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Collected Friday Feed, 2018

Collected Friday Feed, 2018

A collection of interesting links, compiled and published every Friday.

Anthony Starks

December 28, 2018
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  1. Friday Feed January 5, 2018 Reading privileged memory with a

    side-channel We have discovered that CPU data cache timing can be abused to efficiently leak information out of mis-speculated execution, leading to (at worst) arbitrary virtual memory read vulnerabilities across local security boundaries in various contexts. Meltdown and Spectre: Patches, mitigations, and microcode Meltdown, applicable to virtually every Intel chip made for many years, along with certain high-performance ARM designs, is the easier to exploit and enables any user program to read vast tracts of kernel data. Spectre, applicable to chips from Intel, AMD, and ARM, and probably every other processor on the market that offers speculative execution too, is more subtle. It encompasses a trick testing array bounds to read memory within a single process, which can be used to attack the integrity of virtual machines and sandboxes. AI and Deep Learning in 2017 – A Year in Review 2017 saw many bold claims about Deep Learning techniques solving medical problems and beating human experts. There was a lot of hype, and understanding true breakthroughs is anything but easy for someone not coming from a medical background. For an comprehensive review, I recommend Luke Oakden-Rayner’s The End of Human Doctors blog post series. 10 predictions for deep learning in 2018 The incredible breakthroughs we saw in 2017 for deep learning will carry over in a very powerful way in 2018. A lot of work coming from 2017’s research will migrate into everyday software applications. The Biggest Technology Failures of 2017 Among them are: Do it Yourself Gene Therapy, Trump’s Twitter, Juicero and “Internet freedom”
  2. Friday Feed January 12, 2018 500,000 Britons’ Genomes Will Be

    Public by 2020, Transforming Drug Research The plan will turn the UK Biobank, the source of the DNA samples, into the world’s single biggest concentration of genetic and health data anywhere, giving scientists and drug companies a powerful tool for understanding diseases. How Neglecting Minorities in Medical Research Has Led to Deadly Outcomes— Solving a $1T Problem 40 percent of Americans are Hispanic, Pacific Islander, African-, Asian- or Native-American, yet this entire group accounts for less than five percent of the participants in medical research. Conversely white Americans represent 60% of the population, but make up over 95% of the participants in medical research. Because of this disparity, many drugs, treatment methods, and other research developments available to patients today have been shown to be less effective on minorities. This has led to higher mortality rates, a lower quality of life, and higher healthcare costs for minority populations. Triple Meltdown: How So Many Researchers Found A 20-Year-Old Chip Flaw At The Same Time That evening, Gruss informed the other two researchers that he'd succeeded. His code, designed to steal information from the deepest, most protected part of a computer's operating system, known as the kernel, no longer spat out random characters but what appeared to be real data siphoned from the sensitive guts of his machine: snippets from his web browsing history, text from private email conversations. More than a sense of achievement, he felt shock and dismay. Reconstructing Images with Meltdown Reading another process's memory, for images How we recreated Amazon Go in 36 hours My colleagues and I wanted to create something that would make people go “wow” at our latest hackathon.
  3. Facebook’s Virtual Assistant M Is Dead. So Are Chatbots Another

    challenge: When M could complete tasks, users asked for progressively harder tasks. A fully automated M would have to do things far beyond the capabilities of existing machine learning technology. Today's best algorithms are a long way from being able to really understand all the nuances of natural language.
  4. Friday Feed Januar 19, 2018 Power to the Patients So

    Onno is building the digital product that he believes will entice patients with rare diseases to share their data. Once he’s collected a critical mass, Onno aims to use machine learning to disrupt the narrow, slow old model of medical research for the benefit of patients like him Turing Lecture: Data Science for Medicine In this talk, Mihaela will present her view of the transformation of medicine through the use of machine learning, and some of her own contributions. This transformation is already being felt in every aspect of medicine: from clinical support for personalized diagnosis and prognosis to the estimation of individualized treatment effects without the need for clinical trials to medical discovery to the entire path of patient care. The heart of this transformation is the intelligent use of existing data. The Google Brain Team — Looking Back on 2017 This first of two posts will highlight some of our work in 2017, including some of our basic research work, as well as updates on open source software, datasets, and new hardware for machine learning. In the second post we’ll dive into the research we do in specific domains where machine learning can have a large impact, such as healthcare, robotics, and some areas of basic science, as well as cover our work on creativity, fairness and inclusion and tell you a bit more about who we are. Q&A With MIMIR CEO Nick Fierro: Blockchain, Challenges, and Opportunity Looking back to when the questions raised were, ‘what is this technology?’ and now to a place where your taxes can be paid in crypto and soon passports will be on the blockchain, I am filled with pride and joy. I knew the moment this technology was first explained to me that it would change the world, so I left for a different country with no hesitation, never looking back. Now I am paying that all forward with MIMIR. With the help of a brilliant, passionate team, we are bringing blockchain to the masses. Office for Mac now shares a codebase with Windows, gets real-time collaboration Microsoft has released a major Office update for Mac. Update 16.9.0 finally brings long-anticipated real-time collaboration features and automatic cloud saving. Notably, the Mac version of this software is now built from the same codebase as the Windows version, which means that Office shares a codebase across all platforms for the first time in 20 years
  5. Friday Feed January 26, 2018 Apple, in Sign of Health

    Ambitions, Adds Medical Records Feature for iPhone The feature is to become part of Apple’s popular Health app. It will enable users to transfer clinical data — like cholesterol levels and lists of medications prescribed by their doctors — directly from their medical providers to their iPhones, potentially streamlining how Americans gain access to some health information. Fed Up With Drug Companies, Hospitals Decide to Start Their Own For years, hospital executives have expressed frustration when essential drugs like heart medicines have become scarce, or when prices have skyrocketed because investors manipulated the market. Now, some of the country’s largest hospital systems are taking an aggressive step to combat the problem: They plan to go into the drug business themselves, in a move that appears to be the first on this scale. Amazon Go And The Future The economics of Amazon Go define the tech industry; the strategy, though, is uniquely Amazon’s. Most of all, the implications of Amazon Go explain both the challenges and opportunities faced by society broadly by the rise of tech. The UX of AI Using Google Clips to understand how a human-centered design process elevates artificial intelligence Google’s self-training AI turns coders into machine-learning masters A new service, called Cloud AutoML, uses several machine-learning tricks to automatically build and train a deep-learning algorithm that can recognize things in images.
  6. Friday Feed February 2, 2018 Amazon Health After all, if

    Amazon is facilitating the connection to patients, what is the point of having another intermediary? Moreover, by virtue of being the new middleman, Amazon has the unique ability to consolidate patient data in a way that is not only of massive benefit to patients and doctors but also to the application of machine learning. Amazon, Berkshire, JPMorgan to Target Health-Care `Tapeworm' Amazon.com Inc., Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. said they plan to collaborate on a way to offer health-care services to their U.S. employees more transparently and at a lower cost. The three companies plan to set up a new independent company “that is free from profit-making incentives and constraints,” Dr. Alexa, I’ve Been Sneezing and My Throat Is Sore Here are some ideas from health care and medical experts about how the world’s largest online retailer, the largest bank in the United States by assets and the billionaire investor Warren E. Buffett’s holding company might reshape an industry. Artificial Intelligence’s ‘Black Box’ Is Nothing to Fear There’s particular concern about this in health care, where A.I. is used to classify which skin lesions are cancerous, to identify very early-stage cancer from blood, to predict heart disease, to determine what compounds in people and animals could extend healthy life spans and more. But these fears about the implications of black box are misplaced. A.I. is no less transparent than the way in which doctors have always worked — and in many cases it represents an improvement, augmenting what hospitals can do for patients and the entire health care system. Google is using 46 billion data points to predict the medical outcomes of hospital patients Some of Google’s top AI researchers are trying to predict your medical outcome as soon as you’re admitted to the hospital.
  7. Biology, the New (Old) Technical Debt… and What That Means

    for Healthcare Innovation None of this compares to the billions of years of ‘technical debt’ in biology. Over the last few billion years, evolution has been creating its own version of an MVP — a minimal viable product that’s shipped year after year, and works in practice, but that also never gets refactored
  8. Friday Feed February 9, 2019 Principles of Technology Leadership The

