Wednesday 8 May 2019

Researchers make transformational AI seem 'unremarkable'

Physicians making life-and-death decisions about organ transplants, cancer treatments or heart surgeries typically don't give much thought to how artificial intelligence might help them. And that's how researchers at Carnegie Mellon University say clinical AI tools should be designed—so doctors don't need to think about them.

* This article was originally published here

An approach for securing audio classification against adversarial attacks

Adversarial audio attacks are small perturbations that are not perceivable by humans and are intentionally added to audio signals to impair the performance of machine learning (ML) models. These attacks raise serious concerns about the security of ML models, as they can cause them to make mistakes and ultimately generate wrong predictions.

* This article was originally published here

Researchers develop biomarkers, blood test that shows MS patients in relapse

Dr. Horea Rus is an expert in diagnosing and treating patients with multiple sclerosis, and his research laboratory at the University of Maryland is producing new tools for treating the disease that attacks the central nervous system.

* This article was originally published here

Researchers make soft, actuated objects using commercial knitting machines

Carnegie Mellon University researchers have used computationally controlled knitting machines to create plush toys and other knitted objects that are actuated by tendons. It's an approach they say might someday be used to cost-effectively make soft robots and wearable technologies.

* This article was originally published here

Google bucks soaring smartphone prices with new Pixel

Google bucked the soaring smartphone price trend Tuesday, unveiling a high-performance Pixel handset aimed at the middle of the market as part of a wide-ranging pitch to developers of its new hardware, software and privacy efforts.

* This article was originally published here

Behold the mayo: Experiments reveal 'instability threshold' of elastic-plastic material

Arindam Banerjee, an associate professor of mechanical engineering and mechanics at Lehigh University, studies the dynamics of materials in extreme environments. He and his team have built several devices to effectively investigate the dynamics of fluids and other materials under the influence of high acceleration and centrifugal force.

* This article was originally published here

Physical and mental health of seniors linked to optimism, wisdom and loneliness

Ten thousand Baby Boomers turn 65 every day. By 2029, the entire generation born between 1946 and 1964 will be at least that old. What happens next concerns millions of Americans.

* This article was originally published here

'Good enough' parenting is good enough, new research says

What really matters in caring for babies may be different than commonly thought, says Lehigh University researcher Susan S. Woodhouse, an expert on infant attachment. In new research, she finds that caregivers need only "get it right" 50 percent of the time when responding to babies' need for attachment to have a positive impact on a baby. Securely attached infants are more likely to have better outcomes in childhood and adulthood, and based on Woodhouse's potentially paradigm-shifting work, there is more than one way to get there, particularly for low socioeconomic-status families.

* This article was originally published here

Research could lead to more precise diagnosis and treatment of ovarian cancer

Oncologists may soon have an accurate and inexpensive way of differentiating between types of ovarian cancer that will improve how patients are treated, thanks to findings from a national research study co-led out of the University of Alberta.

* This article was originally published here

Statewide initiative doubles survival rates after severe TBI

The implementation of a massive, statewide public health initiative led by University of Arizona researchers and involving 21,000 prehospital care patients has doubled the survival rate of severe traumatic brain injury victims and tripled the survival rate among those who were intubated.

* This article was originally published here

Drones to deliver incessant buzzing noise, and packages

A sister company of Google, Alphabet's Wing Aviation, just got federal approval to start using drones for commercial delivery. Amazon's own drone-delivery program is ready to launch as well. As drones take flight, the world is about to get a lot louder – as if neighborhoods were filled with leaf blowers, lawn mowers and chainsaws.

* This article was originally published here

Complex geology contributed to Deepwater Horizon disaster, new study finds

A study from The University of Texas at Austin is the first published in a scientific journal to take an in-depth look at the challenging geologic conditions faced by the crew of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and the role those conditions played in the 2010 disaster.

* This article was originally published here

Fighting food waste by finding ways to use the useless

Every Thursday and Sunday I walk my frozen banana peels and carrot tops to Columbia's farmers market. It's my small effort to combat food waste, which happens from production to retail to consumption. At the production level, farmers cannot always sell their produce due to surplus. Produce makes it to the retail level can end up being wasted due to imperfections and oversupply. And as consumers, our eyes are often bigger than our stomachs. This leads to a large amount of food being tossed into the garbage. Even though this food is never eaten, the carbon emissions to grow it still end up in the atmosphere and resources are still wasted. Reducing waste at each of these levels is crucial to fighting climate change.

* This article was originally published here

dnDSA and ethnicity linked with thickening of blood vessels after kidney transplant

Children who developed anti-human leukocyte antibodies against their donor kidney, known as de novo donor-specific antibodies (dnDSA), after kidney transplant were more likely to experience carotid intima-media thickening (CIMT) than those without these antibodies, according to preliminary research presented May 7, 2019, during the 10th Congress of the International Pediatric Transplant Association.

* This article was originally published here

Seed abortion and the role of RNA Pol IV in seed development

ASPB is pleased to announce the publication in The Plant Cell of important research that explores the cause of seed abortion and the role of the enzyme RNA Pol IV to understand how seed development works.

* This article was originally published here

No developmental differences in children conceived via assisted reproductive technology

Parents with children conceived via IVF, IUI or using infertility medication can rest assured that treatment has no impact on childhood development.

* This article was originally published here

Experimental cosmologist group launches its first iterations of space-traveling 'wafercraft'

These are the adventures of the "StarChip Wafersize."

* This article was originally published here

Smarter training of neural networks

These days, nearly all the artificial intelligence-based products in our lives rely on "deep neural networks" that automatically learn to process labeled data.

* This article was originally published here