marketing and others by embedding it directly into Salesforce products and enabling developers through our platform. AI will empower every company to deliver smarter, more personalized customer experiences. Nikola Tesla Describes the Modern Smartphone — in 1926 “When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.” Thought as a Technology Have you ever felt awe and delight upon first experiencing a computer interface? An interface that surprised you with its strangeness, with a sense of entering an alien world?

Conversational Commerce, Data Lake And Synthetic Biology In these short
videos, Goldman Sachs experts bring you some of the new and emerging words and phrases that are important to know in today's economy. How Google Is Challenging AWS It turns out that over the last couple of years Google has undertaken a sort of browser approach to enterprise computing . In 2014 Google announced Kubernetes, an open-source container cluster manager based on Google’s internal Borg service that abstracts Google’s massive infrastructure such that any Google service can instantly access all of the computing power they need without worrying about the details. The central precept is containers, which I wrote about in 2014: engineers build on a standard interface that retains (nearly) full flexibility without needing to know anything about the underlying hardware or operating system (in this it’s an evolutionary step beyond virtual machines).

Friday Feed December 2, 2016 The Race for a Zika
Vaccine Perhaps never before have so many companies and government organizations worked so quickly to develop a vaccine from scratch. Vaccines usually take a decade or more to develop. But researchers say a Zika vaccine could be available as early as 2018, in what would be a remarkable two-year turnaround. More than a dozen companies are on the hunt, in addition to government stalwarts like the National Institutes of Health. To get ahead, some teams are employing innovative technologies that rely on splicing DNA, a method that has the potential to revolutionize the development of vaccines but that has never before been approved for use in humans Out of Einstein’s Lab: Salesforce Research Unveils Breakthroughs in Deep Learning Artificial intelligence will be at the core of most enterprise products that deal with large amounts of text, structured data and image data. Salesforce Einstein strives to bring AI to use cases in service, sales, marketing and others by embedding it directly into Salesforce products and enabling developers through our platform. AI will empower every company to deliver smarter, more personalized customer experiences. Nikola Tesla Describes the Modern Smartphone — in 1926 “When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.” Thought as a Technology Have you ever felt awe and delight upon first experiencing a computer interface? An interface that surprised you with its strangeness, with a sense of entering an alien world?

Conversational Commerce, Data Lake And Synthetic Biology In these short
videos, Goldman Sachs experts bring you some of the new and emerging words and phrases that are important to know in today's economy. How Google Is Challenging AWS It turns out that over the last couple of years Google has undertaken a sort of browser approach to enterprise computing . In 2014 Google announced Kubernetes, an open-source container cluster manager based on Google’s internal Borg service that abstracts Google’s massive infrastructure such that any Google service can instantly access all of the computing power they need without worrying about the details. The central precept is containers, which I wrote about in 2014: engineers build on a standard interface that retains (nearly) full flexibility without needing to know anything about the underlying hardware or operating system (in this it’s an evolutionary step beyond virtual machines).

Friday Feed December 9, 2016 1 Patient, 7 Tumors and
100 Billion Cells Equal 1 Striking Recovery The remarkable recovery of a woman with advanced colon cancer, after treatment with cells from her own immune system, may lead to new options for thousands of other patients with colon or pancreatic cancer, researchers are reporting. How Invisible Interfaces are going to transform the way we interact with computers It is this sort of invisibility that allows the user to take full control of their interactions with a given piece of technology. When using a piece of technology that has become invisible, the user thinks of using it in terms of end goals, rather than getting bogged down in the technology itself. The user doesn’t have to worry how it is going to work, they just make it happen. How to Tell If Machine Learning Can Solve Your Business Problem So what are good business problems for machine learning methods? Essentially, any problems that: (1) require prediction rather than causal inference; and (2) are sufficiently self-contained, or relatively insulated from outside influences. The first means that you are interested in understanding how, on average, certain aspects of the data relate to each other, and not in the causal channels of their relationship. Keep in mind that the statistical methods do not bring to the table the intuition, theory, or domain knowledge of human analysts. The second means that you are relatively certain that the data you feed to your learning algorithm includes more or less all there is to the problem. The second stage of mobile dominance is now beginning, says an Andreessen Horowitz partner “The platform wars are over,” says Evans in an interview. Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS run on roughly 2.4 billion phones and 700 million tablets. Now that the second stage of mobile development is starting, the question becomes: “What can we build with this?” Amazon will truck your massive piles of data to the cloud with an 18-wheeler Meet AWS Snowmobile, a tractor-trailer for when your big data is just too big. The truck houses a container that can store up to 100 petabytes of data. Real-life data hoarders can contract Amazon to move exabytes of data to the cloud using the new tricked-out trucks. Snowmobile attaches directly to your data center with power and network fibre to move critical information to AWS, even when its size is insurmountable for mere mortals.