    kind of talk that only Bryan Cantrill of Joyent can give, one which (enthusiastically) explores the importance of leadership principles ranging from the Gettysburg Address to Uber and exhorts the audience to think about how they might consider and apply these lessons to their own Minimum Beautiful Product I think there’s something between MVP and perfected release… the Minimum Beautiful Product perhaps. An MVP that you’ve taken an extra few hours to polish so you make a good first impression to your customers or leads. How we design enterprise software We work closely with Product Management and Engineering to deliver products and features to our customers that are valuable, usable and feasible. For each project it’s a three-legged stool. For a successful project, each of these product teams need to be represented. Of course they are not the only representatives involved, but at the core of a project these three are essential. MIT 6.S099: Artificial General Intelligence This class takes an engineering approach to exploring possible research paths toward building human-level intelligence. The lectures will introduce our current understanding of computational intelligence and ways in which strong AI could possibly be achieved, with insights from deep learning, reinforcement learning, computational neuroscience, robotics, cognitive modeling, psychology, and more. Quantum algorithms: an overview Quantum computers are designed to outperform standard computers by running quantum algorithms. Areas in which quantum algorithms can be applied include cryptography, search and optimisation, simulation of quantum systems, and solving large systems of linear equations. Here we briefly survey some known quantum algorithms, with an emphasis on a broad overview of their applications rather than their technical details.
  9. Friday Feed February 16, 2018 The workplaces of the future

    will be more human, not less In an age when the ability to think and learn, to process and reason take centre stage, the coming age of automation means that, in order to thrive in the modern workplace, we must become more human. “We’re in a diversity crisis”: cofounder of Black in AI on what’s poisoning algorithms in our lives There is a bias to what kinds of problems we think are important, what kinds of research we think are important, and where we think AI should go. If we don’t have diversity in our set of researchers, we are not going to address problems that are faced by the majority of people in the world. Inside The Two Years That Shook Facebook—And The World How a confused, defensive social media giant steered itself into a disaster, and how Mark Zuckerberg is trying to fix it all. 12 Mobile UX Design Trends For 2018 User Journey Simplification, in-app Gestures Paired With Animation, Content-Centered Experience, and Full-Screen Experiences, Vibrant Colors, Emotional Experiences, Dominance of Video, Biometric Authentication, Conversational Design, Advanced Personalization, Augmented Reality, Cashless Payments New CRISPR tools can detect infections like HPV, dengue, and Zika Together, these two papers prove the enormous potential behind different versions of CRISPR — and not just to edit genomes. “It enables a new generation of diagnostics that may be more widely available and more cost effective than current technologies,”
  10. Friday Feed February 23, 2018 Assessing Cardiovascular Risk Factors with

    Computer Vision Recently, we’ve seen many examples [1–4] of how deep learning techniques can help to increase the accuracy of diagnoses for medical imaging, especially for diabetic eye disease. In “Prediction of Cardiovascular Risk Factors from Retinal Fundus Photographs via Deep Learning,” published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, we show that in addition to detecting eye disease, images of the eye can very accurately predict other indicators of CV health. Review of The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Muller Muller summarises his argument thus: “measurement is not an alternative to judgement: measurement demands judgement: judgement about whether to measure, what to measure, how to evaluate the significance of what’s been measured, whether rewards and penalties will be attached to the results, and to whom to make the measurements available” 10 Breakthrough Technologies for 2018 (1) 3-D Metal Printing (2) Artificial Embryos (3) Sensing City (4) Ai for Everybody (5) Dueling Neural Networks (6) Babel-Fish Earbuds (7) Zero-Carbon Natural Gas (8) Perfect Online Privacy (9) Genetic Fortune-Telling (10) Materials’ Quantum Leap The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigation This report surveys the landscape of potential security threats from malicious uses of artificial intelligence technologies, and proposes ways to better forecast, prevent, and mitigate these threats. Is “Murder by Machine Learning” the New “Death by PowerPoint”? Digital empowerment all too frequently leads to organizational mismanagement and abuse. The enterprise history of personal productivity tools offers plenty of unhappy litanies of unintended consequences. For too many managers, the technology’s costs often rival its benefits.
  11. Friday Feed March 2, 2018 How I Found My Way

    After an MS Diagnosis at Twenty-Seven I should clarify: I couldn’t see properly. The centre of my vision was missing, sort of, and whenever I looked straight at something, it would dissolve, but I could see well enough around the periphery. Learn with Google AI: Making ML education available to everyone To help everyone understand how AI can solve challenging problems, we’ve created a resource called Learn with Google AI. This site provides ways to learn about core ML concepts, develop and hone your ML skills, and apply ML to real-world problems. From deep learning experts looking for advanced tutorials and materials on TensorFlow, to “curious cats” who want to take their first steps with AI, anyone looking for educational content from ML experts at Google can find it here. Security Monkey Security Monkey monitors your AWS and GCP accounts for policy changes and alerts on insecure configurations. Support is available for OpenStack public and private clouds. Security Monkey can also watch and monitor your GitHub organizations, teams, and repositories. What Managers Need to Know About Social Tools Since then we have studied internal social tools in various work settings, including banking, insurance, telecommunications, e-commerce, atmospheric science, and computing. The mounting evidence is clear: These tools can promote employee collaboration and knowledge sharing across silos. They can help employees make faster decisions, develop more innovative ideas for products and services, and become more engaged in their work and their companies. Note there are four traps to avoid
  12. Friday Feed March 9, 2018 Infection forecasts powered by big

    data Web searches, medical records and networks of local volunteers are enabling faster control of disease outbreaks. The surprising ingredient that makes businesses work better What is it about unfairness? Whether it's not being invited to a friend's wedding or getting penalized for bad luck or an honest mistake, unfairness often makes us so upset that we can't think straight. And it's not just a personal issue -- it's also bad for business, says Marco Alverà. He explains how his company works to create a culture of fairness -- and how tapping into our innate sense of what's right and wrong makes for happier employees and better results. The office of the future will be a distracted dystopia. We have some better ideas Offices will change to suit the new modes and technologies of our time. With that in mind, we looked around the open office here at argodesign and created a vision for the workplace of the future. UX writing and the customer experience: won’t somebody please think of the words? Words are slowly getting the attention they deserve in the world of experience design.
  13. Friday Feed March 16, 2018 Blockchain Expert Explains One Concept

    in 5 Levels of Difficulty Blockchain, the key technology behind Bitcoin, is a new network that helps decentralize trade, and allows for more peer-to-peer transactions. WIRED challenged political scientist and blockchain researcher Bettina Warburg to explain blockchain technology to 5 different people; a child, a teen, a college student, a grad student, and an expert. How Amazon’s Bottomless Appetite Became Corporate America’s Nightmare Amazon became a verb because of the damage it can inflict on other companies. To be Amazoned means to have your business crushed because the company got into your industry. And fear of being Amazoned has become such a defining feature of commerce, it’s easy to forget the phenomenon has arisen mostly in about three years. Health On The Web Interesting research papers on health care and the web to be presented at the Web Conference in Lyon Alexa is coming to the office Amazon is announcing today it's bringing its voice assistant into a range of business settings, big and small, like hotels and co-working spaces. Design in Tech Report See also:https://designintech.report Design trends revolutionizing the entrepreneurial and corporate ecosystems in tech. Related M&A activity, new patterns in creativity × business, and the rise of computational design. Enterprise Design Thinking Design thinking is a proven way of coming to better solutions in less time. IBM has re-envisioned design thinking, creating a framework for the speed and scale of the modern enterprise.
  14. Friday Feed March 23, 2018 Mark Zuckerberg Talks To Wired

