Picture, if you will, the labyrinthine world of academic information management, where metadata schema mapping serves as a vital underpinning for the exchange and intermingling of data across diverse platforms and systems. This arena has long been dominated by the venerable metadata schema crosswalk, which, though serviceable, has begun to show its age.
There’s a notion in artificial intelligence known as Moravec’s paradox: it’s relatively easy to teach a computer to play chess or checkers at a pretty decent level, but near impossible to teach it something as trivial as bipedal motion. (Hassabis 2017) The sensorimotor tasks that our truly wonderful brains have mastered by our second birthday are much harder to teach a computer than something arguably as ‘complex’ as beating a chess grandmaster.
In a recent paper that has attracted the interest of popular media as well, Fabio Urbina and colleagues examined the use (or rather, the abuse) of computational chemistry models of toxicity for generating toxic compounds and potential chemical agent candidates.(Urbina et al. 2022) Urbina and colleagues conclude that Urbina, Fabio, Filippa Lentzos, Cédric Invernizzi, and Sean Ekins. 2022.
Markus Strasser (@mkstra write a fascinating article entitled "The Business of Extracting Knowledge from Academic Publications". His TL;DR: After recounting the many problems of knowledge extraction - including a swipe at nanopubs which "are ... dead in my view (without admitting it)" - he concludes: Well worth a read, and much food for thought.
Published today in GigaScience is a Data Note describing the National COVID-19 Chest Imaging Database (NCCID), a centralised database containing chest X-rays, Computed Tomography (CT) and MRI scans from patients across the UK. Utilising the UK National Health Service’s unique position as the world’s single largest integrated healthcare system, the benefits of collecting chest imaging data this large are extensive and already being used
A new article published today in GigaScience demonstrates that machine learning can yield “proxy measures” for brain-related health issues from large population data, without the need for a specialist’s assessment.
Came across Microsoft's announcement of a "A planetary computer for a sustainable future through the power of AI", complete with a glossy video featuring Lucas Joppa @lucasjoppa (see also @Microsoft_Green and #AIforEarth). On the one hand it's great to see super smart people with lots of resources tackling important questions, but it's hard not to escape the feeling that this is the classic technology company approach of framing difficult
Editors: Mark Wass (University of Kent, UK), Iddo Friedberg (Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, USA), Predrag Radivojac (Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA) A key to understanding life at the molecular level is based on accurate protein annotation at the functional level.
Editors: Mark Wass (University of Kent, UK), Iddo Friedberg (Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, USA), Predrag Radivojac (Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA) To tie in with the upcoming Automated Function Prediction Special Interest Group (AFP-SIG) at the ISMB/ECCB 2013 meeting in Berlin, GigaScience and the organisers are launching a call for submissions to a thematic series of research from the
This year is the “Year of Neuroscience” in Spain. As a part of this educational movement and celebration of the most recent flowering of Spanish neuroscience, Barcelona hosted the FENS Forum of Neuroscience. Drawing what the Chair of the Host Committee, Mara Dierssen, described as the largest number of attendees ever, the 8 th FENS meeting fostered cross-disciplinary discussion and showcased some of the field’s best science.