How to Operate Your Smart Watch with the Same Hand That Wears It
Researchers used a smart watch’s existing sensors to add gesture controls like pinching and waving.
Showing posts with label Technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Technology. Show all posts
Better Than Opioids? Virtual Reality Could Be Your Next Painkiller
TechnologyBetter Than Opioids? Virtual Reality Could Be Your Next Painkiller
In one study, virtual reality did about as well as narcotics in reducing pain.
What Yahoo Got Right!
TechnologyWhat Yahoo Got Right!
The company may have failed, but not everything it did was a bad idea.
News that Yahoo’s Internet business will be sold to Verizon for $4.8 billion marks the end of the failed effort by CEO Marissa Mayer to revive a company widely seen as dysfunctional and outdated. But the history books will also record that Yahoo made lasting contributions to how the Internet works. Here are three things Yahoo got right.
THE FINANCIAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE INTERNET
Yahoo was incorporated early in 1995, and by late the next year turned its first profit—a timeline just about unthinkable for an Internet startup today. The company grew profits and revenues fast in its early years by helping establish the basics of online advertising, the business model that dominates the Internet. One example is how in 1996 Yahoo agreed to charge consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble only when people clicked on ads, not just when an ad was displayed, an early move toward the complex tracking and targeting used by online ads today.
BIG DATA PLUMBING THAT KEEPS THE WORLD RUNNING
Facebook, the U.S. government, and countless other organizations rely on software gifted to the world by Yahoo to manage and analyze giant data stores. Hadoop, as the software is called, started life in 2006, when Yahoo hired two software engineers working on a new system for big data inspired by white papers released by Google. Before long Yahoo was using Hadoop internally, and in 2008 the company released the software as an open-source project. Many companies have since been built on Hadoop, or built to sell services based on it. Intel, Google, and T. Rowe Price have all invested in one leading Hadoop company,Cloudera, which is valued at roughly $4 billion—about the same as the parts of Yahoo being acquired by Verizon.
SPOTTING THE VAST POTENTIAL OF THE CHINESE INTERNET
In 2005 Yahoo cofounder and CEO Jerry Yang made a risky looking $1 billion investment that has been called the most lucrative in Silicon Valley history. He bought 40 percent of a small Chinese e-commerce startup called Alibaba, which in the years since has grown into the world’s largest retailer. Yang’s bet on Alibaba has helped keep Yahoo afloat in recent years, but ultimately forced this week’s sale to Verizon. The roughly $25 billion stake in Alibaba dwarfs the company’s other assets and businesses. But Yang’s investment in the company was smart because he correctly identified a huge trend in the future of the Internet. Companies such as Alibaba and Baidu that grew up with China’s vast Internet population are increasingly looking to expand beyond the country’s borders.
Poop Pill’s Surprise Failure Shows That the Microbiome Is Still a Mystery
TechnologyPoop Pill’s Surprise Failure Shows That the Microbiome Is Still a Mystery
Pills containing fecal bacteria looked like they could cure an infection that kills thousands of people every year in the U.S.
The human microbiome remains a mystery. That is the hard lesson to take from Seres Therapeutics’s shocking announcement today that its experiment in using gut bacteria to treat a deadly infection has failed.
Data published earlier this year by Seres suggested its pill for treating cases of Costridium difficile could radically alter treatment of the gastrointestinal illness that in 2011 claimed 29,000 lives in the U.S. That made the company one of the most promising in a field of biotech startups hoping to harness some of the trillions of bacteria living on or in the human body to treat disease.
Seres’s drug, SER-109, is designed to treat patients with recurring C. difficile infections, which can be hard to treat. Antibiotics can sometimes worsen the condition by killing good bacteria and allowing C. difficile to thrive.
Previously, researchers demonstrated that a fecal transplant—taking a healthy person’s stool and putting it in another person—results in a remarkably successful treatment of C. difficile infections. But scientists don’t really know why it works.
The ick factor of receiving a fecal enema resulted in the creation of thenonprofit stool bank OpenBiome, which aimed to create pills that could be taken orally instead. Seres Therapeutics took the idea a step further by creating the SER-109 pill. Here, spores from good bacterial species are isolated and encapsulated in pill form, while disease-spreading microbes like Listeria and Salmonella are eliminated.
The goal is to reintroduce the diverse population of microbes that normally live in the gut, which is disrupted during a C. difficile infection. Researchers from Seres Therapeutics, the Mayo Clinic, and Massachusetts General Hospital published a paper in the Journal of Infectious Diseases earlier this year saying that the SER-109 treatment was effective for preventing C. difficile infections in an early stage trial.