    About Facebook’s Privacy Problem For the past four days, Facebook has been taken to the woodshed by critics, the stock market, and regulators after it was reported that the data-science firm Cambridge Analytica obtained the data of 50 million Facebook users. Until Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg had stayed silent. On Wednesday afternoon, though, he addressed the problem in a personal Facebook post and laid out some of the solutions he will introduce. Machine learning classifies cancer Brain tumours are often classified by visual assessment of tumour cells, yet such diagnoses can vary depending on the observer. Machine-learning methods to spot molecular patterns could improve cancer diagnosis. Apple and IBM partner in Machine Learning With Watson Services for Core ML, it’s easy to build apps that access powerful Watson capabilities right from iPhone and iPad, so you can provide dynamic, intelligent insights that improve over time. And with the IBM Cloud Developer Console for Apple, you can quickly tap into Watson Services for Core ML and other services on IBM Cloud. Running at a Trillion Rows Per Second The fact that we can break the trillion-row-per-second barrier with MemSQL on 448 cores worth of Intel’s latest chips is significant in a couple of ways. First, you can get interactive response time on mammoth data sets without precalculating results. This allows more flexible interaction from users, and encourages them to explore the data. It also enables real-time analytics. Second, it allows highly concurrent access by hundreds of users on smaller data sets, with all of them getting interactive response times.
  15. Friday Feed March 30, 2018 Patient Voices: Rare Diseases Living

    with any disease can be a trial, but patients with rare conditions face a host of uniquely difficult challenges. Simply getting an accurate diagnosis can be an enormous task, and many with poorly understood illnesses struggle with isolation and loneliness. Here six men and women talk about how their lives have been most affected by rare conditions. Apple’s Health app can now display medical records from 39 health systems Providing patients with a way to easily see their medical records gives them somewhat better control over their health information, which can stay stuck in the silos of individual health systems. Some healthcare groups — like Kaiser, for example — already offer patients a way to look at their medical records from their mobile devices or desktop. The idea here with Apple is that multiple systems are collected into a single app. The Real Story Behind Microsoft’s Quietly Brilliant AI Design Those principles seem obvious enough, when you lay them all out: “Humans are the heroes,” “Balance EQ and IQ,” “Honor societal values,” “Respect the context,” and “Evolve over time.” But behind them lies a unusual origin story–one that tells you a lot about where design is going. The principles didn’t emerge fully formed. Rather, they were the end result of a process started over five years ago, in which Microsoft spent untold millions trying to make a better AI assistant by watching how actual human assistants gain the trust of their clients. Microsoft reshuffles to bring more AI into products Over the past year, we have shared our vision for how the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge will shape the next phase of innovation. First, computing is more powerful and ubiquitous from the cloud to the edge. Second, AI capabilities are rapidly advancing across perception and cognition fueled by data and knowledge of the world. Third, physical and virtual worlds are coming together to create richer experiences that understand the context surrounding people, the things they use, the places they go, and their activities and relationships.
  16. Slack is developing tools to tell if someone's mansplaining Now,

    Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield says Slack is pioneering products that will provide individual Slack users with data on whether their digital communication changes when they speak with people of different demographics. He says this data will help promote more equal, inclusive workplace cultures, and make employees more efficient and effective.
  17. Friday Feed April 6, 2018 #WeAreNotWaiting Using innovative, do-it-yourself hacks,

    healthcare consumers are creating solutions to help manage their diabetes. Microsoft Professional Program for Artificial Intelligence The AI track takes aspiring AI engineers from a basic introduction of AI to mastery of the skills needed to build deep learning models for AI solutions that exhibit human-like behavior and intelligence. Apple Hires Google’s A.I. Chief The hire is a victory for Apple, which many Silicon Valley executives and analysts view as lagging its peers in artificial intelligence, an increasingly crucial technology for companies that enable computers to handle more complex tasks, like understanding voice commands or identifying people in images. The End of Windows What is more interesting, though, is the story of Windows’ decline in Redmond, culminating with last week’s reorganization that, for the first time since 1980, left the company without a division devoted to personal computer operating systems (Windows was split, with the core engineering group placed under Azure, and the rest of the organization effectively under Office 365; there will still be Windows releases, but it is no longer a standalone business). Such a move didn’t seem possible a mere five years ago, when, in the context of another reorganization, former-CEO Steve Ballmer wrote a memo insisting that Windows was the future (emphasis mine): The death of the newsfeed One basic problem here is that if the feed is focused on ‘what do I want to see?’, then it cannot be focused on ‘what do my friends want (or need) me to see?’ Sometimes this is the same thing - my friend and I both want me to see that they’re throwing a party tonight. But if every feed is a sample, then a user has no way to know who will see their post.
  18. The Scientific Paper Is Obsolete Scientific methods evolve now at

    the speed of software; the skill most in demand among physicists, biologists, chemists, geologists, even anthropologists and research psychologists, is facility with programming languages and “data science” packages. And yet the basic means of communicating scientific results hasn’t changed for 400 years. Papers may be posted online, but they’re still text and pictures on a page.
  19. Friday Feed April 13, 2018 FDA permits marketing of artificial

    intelligence-based device to detect certain diabetes-related eye problems The device, called IDx-DR, is a software program that uses an artificial intelligence algorithm to analyze images of the eye taken with a retinal camera called the Topcon NW400. A doctor uploads the digital images of the patient’s retinas to a cloud server on which IDx-DR software is installed. If the images are of sufficient quality, the software provides the doctor with one of two results: (1) “more than mild diabetic retinopathy detected: refer to an eye care professional” or (2) “negative for more than mild diabetic retinopathy; rescreen in 12 months.” I Downloaded the Information That Facebook Has on Me. Yikes. When I downloaded a copy of my Facebook data last week, I didn’t expect to see much. My profile is sparse, I rarely post anything on the site, and I seldom click on ads. (I’m what some call a Facebook “lurker.”) But when I opened my file, it was like opening Pandora’s box. What Healthcare can learn from Finance about data sharing Banks, credit card companies and other financial institutions are able to navigate these barriers to talk to one another, making it easier for customers to coordinate payments and understand their overall financial wellbeing. So why can’t patients, doctors, payers and insurance providers do the same for health data?
  20. Friday Feed April 20, 2018 Semantic Experiences How does a

    computer understand you when you talk to it using everyday language? NORMAN World's first psychopath AI. We present you Norman, world's first psychopath AI. Norman is born from the fact that the data that is used to teach a machine learning algorithm can significantly influence its behavior. So when people talk about AI algorithms being biased and unfair, the culprit is often not the algorithm itself, but the biased data that was fed to it Apple’s 2019 Mac Pro will be shaped by workflows To do that, Ternus says, they want their architects sitting with real customers to understand their actual flow and to see what they’re doing in real time. The challenge with that, unfortunately, is that though customers are typically very responsive when Apple comes calling, it’s not always easy to get what they want because they may be using proprietary content. John Powell, for instance, is a long-time logic user and he’s doing the new Star Wars Han Solo standalone flick. As you can imagine, taking those unreleased and highly secret compositions to Apple to play with on their machines can be a sticking point Darwin: a genomics co-processor provides up to 15,000x acceleration on long read assembly This paper describes “Darwin” — a co-processor for genomic sequence alignment that, without sacrificing sensitivity, provides up to 15, 000× speedup over the state-of-the-art software for reference-guided assembly of third-generation reads. Darwin achieves this speedup through hardware/algorithm co-design, trading more easily accelerated alignment for less memory-intensive filtering
  21. Friday Feed April 27, 2018 FDA chief moves to promote

    artificial intelligence in health care As an example of the new health technology he is seeking to promote, Gottlieb pointed to a new medical device approved by the FDA earlier this month that uses artificial intelligence and a special camera to help diagnose a condition in people with diabetes known as retinopathy that can lead to vision loss. Lessons from My First Two Years of AI Research A friend of mine who is about to start a career in artificial intelligence research recently asked what I wish I had known when I started two years ago. Below are some lessons I have learned so far. They range from general life lessons to relatively specific tricks of the AI trade. I hope others find them useful. Gmail’s biggest redesign is now live The world’s most popular email service is getting a big overhaul today. Google is making official the changes we saw leaked earlier this month, with email snoozing, nudging, and confidential mode making their debut alongside a substantial visual redesign for Gmail on the web. Hijack of Amazon’s internet domain service used to reroute web traffic for two hours unnoticed The attackers used BGP.—.a key protocol used for routing internet traffic around the world.—.to reroute traffic to Amazon’s Route 53 service, the largest commercial cloud provider who count major websites such as Twitter.com as customers.
  22. Friday Feed May 4, 2018 Email, the Micro-Meetings Eating Our

    Days It occurred to me recently that email and meetings are actually even more similar than the parallel above. Emails are basically little meetings that you get sucked into throughout a day. Some of them may take just a few seconds, others take far longer. Some may even take days or weeks Stop saying ‘privacy,’ start saying ‘data protection’ As clunky and boring as a term like “data protection” may sound, it has an undeniably different feel. It immediately implies that data in question is rightfully yours, and thus deserves protection when lent out. The conditional nature of the relationship is built in to the very phrase itself. It places the onus on the other, marking them as the party asking for a concession. Lobe: Deep Learning Made Simple Lobe is an easy-to-use visual tool that lets you build custom deep learning models, quickly train them, and ship them directly in your app without writing any code. Start by dragging in a folder of training examples from your desktop. Lobe automatically builds you a custom deep learning model and begins training. When you’re done, you can export a trained model and ship it directly in your app. Machine Box State of the art machine learning technology inside a Docker container which you can run, deploy and scale Exabytes in a Test Tube: The Case for DNA Data Storage If we can solve these problems, nature’s incredible storage medium—DNA—might also store our music, our literature, and our scientific advances. The very same medium that literally specifies who we are as individuals might also store our art, our culture, and our history as a species.
  23. Here's How Designers Would Fix Aamazon I wondered what Amazon

    would look like if it were redesigned as a more transparent, trusted, and even human service. So Co.Design enlisted the award-winning digital studio Upstatement–which has built sites for MIT, Harvard, Salesforce, and Microsoft–to redesign the retailer. Upstatement delivered two concepts that are each anchored in the idea that Amazon should reposition itself not as a deal warehouse but a trusted advisor or concierge.
  24. Friday Feed May 11, 2018 Why 'Stories' Took Over Your