AI Winter Isn't Coming Despite plenty of hype and frantic
investment, a leading artificial intelligence expert says hardware advances will keep AI breakthroughs coming.

Friday Feed December 16, 2016 Four steps to precision public
health The use of data to guide interventions that benefit populations more efficiently is a strategy we call precision public health. It requires robust primary surveillance data, rapid application of sophisticated analytics to track the geographical distribution of disease, and the capacity to act on such information1. The availability and use of precise data is becoming the norm in wealthy countries. But large swathes of the developing world are not reaping its advantages. The Great A.I. Awakening How Google used artificial intelligence to transform Google Translate, one of its more popular services — and how machine learning is poised to reinvent computing itself. Making big data manageable One way to handle big data is to shrink it. If you can identify a small subset of your data set that preserves its salient mathematical relationships, you may be able to perform useful analyses on it that would be prohibitively time consuming on the full set. I got a Google Home and finally understand the future of computing I thought Home would be a gimmick, but a few weeks after launch and we’re using it all day at home for music, news and lots of other stuff. It feels like a glimpse of the future, and for the first time I’m really convinced voice assistants could take off. Google Home truly makes Siri look like a toy. The Pint-Sized Supercomputer That Companies Are Scrambling to Get Early customers of Nvidia’s DGX-1, which combines machine-learning software with eight of the chip maker’s highest-end graphics processing units (GPUs), say the system lets them train their analytical models faster, enables greater experimentation, and could facilitate breakthroughs in science, health care, and financial services.

Friday Feed December 23, 2016 Defining the End of Cancer
However, there are other ways to think about the end of cancer: The end of fear of cancer; the end of pain, suffering, and death from cancer; the end of cancer as an inevitable disease. Wender points out that up to half of all cancer deaths could be prevented. And for cancers that can’t be cured, improved treatments could “enable us to peacefully coexist with our cancer for a long time,” Voice Is the Next Big Platform, and Alexa Will Own It Amazon is introducing us to a new computing interface.—.a voice devoid of a screen—that will eventually grow to be more ubiquitous and more useful than our smartphones. Forget the onerous process of pulling your Pixel or iPhone from your pocket, unlocking it, opening apps, and tapping your desires onto a screen. (Ugh!) Soon, you’ll speak your wants into the air.—.anywhere.—.and a woman’s warm voice with a mid-Atlantic accent will talk back to you, ready to fulfill your commands. The End of Cloud Computing But how can we say cloud computing is coming to an “end” when it hasn’t even really started yet?? Because the edge — where self-driving cars and drones are really data centers with wheels or wings — is where it’s at. So where does machine learning in the enterprise come in? How does this change IT? As software programs the world, these are some of the shifts to look at Building Jarvis My personal challenge for 2016 was to build a simple AI to run my home -- like Jarvis in Iron Man. So far this year, I've built a simple AI that I can talk to on my phone and computer, that can control my home, including lights, temperature, appliances, music and security, that learns my tastes and patterns, that can learn new words and concepts, and that can even entertain Max. It uses several artificial intelligence techniques, including natural language processing, speech recognition, face recognition, and reinforcement learning, written in Python, PHP and Objective C. In this note, I'll explain what I built and what I learned along the way.

Data is only as valuable as the decisions it enables
The RISE Lab is about real-time decisions on live data. There are two differences: one is the transition from analytics to decisions, the other is transitioning from what was mostly queries on batch data to live data. If you look at what people try to do with their data, it's to use it make decisions or to take some actions that will improve their product, business processes, and things like that. You hear more and more today that data is only as valuable as the decision it enables. The State Of Technology At The End Of 2016 The risk for the technology industry is that we are now the incumbents: we have a stake in keeping things exactly as they are, and we build products for ourselves — we’re our own best customers. That, though, cedes the future to the powerless — those with nothing to lose under the current system will by sheer necessity build the new. The Verge: 2016 Yearbook It was a long and memorable year, so we’re taking a moment to look back at our favorite stories.

Collected Friday Feed, 2016

Collected Friday Feed, 2016

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