News

The Microbiome is the Fundamental Future of Personalized Medicine

If anything makes us human it’s our minds, thoughts and emotions. And yet a controversial new concept is emerging that claims gut bacteria are an invisible hand altering our brains. Science is piecing together how the trillions of microbes that live on and in all of us—our microbiome—affect our physical health.

Using CRISPR to edit coral

The work was published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Phillip Cleves, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford and coral enthusiast, is first author on the study. Cleves and his collaborators were able to use CRISPR to successfully introduce mutations to three genes (red fluorescent protein, green fluorescent protein and fibroblast growth factor 1a, a gene that is thought to help regulate new coral colonization) in a specific type of coral, Acropora millepora, definitively showing for the first time that the gene-editing technology could be successful in coral species.

Transfer Learning

Transfer Learning is the reuse of a pre-trained model on a new problem. It is currently very popular in the field of Deep Learning because it enables you to train Deep Neural Networks with comparatively little data. This is very useful since most real-world problems typically do not have millions of labeled data points to train such complex models.

A videogame that powers quantum entanglement experiments

The random number generator Abellan wanted to use? Randos online. His group would design a game that used the 1 and 0 keys on a phone or computer keyboard as controller buttons.

An Introduction to Hashing in the Era of Machine Learning

What’s New in Deep Learning Research: Inside Google’s Semantic Experiences

The best representations of mathematics may not exist yet

Humility. It’s all I can feel after watching 3Blue1Brown’s latest maths video, in which Grant Sanderson and his team provide the most novel of approaches to solving 2D equations, using colour. It is the second time 3Blue1Brown has blown my mind to pieces in just a few weeks, following their earlier video that solved the Basel problem with light.

Machine Learning for Text Classification Using SpaCy in Python

spaCy is a popular and easy-to-use natural language processing library in Python. It provides current state-of-the-art accuracy and speed levels, and has an active open source community. However, since SpaCy is a relative new NLP library, and it’s not as widely adopted as NLTK.

The fall of RNN / LSTM

It is the year 2014 and LSTM and RNN make a great come-back from the dead. We all read Colah’s blog and Karpathy’s ode to RNN. But we were all young and unexperienced.

DNA of every baby born in California is stored. Who has access to it?