    Smartphone The format, made popular by Snapchat and Instagram, is the native genre of glass rectangles. Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone Today we announce Google Duplex, a new technology for conducting natural conversations to carry out “real world” tasks over the phone. The technology is directed towards completing specific tasks, such as scheduling certain types of appointments. For such tasks, the system makes the conversational experience as natural as possible, allowing people to speak normally, like they would to another person, without having to adapt to a machine. Tech’s Two Philosophies In Google’s view, computers help you get things done — and save you time — by doing things for you. Apple's and Microsoft view: the expectation is not that the computer does your work for you, but rather that the computer enables you to do your work better and more efficiently. Microsoft reflects on the failures of Courier, KIN, and ultra mobile PCs Jon Friedman, now chief designer of Office 365, has been at the center of Microsoft’s notorious product failures, including the SPOT watches from 2004, ultra mobile PCs, the KIN phone, and the unreleased Courier device. At Microsoft’s Build developer conference this week, Friedman reflected on his personal career at the software giant and why some of these products weren’t successful. Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence The School of Computer Science has created the new AI degree, the first offered by a U.S. university, in response to extraordinary technical breakthroughs in AI and the growing demand by students and employers for training that prepares people for careers in AI.
  25. Women with Breast Cancer Delay Care When Faced with High

    Deductibles Nir Menachemi, a health policy professor at Indiana University who recently published an analysis of high-deductible plans in Health Affairs, said numerous studies show people are more likely to forgo preventive care when they have a high deductible — even if that care is free.
  26. Friday Feed May 18, 2018 Deep Learning for Electronic Health

    Records We used deep learning models to make a broad set of predictions relevant to hospitalized patients using de-identified electronic health records. Importantly, we were able to use the data as-is, without the laborious manual effort typically required to extract, clean, harmonize, and transform relevant variables in those records. Meet Surface Hub 2 Surface Hub 2 was designed from the ground up to be used by teams – to get people out of their seats, to connect and ideate, regardless of location. The new Surface Hub 2 is sleeker, more agile and more affordable to fit any workspace or work style. The gorgeous 4K+ 50.5” multi-touch display creates an inviting canvas to co-create, harnessing the power of Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Whiteboard, Office 365, Windows 10 and the intelligent cloud. AI for Humanity Cédric Villani intended to build a strategy for the French government to develop AI in France and Europe. Notably, the report strongly encompasses the social and ethical issues raised by AI. Villani pledges for a more ecological and energy-efficient AI. He points out the role of data scientists in making their blackbox algorithms as fair and explainable as possible. Reaching Peak Meeting Efficiency In the course of building a company the most important tool you have to create a culture of shared values is communication and meetings are critical to communication.
  27. Friday Feed May 25, 2018 How gut microbes are joining

    the fight against cancer Cancer has some provocative connections as well: inflammation is a contributing factor to some tumours and a few types of cancer have infectious origins. But with the explosive growth of a new class of drug — cancer immunotherapies — scientists have been taking a closer look at how the gut microbiome might interact with treatment and how these interactions might be harnessed. Production Readiness Checklist Everything you need to do before you go live -- This checklist is your guide to the best practices for deploying secure, scalable, and highly available infrastructure in AWS. Before you go live, go through each item, and make sure you haven't missed anything important! Microsoft is creating an oracle for catching biased AI algorithms Microsoft is building a tool to automatically identify bias in a range of different AI algorithms. It is the boldest effort yet to automate the detection of unfairness that may creep into machine learning—and it could help businesses make use of AI without inadvertently discriminating against certain people. AI Chatbots Try To Schedule Meetings—Without Enraging Us Some market researchers predict that by 2025 more than a billion people will have had an encounter with an AI assistant. New York Times: Using AI to host better conversations The New York Times, however, refuses to let the trolls win. They’ve invested significant resources in community moderation to ensure that their readers have a productive place to discuss all sides of an issue and connect freely over the topics that matter most, without being subjected to abuse.
  28. Friday Feed June 1, 2018 Mary Meeker's Internet Trends 2018

    Among the conclusions: People are spending more on health care, meaning they might have to be more focused on value. Meeker asks: “Will market forces finally come to health care and drive prices lower for consumers?” Expect health care companies to offer more modern retail experiences, with convenient offices, digitized transactions and on-demand pharmacy services. Invisible asymptotes For me, in strategic planning, the question in building my forecast was to flush out what I call the invisible asymptote: a ceiling that our growth curve would bump its head against if we continued down our current path. It's an important concept to understand for many people in a company, whether a CEO, a product person, or, as I was back then, a planner in finance. The Bill Gates Line When that 15B happened a few months after Facebook Platform and Gates said something along the lines of, “...This isn’t a platform. A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform.” America’s Teens Are Choosing YouTube Over Facebook Three years ago, Facebook was the dominant social media site among U.S. teens, visited by 71 percent of people in that magic, trendsetting demographic. Not anymore. Now only 51 percent of kids ages 13-17 use Facebook, according to Pew Research Center. The world’s largest social network is eclipsed in popularity by YouTube, Snapchat and Facebook Inc.-owned Instagram. Roseanne Barr’s Ambien Defense Is Disputed: ‘Racism Is Not a Known Side Effect’ “People of all races, religions and nationalities work at Sanofi every day to improve the lives of people around the world,” the company, Sanofi U.S., said on Twitter. “While all pharmaceutical treatments have side effects, racism is not a known side effect of any Sanofi medication.”
  29. Friday Feed June 8, 2018 The Cost of Developers Developers

    can be quite expensive indeed! The 6 biggest highlights from Apple WWDC 2018 (1) iOS 12 Gets In On Time Well Spent, (2) More Visual Fun On iOS 12, Siri Gets An Update... But Not Quite The One You’re Looking For, (3) MacOS Mojave Announced (4) watchOS 5 Takes On Fitbit, (5) Dolby Atmos Arrives On Apple TV 4K, Infrastructure for Usable Machine Learning: The Stanford DAWN Project Despite incredible recent advances in machine learning, building machine learning applications remains prohibitively time-consuming and expensive for all but the best-trained, best-funded engineering organizations. This expense comes not from a need for new and improved statistical models but instead from a lack of systems and tools for supporting end-to-end machine learning application development, from data preparation and labeling to productionization and monitoring. In this document, we outline opportunities for infrastructure supporting usable, end-to-end machine learning applications in the context of the nascent DAWN (Data Analytics for What’s Next) project at Stanford. AI at Google: our principles We recognize that such powerful technology raises equally powerful questions about its use. How AI is developed and used will have a significant impact on society for many years to come. As a leader in AI, we feel a deep responsibility to get this right. So today, we’re announcing seven principles to guide our work going forward. These are not theoretical concepts; they are concrete standards that will actively govern our research and product development and will impact our business decisions. Apple's Plans To Bring Artificial Intelligence To Your Phone At Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday, Federighi revealed the next phase of his plan to enliven the app store with AI. It’s a tool called Create ML that’s something like a set of training wheels for building machine learning models in the first place. In a demo, training an image-recognition algorithm to distinguish different flavors of ice cream was as easy as dragging and dropping a folder containing a few dozen images and waiting a few seconds.
  30. Friday Feed June 15, 2018 Why the Future of Machine

