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. How could bacteria be altering the brain? The brain is the most complex object in the known universe so how could it be reacting to bacteria in the gut? One route is the vagus nerve, it’s an information superhighway connecting the brain and the gut.
Read moreUSING 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.
Read moreTRANSFER 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. This blog post is intended to give you an overview of what Transfer Learning is, how it works, why you should use it and when you can use it. It will introduce you to the different approaches of Transfer Learning and provide you with some resources on already pre-trained models. In Transfer Learning, the knowledge of an already trained Machine Learning model is applied to a different but related problem.
Read moreA 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. As people played the game, those 1’s and 0’s they’d press would change the detector settings on each of the experiments across the world. So they designed a videogame with six levels. In the first level, you press 1’s and 0’s to navigate through a city.
Read moreAN INTRODUCTION TO HASHING IN THE ERA OF MACHINE LEARNING
In December 2017, researchers at Google and MIT published a provocative research paper about their efforts into “learned index structures”. The research is quite exciting, as the authors state in the abstract: Indeed the results presented by the team of Google and MIT researchers includes findings that could signal new competition for the most venerable stalwarts in the world of indexing: the B-Tree and the Hash Map. The engineering community is ever abuzz about the future of machine learning; as such the research paper has made its rounds on Hacker News, Reddit, and through the halls of engineering communities worldwide.
Read moreWHAT’S NEW IN DEEP LEARNING RESEARCH: INSIDE GOOGLE’S SEMANTIC EXPERIENCES
Last week Google Research made news with the release of Semantic Experiences, a website that serves as a playground to evaluate some of the new advancements in natural language understanding(NLU) technologies. The initial release included two pseudo-games that illustrates the practical viability of some of Google’s latest NLU research. The second initiatives included in Semantic Experiences is Semantris, a game powered by machine learning, where you type out words associated with a given prompt.
Read moreTHE 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. While I was familiar with the results/methods in both cases, the representations came as a complete surprise. The 3Blue1Brown videos are far from perfect (they proceed at a cadence that sometimes proves frustrating, lack interaction and, in the most recent example, may be of little use to the colour-blind), yet they remind us that our understanding of mathematics will never be complete. However well you think you understand a concept, there will always be new representations to deepen your thinking and force you to confront familiar truths in unfamiliar ways.
Read moreMACHINE 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. Source: towardsdatascience.com
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. For a few years this was the way to solve sequence learning, sequence translation (seq2seq), which also resulted in amazing results in speech to text comprehension and the raise of Siri, Cortana, Google voice assistant, Alexa. Also let us not forget machine translation, which resulted in the ability to translate documents into different languages or neural machine translation, but also translate images into text, text into images, and captioning video, and… well you got the idea. Then in the following years (2015–16) came ResNet and Attention.
Read moreDNA OF EVERY BABY BORN IN CALIFORNIA IS STORED. WHO HAS ACCESS TO IT?
You probably know where your Social Security card, birth certificate and other sensitive information is being stored, but what about your genetic material? If you or your child was born in California after 1983, your DNA is likely being stored by the government, may be available to law enforcement and may even be in the hands of outside researchers, CBS San Francisco’s Julie Watts reports. Like many states, California collects bio-samples from every child born in the state.
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