    Learning is Tiny Instead I chose to speak about another trend that I am just as certain about, and will have just as much impact, but which isn’t nearly as well known. I’m convinced that machine learning can run on tiny, low-power chips, and that this combination will solve a massive number of problems we have no solutions for right now. Inside Amazon's Painstaking Pursuit To Teach Alexa French Moving to a new country can be hard. You don’t know the language. Cultural differences create conversational landmines. And you just can’t be sure that everyone will like you. As it turns out, that as true for people as it is for Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant, which officially sets up residence in France today. Conversational interface for chatbot & voicebot: the French touch Most of my clients choose these new platforms for business reasons. My goal is to make them realize that without a positive experience it’s hard to guarantee the adoption of a conversational tool. Power and simplicity—updates to the Office 365 user experience Office is used by more than a billion people every month, so while we’re excited about these changes, we also recognize how important it is to get things right. To guide our work, we came up with “The Three Cs”—a set of guiding principles that we use as a north star. Because these principles will make this process feel different than any previous user experience update, we thought it would be useful to share them with you. Building the Software 2.0 Stack by Andrej Karpathy from Tesla 1.0 is pipelines and stacks, 2.0 is machine-optimized structure and parameters for code
  31. Friday Feed June 22, 2018 The Innovation Stack: How to

    make innovation programs deliver more than coffee cups It starts by understanding the “Innovation Stack” – the hierarchy of innovation efforts that have emerged in large organizations. The stack consists of: Individual Innovation, Innovation Tools and Activities, Team-based Innovation and Operational Innovation. Shortcuts: A New Vision for Siri and iOS Automation In iOS 12, developers can now create their own custom intents based on built-in semantic templates; furthermore, existing SiriKit Intents can break out of the Siri UI and also work as shortcuts in other places such as Spotlight, the Lock screen, and even the Siri watch face. Apple's approach isn't surprising: if iOS apps can have the ability to perform tasks with custom interfaces and responses outside of the main app environment (as is currently possible with SiriKit Intents), why not expand the same functionality to other types of proactive assistance? Designing for Data Visualization IBM designers share the unique challenges and opportunities of designing for data visualization Five ideas that might steer Gawande as CEO of Amazon-backed health company Reducing health care costs, Checklists could be one way to curb medical errors, rethinking how we approach end-of-life care, expanding coverage After 20 years of Salesforce, what Marc Benioff got right and wrong about the cloud As the pace of technological disruption picks up, the previous generation of SaaS companies is facing a future similar to the legacy software providers they once displaced. From mainframes up through cloud-native (and even serverless) computing, the goal for CIOs has always been to strike the right balance between cost, capabilities, control and flexibility. Cloud-native computing, which encompasses a wide variety of IT facets and often emphasizes open-source software, is poised to deliver on these benefits in a manner that can adapt to new trends as they emerge.
  32. Designing for Data Visualization IBM designers share the unique challenges

    and opportunities of designing for data visualization
  33. Friday Feed June 29, 2018 Amazon buys PillPack, an online

    pharmacy, for just under $1B “PillPack makes it simple for any customer to take the right medication at the right time, and feel healthier,” he said in a statement. “Together with Amazon, we are eager to continue working with partners across the healthcare industry to help people throughout the U.S. who can benefit from a better pharmacy experience.” She discovered a secret to cancer growth that could lead to a new class of drugs Now Venkatesh is harnessing tumors’ essentially parasitic behavior within their environment to develop drugs that might neutralize the way they exploit neural networks. These therapies could be pushed into clinics faster than some others because prototypes of such drugs already exist—they were developed for other purposes before scientists found out about their potential in cancer treatment. What Blockchain Can’t Do At the interface between the offline world and its digital representation, the usefulness of the technology still critically depends on trusted intermediaries to effectively bridge the “last mile” between a digital record and a physical individual, business, device, or event. Bias detectives: the researchers striving to make algorithms fair Vaithianathan, who is now in the process of extending her child-abuse prediction model to Douglas and Larimer counties in Colorado, sees value in building better algorithms, even if the overarching system they are embedded in is flawed. That said, “algorithms can’t be helicopter-dropped into these complex systems”, she says: they must be implemented with the help of people who understand the wider context
  34. Friday Feed July 6, 2018 Want to Create Better Products?

    Ban Presentations. Make Everyone Draw Instead of relying on PowerPoints, word documents, and other common presentational tools to guide meetings, team members would be required to sketch their ideas. Metacat: Making Big Data Discoverable and Meaningful at Netflix Given the diverse set of data sources, and to make sure our data platform can interoperate across these data sets as one “single” data warehouse, we built Metacat. In this blog, we will discuss our motivations in building Metacat, a metadata service to make data easy to discover, process and manage. Reaching Peak Meeting Efficiency I’ve endured a lot of bad meetings in my time. I’ve led bad meetings and attended bad meetings. I’ve tried to fix meetings. I’ve broken meetings. This post is about why meetings really are important to getting things done, even with incredibly divergent views on that fact, and why meetings so often go sideways or worse. Manual Work is a Bug This culture can be summarized in two sentences: (1) Every manual action must have a dual purpose of completing a task and improving the system. (2) Manual work should not be tolerated unless it generates an artifact or improves an existing one. The iPad as a fast, precise tool for creativity The Ink & Switch research team set out to explore this question. Our preliminary findings are that a tablet can be a powerful tool for creative tasks.—.but only by challenging some of the design orthodoxies of mobile app development.
  35. Friday Feed July 13, 2018 Good for your health: design

    philosophy from the technology of healing A lot of work is being done to bring design thinking to healthcare. I’d like to explore how healthcare can be a source for design philosophy. Not because healthcare has experience design figured out.—.not by a long shot, obviously. As an industry, healthcare is often rife with misaligned, and even malign incentives that can lead to awful results. But as a discipline of diagnosis, treatment, and prevention, healthcare is the endeavor of healing. Analytics at work: How Netflix’s Customer Obsession Created a Customer Obsession Reed’s aspiration was that the Netflix team would discover what delights customers through the scientific process.—.forming hypotheses through existing data, qualitative, and surveys, and then A/B testing these ideas to see what works. His vision was that product leaders at Netflix would develop remarkable consumer insight, fueled by results and learning from thousands of experiments. Dynamicland Dynamicland is a communal computer, designed for agency, not apps, where people can think like whole humans. -- The computer of the future is not a product, but a place. The App Store turns 10 When Apple introduced the App Store on July 10, 2008 with 500 apps, it ignited a cultural, social and economic phenomenon that changed how people work, play, meet, travel and so much more
  36. Friday Feed The Internet Health Report 2018 Our 2018 compilation

    of research explains what’s helping and what’s hurting the Internet across five issues, from personal experience to global concerns.
  37. Friday Feed August 3, 2018 With Goals, FAST Beats SMART

    The conventional wisdom of goal setting is so deeply ingrained that managers rarely stop to ask a fundamental question — does it work? The traditional approach to goals — the annual cycle, privately set and reviewed goals, and a strong linkage to incentives — can actually undermine the alignment, coordination, and agility that’s needed for a company to execute its strategy. Goals should be embedded in frequent discussions; ambitious in scope; measured by specific metrics and milestones; and transparent for everyone in the organization to see. What do machine learning practitioners actually do? This post is the first in a 3-part series. It will address what it is that machine learning practitioners do, with Part 2 explaining AutoML and neural architecture search (which several high profile figures have suggested will be key to decreasing the need for data scientists) and Part 3 will cover Google’s heavily hyped AutoML product in particular. Hey, data teams - We're working on a tool just for you Meltano aims to be a complete solution for data teams — the name stands for model, extract, load, transform, analyze, notebook, orchestrate — in other words, the data science lifecycle. Data's day of reckoning Data science, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and related technologies are now facing a day of reckoning. It is time for us to take responsibility for our creations. What does it mean to take responsibility for building, maintaining, and managing data, technologies, and services? Responsibility is inevitably tangled with the complex incentives that surround the creation of any product. Portable Cloud Programming with Go Cloud Today, the Go team at Google is releasing a new open source project, Go Cloud, a library and tools for developing on the open cloud. With this project, we aim to make Go the language of choice for developers building portable cloud applications.
  38. Friday Feed August 10, 2018 The $250 Biohack That’s Revolutionizing

    Life With Diabetes Two exhausting years in, Kate found the beginnings of an alternative in an online forum. A loose confederation of do-it-yourselfers were working on a system that would eventually help link an insulin pump to a glucose monitor and connect both to a smartphone app. The idea was that the wearer—or her parents—could track and adjust her blood sugar, in person or from afar. That would mean fewer pinpricks, and far fewer alarms, because her blood sugar would stay out of the danger zone. Most of the time, the contraption would be able to regulate the wearer’s insulin itself. Apple says iOS Health Records has over 75 backers, uses open standards Apple’s initiative to enable iPhone users to securely access and carry their own medical records has continued to expand, as over 75 different health institutions are now supporting it — up from only 12 earlier this year. The company updated its list of medical partners ahead of a speech today by its Clinical and Health Informatics Lead Ricky Bloomfield, M.D., who offered insights into how the feature works for patients and providers. AI can spot the pain from a disease some doctors still think is fake Artificial intelligence, though, has the potential to make a diagnosis in minutes. Last year, researchers used machine learning to distinguish the brain scans of those with fibromyalgia from those without—with 93% accuracy. Why I design in healthcare UX Healthcare is a field where information is of the utmost importance. As a result, the systems and interfaces are information-heavy. It’s a lot like Enterprise UX in this respect where there is a plethora of information (and functions) to pack into a given screen. Adding to the complexity, healthcare is a highly interruptive environment where professionals are often conversing with patients while they attempt to complete a complex task (such as ordering a lab test or medication).
  39. CMU Engineers Find Innovative Way to Make a Low-Cost 3D

    Bioprinter While 3D printers have already caused quite a buzz in the healthcare field — facilitating difficult surgeries and opening the door to low-cost prosthetics — the concept of bioprinting on a large scale has eluded the industry for the most part. But a recent breakthrough from Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Engineering could change all that.
  40. Friday Feed August 17, 2018 Q: Why Do Keynote Speakers

    Keep Suggesting That Improving Security Is Possible? James Mickens of Harvard University performs a funny and entertaining tour-de-force clearly explains concepts of machine learning while pointing out its limits, while exploring the ethics of computer science and startup culture. Clinically applicable deep learning for diagnosis and referral in retinal disease The volume and complexity of diagnostic imaging is increasing at a pace faster than the availability of human expertise to interpret it. Artificial intelligence has shown great promise in classifying two-dimensional photographs of some common diseases and typically relies on databases of millions of annotated images. Until now, the challenge of reaching the performance of expert clinicians in a real-world clinical pathway with three-dimensional diagnostic scans has remained unsolved. Here, we apply a novel deep learning architecture to a clinically heterogeneous set of three-dimensional optical coherence tomography scans from patients referred to a major eye hospital. DeepMind’s AI can detect over 50 eye diseases as accurately as a doctor Step by step, condition by condition, AI systems are slowly learning to diagnose disease as well as any human doctor, and they could soon be working in a hospital near you. The latest example is from London, where researchers from Google’s DeepMind subsidiary, UCL, and Moorfields Eye Hospital have used deep learning to create software that identifies dozens of common eye diseases from 3D scans and then recommends the patient for treatment. CMU's Practical Data Science Course This course provides a practical introduction to the “full stack” of data science analysis, including data collection and processing, data visualization and presentation, statistical model building using machine learning, and big data techniques for scaling these methods Why GE Digital Failed True digital transformation is about rethinking your current business model for the 21st century. The process is not just about adding technology to the existing model. Most companies do the latter, because doing the former is extremely difficult.
  41. Google is building “virtual agents” to handle call centers’ grunt

    work The software is called Contact Center AI, and Google is working with at least a dozen partners, such as Cisco and Vonage, to install “virtual agents” that will be the first to pick up the phone when a customer is routed to a call center. When the customer asks something that the AI can’t do, it will automatically forward the call to a human, according to a blog post by Google Cloud chief scientist Fei-Fei Li. Why Software Development Requires Servant Leaders At its core, servant leadership is about inverting the pyramid of power. Instead of exerting power from the top, servant leaders empower others and enable them from below. 9 Principles of Service Design Often, the design of a service is overlooked by organizations and decisions related to the service supporting a product are not routinely considered in relation to how they impact the overall design of an experience. This results, most often, in poor service design and a poor experience.
  42. Friday Feed August 24, 2018 Meet Bot M.D.— Your A.I.

    Clinical Assistant Bot M.D. provides doctors with a smarter, simpler way to search for the clinical information they need. He also automatically transcribes patient case notes to reduce the amount of time doctors have to spend writing up case reports. Wet lab automation, from experiments to mass production. Control and integrate all the devices in your lab. Focus on doing science rather than managing different lab tools. Beyond Interactive: Notebook Innovation at Netflix Notebooks have rapidly grown in popularity among data scientists to become the de facto standard for quick prototyping and exploratory analysis. At Netflix, we’re pushing the boundaries even further, reimagining what a notebook can be, who can use it, and what they can do with it. And we’re making big investments to help make this vision a reality. Design for People, Use People Language The second unintended consequence is that using shortcut language can lead us to lose sight of what the real end goal is. You start seeing and responding to company problems rather than people problems. What happened when we took a week off of Slack As an experiment, we decided to spend a week without Slack to see how it feels and to hopefully learn a thing or two.
  43. Friday Feed August 31, 2018 To Boost Patient Participation, Clinical

    Trials Come Home Companies are using digital technologies — smartwatches, mobile apps, and wearable biosensors — to conduct virtual trials. Is it the way forward? The university where student loans can pay for tuition, books — and a virtual reality headset At most universities, student loan money helps to pay for tuition, room and board, and textbooks. This semester, biology students at Arizona State University can use those same funds to pay for a new kind of educational tool: virtual reality headsets. Suki is a digital assistant for doctors. Our vision is to rethink health care technology and make it invisible and assistive, allowing doctors to do what they love — take care of patients. How to Run 13 Design Sprints at Once: Inside Maker Week at The New York Times Maker Week is like a hackathon. For one week every summer, folks are encouraged to step away from their regular work (as much as humanly possible at a newspaper) and experiment with new projects. They start on Monday, and on Friday they share prototypes with the company.
  44. Friday Feed September 7, 2018 Artificial intelligence system designs drugs

    from scratch The system is called Reinforcement Learning for Structural Evolution, known as ReLeaSE, and is an algorithm and computer program that comprises two neural networks which can be thought of as a teacher and a student. The teacher knows the syntax and linguistic rules behind the vocabulary of chemical structures for about 1.7 million known biologically active molecules. By working with the teacher, the student learns over time and becomes better at proposing molecules that are likely to be useful as new medicines. Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-07-artificial-intelligence-drugs.html#jCp We trained an algorithm to detect cancer in just two hours This project highlights the major differences between humans and modern AI systems. Humans are very efficient at learning, because we use our pre-existing knowledge as a scaffold...However, the AI system has no way to incorporate knowledge; it can't understand "calcified" as a concept. Since the AI has no concept of what calcium looks like, or that calcified nodules are benign, it needs to build that understanding from many examples. In this case, it took over 50,000 images to learn what a human could learn from a description in a book. Johns Hopkins researchers use deep learning to combat pancreatic cancer Fishman is helping train deep learning algorithms to spot minute textural changes to tissue of the pancreas and nearby organs. These changes often are the first indication of cancer. Deep learning detection methods could mean earlier diagnosis. Fishman estimates that nearly a third of the cases he sees could have been detected four to 12 months sooner. Lehigh research team to investigate a “Google for research data Brian and his Lehigh research team envision a "dataset search engine" that can ultimately assist many kinds of scientists in locating data that they can use to perform exploratory analysis and test hypotheses. Bezos Unbound: Exclusive Interview With The Amazon Founder On What He Plans To Conquer Next "Let's say a junior executive comes up with a new idea that they want to try. They have to convince their boss, their boss's boss, their boss's boss's boss and so on—any 'no' in that chain can kill the whole idea." That's why nimble startups so easily slaughter hidebound dinosaurs:
  45. Friday Feed September 14, 2018 A Battle Plan for a

    War on Rare Diseases Dr. Matthew Might is developing a strategy for people seeking treatments for little-known ailments. The new Apple Watch is going to have more of your health data than your doctor The biggest change to the wearable isn’t the bigger screen or thinner design, but the addition of an FDA-approved electrocardiogram (ECG) that’s built into the device. This means owners of the watch can get hospital-grade heart monitoring in 30 seconds, with the ability to track that heart health over time and export the data as a PDF to share with their doctor. Why an Apple Watch with EKG matters EKG is a serious feature and the next step for Apple as a health company. It can be used to more accurately diagnose or monitor heart disease. Heart disease is the most common cause of death around the world, according to the World Health Organization, so of course companies want to work on a problem that could have a huge impact and be a real moneymaker. Data Genesis: AI's Primordial Soup This talk will examine the data that trains and shapes AI systems. Where does it come from? Who makes it? Who gets to say what it "represents", and what kinds of knowledge and experience are beyond the bounds of such representation? We will look at how close readings of such data might help us better understand issues of bias, fairness, and power at a time when AI systems are making increasingly significant decisions across core social and economic domains. If AI is going to be the world’s doctor, it needs better textbooks “When you actually talk to real doctors and patients, suddenly the things that weren’t apparent to computer scientists working in a basement with data become more evident,”
  46. Library Rules: How to make an open office plan work

    Libraries are full of people working, reading, thinking, studying, writing, contemplating, designing, etc. Yet they’re silent. People are heads down doing independent work. In our opinion, this is the model business, the model office. We pattern our way of working around Library Rules. There Are Now 141 Bio Companies Funded by YC Overall, the breakdown of bio companies at YC is 74% healthcare (34% IT, 28% diagnostics, 24% therapeutics, 14% devices), 16% industrial bio, and 10% food and ag tech.
  47. Friday Feed September 21. 2018 Anatomy of an AI System

    The Amazon Echo as an anatomical map of human labor, data and planetary resources IBM launches cloud tool to detect AI bias and explain automated decisions IBM has launched a software service that scans AI systems as they work in order to detect bias and provide explanations for the automated decisions being made — a degree of transparency that may be necessary for compliance purposes not just a company’s own due diligence. How to design an open office that employees don't hate The firm’s design features smart acoustics to keep things quiet, a communal cafe-like kitchen and library, and a total lack of typical office gimmicks that might keep people around after-hours. The result? While the office’s layout is still an open plan, the ethos is decidedly anti-open office. Designing a place for designers Apple has several products that lead their markets in revenue or profit. What makes Apple Watch different from every other product the company makes, though, is a measure near and dear to the company’s soul by which they cannot claim Apple Watch to be number one: nicest. Apple Watch Series 4 (John Gruber Review) Apple has several products that lead their markets in revenue or profit. What makes Apple Watch different from every other product the company makes, though, is a measure near and dear to the company’s soul by which they cannot claim Apple Watch to be number one: nicest. iOS 12: The MacStories Review After years of unabated visual and functional changes, iOS 12 is Apple's opportunity to regroup and reassess the foundation before the next big step – with one notable exception.
  48. Friday Feed September 28, 2018 The Apple Watch – Tipping

    Point Time for Healthcare Sooner than people think, virtually all home and outpatient diagnostics will be performed by consumer devices such as the Apple Watch, mobile phones, fitness trackers, etc. that have either become FDA cleared as medical devices or have apps that have received FDA clearance. Consumer devices will morph into medical grade devices, with some painful and well publicized mistakes along the way. Where Big Tech Is Placing Bets In Healthcare The healthcare landscape is increasingly shifting from fee-for-service to value-based care. Healthcare startups have reached unicorn status in areas such as health insurance, electronic medical records, telemedicine, and biotechnology. Over the last few years, large tech companies have entered the healthcare sector, increasing internal R&D and private market activity in the space. Machine Learning Confronts the Elephant in the Room “The human visual system says, ‘I don’t have right answer yet, so I have to go backwards to see where I might have made an error,’” ... Most neural networks lack this ability to go backward. It’s a hard trait to engineer. New Microsoft Search, Ideas tap AI to add smart features to Microsoft's Office 365 Essentially auto-generating a PowerPoint presentation using the Ideas tool seems like a powerful addition to your workflow. Google at 20: how two 'obnoxious' students changed the internet https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/sep/24/google-at-20-larry-page-sergey-brin-internet
  49. Friday Feed October 5, 2018 How to deliver on Machine

    Learning projects In this article, we’ll describe our conception of the “OODA Loop” of ML: the ML Engineering Loop, where ML Engineers iteratively: Analyze, Select an approach, Implement, Measure State of the Art: Reproducibility in Artificial Intelligence To quantify the state of reproducibility of empirical AI research using six reproducibility metrics measuring three different degrees of reproducibility. The web is broken, so its founder is taking another stab at it Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist credited with inventing the web in 1989, announced a new project today that he hopes will radically change his creation, by giving people full control over their data. Presentation Matters, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Data Communication It’s less designing to evoke emotion and more designing to best serve the data.—.and the audience.
  50. Friday Feed October 12, 2018 A free, teacher-less university in

    France is schooling thousands of future-proof programmers “We don’t teach anything,” says Nicolas Sadirac, head of École 42. “The students create what they need all the time.” At 8:42 every morning, students get digital projects to complete. They have 48 hours to complete them, so they are always juggling various projects, sort of like in real life. Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals Throughout the reading journey with the book, Cole really taught me how to communicate effectively with data.—.empathy.—.and the very core and fundamentals of data visualization.—.simplicity. How to level up your organization's security expertise There are a number of best practices that can help you level up the overall security expertise in your company through basic and intermediate education, subject matter experts, and knowledge-sharing. Simple diagrams of convoluted neural networks Neural networks are complicated, multidimensional, nonlinear array operations. How can we present a deep learning model architecture in a way that shows key features, while avoiding being too complex or repetitive? Do you need a blockchain? This chart from a rather good US department of Homeland Security report on blockchain shows how rarely it’s needed
  51. Friday Feed October 19, 2018 Your next doctor’s appointment might

    be with an AI A new wave of chatbots are replacing physicians and providing frontline medical advice—but are they as good as the real thing? Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2019 (1) Autonomous things (2) Augmented analytics (3) AI-driven development (4) Digital twins (5) Empowered edge (6) Immersive technologies (7) Blockchain (8) Smart spaces (9) Digital ethics and privacy (10) Quantum computing M.I.T. Plans College for Artificial Intelligence, Backed by $1 Billion The goal of the college, said L. Rafael Reif, the president of M.I.T., is to “educate the bilinguals of the future.” He defines bilinguals as people in fields like biology, chemistry, politics, history and linguistics who are also skilled in the techniques of modern computing that can be applied to them Staying Focused in a Noisy Open Office The open office can be a nightmare, especially when you’re working on something that requires your undivided attention. To make matters worse, your colleagues can be distracting — maybe they’re having loud conversations or their cell phones are constantly chirping. How can you make peace with your open office?
  52. Friday Feed October 26, 2018 Look how far precision medicine

    has come Skeptics say drugs based on genetic insights have underdelivered. But look carefully and they’re everywhere. Tim Cook warns of ‘data-industrial complex’ in call for comprehensive US privacy laws Apple CEO Tim Cook has called for new digital privacy laws in the United States, warning that the collection of huge amounts of personal data by companies is harming society. Uncomplicated Technology, and Why It’s Always Worth Your Money The products that have been most successful, particularly digital products and services, “haven’t been the most advanced, sophisticated or beautiful, necessarily,” he explained, “but they were the ones that understood what consumers wanted to do and enabled them to do it.” Amazon Pharmacy After struggling to get past regulators, the company’s near $1B acquisition of PillPack is a signal that it’s willing to spend significant capital to obtain strategic relationships with both suppliers and pharmacy benefits managers along with statewide pharmacy licenses to sell prescription drugs.
  53. Friday Feed November 2, 2018 In Medical Reporting, the Impact

    of Patients’ Stories A highly unusual response to my article on insurance obstacles to acquiring powerful new cholesterol-lowering drugs came from the very top: the leaders of one of the two companies making the drugs. How to Decide Which Data Science Projects to Pursue In an excellent strategy, the projects will include automation and efficiency and performance improvements, but they will also include projects and ideas for new revenue generation and entirely new businesses driven by your unique data assets. UX Ecosystems in Healthcare A patient with diabetes, for example, will have a minimum of three different physicians on their care team. These physicians may or may not share the same EHR and, thus, may not coordinate care. If that patient is hospitalized, the hospital may have a different care team and use a different EHR as well. Why Walmart and other F500 companies are using virtual reality to train the next generation of American workers Several Fortune 500 companies, such as Boeing, UPS and Walmart, are folding VR into worker-education programs on a wide scale. And some have been happily impressed with the results. "Life happens in 360, not 2D video. We test our associates on the content they see. Those associates who [used] VR as part of their training scored higher than those who didn't."
  54. Friday Feed November 9, 2018 A cure for cancer: how

    to kill a killer “The emergence of cancer immunotherapy has occurred so quickly, it’s hard for scientists, let alone physicians and patients, to keep track of it all,” explains Dr Daniel Chen, a Stanford oncologist and researcher who helped bring some of the new cancer breakthroughs from lab to clinic. “The tidal wave of data is still teaching us fundamental concepts about the interaction of the human immune system and human cancer.” Why Doctors Hate Their Computers Digitization promises to make medical care easier and more efficient. But are screens coming between doctors and patients? The easiest and most effective way to make your colleagues feel happy and safe at work Above any other measure, nearly 40% of American workers surveyed said they feel the greatest sense of belonging and happiness at work when colleagues simply check in with them, asking how they are doing both personally and professionally. A Programmer's Guide to Data Mining The textbook is laid out as a series of small steps that build on each other until, by the time you complete the book, you have laid the foundation for understanding data mining techniques. AI is not “magic dust” for your company, says Google’s Cloud AI boss AI is about using math to make machines make really good decisions. At the moment it has nothing to do with simulating real human intelligence. Once you understand that, it kind of gives you permission to think about how a set of data tools—things like deep learning and auto machine learning and, say, natural language translation—how you can put those into situations where you can solve problems.
  55. Friday Feed November 16, 2018 Johns Hopkins researchers are peering

    into a familiar place to stop multiple sclerosis By measuring the optic nerves in patients, researchers can gauge how much overall neurological damage has occurred in people with MS – bringing doctors closer to a significant advance in halting the progressive disease,...After collecting the data from those optic measurements, Johns Hopkins Medicine worked with Microsoft to apply artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to create individualized treatments for each patient. FDA’s MyStudies Application The FDA MyStudies App is designed to facilitate the input of real world data directly by patients which can be linked to electronic health data supporting traditional clinical trials, pragmatic trials, observational studies and registries. It was developed by the FDA and private sector partners, but open source code and technical documentation are being released to the public, so the app and patient data storage system can be reconfigured by organizations conducting clinical research. Google is absorbing DeepMind’s health care unit to create an ‘AI assistant for nurses and doctors’ DeepMind’s founders said it was a “major milestone” for the company that would help turn its Streams app — which it developed to help the UK’s National Health Service (NHS)— into “an AI-powered assistant for nurses and doctors” that combines “the best algorithms with intuitive design. The Experience Economy That business value is very much predicated on SAP’s nearly fifty year history: the real potential of this deal is tying data from consumers about their experience to actual transaction data, whether that be a purchase or a customer service interaction. Microsoft introduces guidelines for developing responsible conversational AI In general, the guidelines emphasize the development of conversational AI that is responsible and trustworthy from the very beginning of the design process. They encourage companies and organizations to stop and think about how their bot will be used and take the steps necessary to prevent abuse.
  56. Friday Feed November 23, 2018 Internet-era ways of working (1)

    Design for user needs, not organisational convenience (2) Test your riskiest assumptions with actual users (3) The unit of delivery is the empowered, multidisciplinary team (4) Do the hard work to make things simple (5) Staying secure means building for resilience (6) Recognise the duty of care you have to users, and to the data you hold about them (7) Start small and optimise for iteration. Iterate, increment and repeat (8) Make things open; it makes things better (9) Fund product teams, not projects (10) Display a bias towards small pieces of technology, loosely joined (11) Treat data as infrastructure (12) Digital is not just the online channel Why Information Security is Hard – An Economic Perspective In this note, I put forward a contrary view: infor- mation insecurity is at least as much due to perverse incentives. Many of the problems can be explained more clearly and convincingly using the language of microeconomics: network externalities, asymmetric information, moral hazard, adverse selection, liability dumping and the tragedy of the commons. How Dieter Rams’ new advice applies to voice In a new documentary by Gary Hustwit, Rams, Dieter Rams addresses our world that throws away its phones every one or two years for the new release and the world that can’t look away from a screen. He has tweaked his message a bit: “Less would be better everywhere.” How Twitter bots get people to spread fake news To spread misinformation like wildfire, bots will strike a match on social media but then urge people to fan the flames. Managing risk in machine learning So, what skills will be needed in a world where ML models are becoming mission critical? As noted above, fairness audits will require a mix of data and domain experts. But you’ll also need to supplement your data and domain experts with with legal and security experts.
  57. Friday Feed November 30, 2018 The end of the beginning

    Ecommerce is still only a small fraction of retail spending, and many other areas that will be transformed by software and the internet in the next decade or two have barely been touched. ThoughtWorks Technology Radar Vol.19 Sticky Clouds, Lingering Enterprise Anti-Patterns, Enduring Engineering Practices, Pace = Distance / Time AWS Launches, Previews, and Pre-Announcements at re:Invent 2018 A Summary of the blizzard of products announced by Amazon -- notable announcements include support for blockchain, text recognition, time series databases, and data lakes. Design for Everyone: How Universal Design Makes Technology Better for All of Us Creating technology that can be used one-handed, without visual feedback, without auditory feedback, without touch or without focused attention enables your product to be used more widely, in more circumstances, and under more conditions across the spectrum of humanity. This principle is known as universal design, the idea that products, buildings and environments ought to be created to make them accessible to all people, regardless of age, ability or other individuating features.
  58. Friday Feed December 7, 2018 The Apple Watch's ECG app

    and irregular heart rhythm notifications are guardians on your wrist Apple gave me a preview of the ECG app and irregular heart rhythm notifications feature pre-loaded onto a Series 4 loaner unit so I could see for myself how they worked. ...having the two features accessible from my wrist fulfills the device's promise as a wearable companion that's got my back if I were to notice unusual symptoms or signs that could be related to heart problems. AlphaFold: Using AI for scientific discovery With a strongly interdisciplinary approach to our work, DeepMind has brought together experts from the fields of structural biology, physics, and machine learning to apply cutting-edge techniques to predict the 3D structure of a protein based solely on its genetic sequence. The Friendship That Made Google Huge Coding together at the same computer, Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat changed the course of the company—and the Internet. The Problem With Feedback Negative feedback is actually good feedback because it yields greater efficiency and performance. [...] Positive feedback, by contrast, causes the system to keep going, unchecked. Like a thermostat that registers the room as too warm and cranks up the furnace, it’s generally meant to be avoided. Building a Language and Compiler for Machine Learning This post, based on our paper to be presented at NeurIPS MLSys, will explore how we have used Julia to re-think ML tooling from the ground up, and provides some insight into the work that modern ML tools need to do.
  59. Friday Feed December 14, 2018 AI INDEX 2018 The AI

    Index is an effort to track, collate, distill, and visualize data relating to artificial intelligence. It aspires to be a comprehensive resource of data and analysis for policymakers, researchers, executives, journalists, and the general public to develop intuitions about the complex field of AI. The State of Technology at the End of 2018 This article is a bit of an annual tradition: in mid-December I summarize the state of technology,and appropriately enough, this year’s edition coincides with a tech executive testifying in front of Congress. Computing is Everywhere: Bret Victor and Dynamicland This week Paul Ford and Rich Ziade sit down with Bret Victor to talk to about Dynamicland.—.a non-profit that’s inventing a new computational medium, where people work together with real objects in the real world. We chat about the tech behind Dynamicland, the importance of creating intentional communities, and how a culture of secrecy at Apple inspired a life-long vision of community computing. Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night, and They’re Not Keeping It Secret Dozens of companies use smartphone locations to help advertisers and even hedge funds. They say it’s anonymous, but the data shows how personal it is. Evelyn Berezin, 93, Dies; Built the First True Word Processor Without Ms. Berezin, he added enthusiastically, “there would be no Bill Gates, no Steve Jobs, no internet, no word processors, no spreadsheets; nothing that remotely connects business with the 21st century.”
  60. Friday Feed December 21, 2018 Inside AWS: Technology Choices for

    Modern Applications Join Tim Bray, Senior Principal Engineer, to hear about the high-level choices that developers at AWS and our customers have to make. Here are a few: Are microservices always the way to go? Serverless, containers, or serverless containers? Is relational over? Is Java over? The talk is technical and based on our experience in building AWS services and working with customers on their cloud-native apps. Serverless Computing: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back Serverless computing offers the potential to program the cloud in an autoscaling, pay-as-you go manner. In this paper we address critical gaps in first-generation serverless computing, which place its autoscaling potential at odds with dominant trends in modern computing: notably data-centric and distributed computing, but also open source and custom hardware. A Computer of One's Own Pioneers of the Computing Age Get Smarter with Data Science.—.Tackling Real Enterprise Challenges Typically, most of my articles are hands-on oriented, targeted towards people building systems and actually doing data science. However, this guide is aimed at a broader audience including executives, business, architects, analysts, engineers and data scientists.
  61. Friday Feed December 28, 2018 The Machine Learning Race Is

    Really a Data Race Organizations that hope to make AI a differentiator need to draw from alternative data sets — ones they may have to create themselves. The China Issue Genes, chips, qbits, rockets, reactors, surveillance and sand - the tools of a rising superpower Best Data Visualization Projects of 2018 visualization that matured over the years and developed into a medium rather than a form of commercial eye candy. There’s less focus on visualization the tool and more focus on how to use the tools. That’s a good thing. The 10 most intriguing inventions of 2018 From programmable pills to power-generating boots, here are some of the most unusual technological innovations we covered this year.