But results from a more advanced trial released today indicate that there was no significant difference in the outcome of patients receiving the therapy compared to those who got a placebo. In a press release, Seres noted this was “inconsistent” with their expectations.
The microbiome is having a moment, as biotech firms like Vedanta Biosciences, Synlogic, Second Genome, Enterome, and others are all working on therapies centered around human-hosted bacteria. Seres Therapeutics themselves received $120 million in funding from Nestléand had a market capitalization of $1.4 billion before its stock fell 78 percent on the news of the failed trial. The company has two other treatments in clinical trials—one for ulcerative colitis and a second C. difficile medication.
SER-109’s surprising flop is a humbling reminder of the microbiome’s complexity. But even if the treatment had been successful, its creators would’ve been hard-pressed to present a concrete reason why. Many microbiologists have called for a healthy dose of skepticism in microbiome studies. Its potential may be great, but for now it looks like the good old-fashioned fecal transplants still have the drugs beat out.
Glaxo and Verily Join Forces to Treat Disease By Hacking Your Nervous System
TechnologyGlaxo and Verily Join Forces to Treat Disease By Hacking Your Nervous System
Small implantable devices would treat people by blocking or altering signals sent from the brain.
GlaxoSmithKline and Google’s life sciences spin-off, Verily, are jointly funding a new venture that will investigate how tiny bioelectronic devices can be used to modify nerve signals and treat chronic diseases.
The pair are investing $715 million over the next seven years to fund the company, which will be known as Galvani Bioelectronics. (Luigi Galvani discovered what he called “animal electricity” in 1780.) With research centers in San Francisco and GSK’s bioscience hub in the U.K., the new company will investigate how to create small, implantable electronic systems that can be used to correct irregular nerve impulses.
The devices—sometimes referred to as electroceuticals—place a small sheath around a bundle of nerves. There, a miniature piece of hardware can be used to block or alter signals passing through the nerve fibers. That ability makes it possible to override or augment signals from the brain in order to control the organs at the end of the nerve to treat disease.
Kris Famm, GSK's head of bioelectronics research and the new president of Galvani Bioelectronics, told Reuters that the first such devices may be the size of a pill, while later iterations could be as small as a grain of rice. The company’s goal is to ready its first devices for regulatory approval within the seven years of funding.
Currently, however, there are no specific product plans for Galvani Bioelectronics. A spokesperson from GSK told MIT Technology Reviewthat the company will look to “tackle a wide range of chronic diseases that are inflammatory, metabolic and endocrine disorders, which includes Type 2 diabetes, but nothing more specific yet.”
GSK already has experience in the area of electroceuticals. Moncef Slaoui, chairman of vaccines at GSK and the chair of the new company’s board, publicly acknowledged GSK’s involvement in the field in a 2013 Nature paper. It now funds as many as 80 external researchers working in the area, according to Bloomberg. Verily is a newcomer to electrified medicine, but has been ambitious in its other ventures, which include embeddable glucose sensors and an electronic contact lens for diabetes patients.
All that said, Galvani Bioelectronics is working in a relatively young field that Slaoui himself only became convinced by in 2012. In a New York Times article, he explained that his initial reaction to the suggestion that the nervous system could be hacked to treat disease was one of suspicion. “C’mon? You’re gonna give a shock and it changes the immune system? I was very skeptical,” he explained.
Clearly, both Verily and GSK have been won over by the approach. Now Galvani Bioelectronics just has to show that their confidence is well-placed.
Artificial Pancreas Is First To Raise $1 Million Under New Crowdfunding Rules
TechnologyArtificial Pancreas Is First To Raise $1 Million Under New Crowdfunding Rules
When Beta Bionics needed idealistic investors it found them on the Web.
23andMe Pulls Off Massive Crowdsourced Depression Study
Technology23andMe Pulls Off Massive Crowdsourced Depression Study
Trove of consumer gene data yields breakthrough in search for depression genes.
A scientific expedition into the DNA of more than 400,000 customers of gene-testing company 23andMe has uncovered the first major trove of genetic clues to the cause of depression.
The study, the largest of its kind, detected 15 regions of human genome linked to a higher risk of struggling with serious depression. The study was carried out by drug giant Pfizer as part of an alliance with 23andMe, the California company whose gene reports have been purchased by more than 1.2 million people.
So far the vast majority of efforts to locate genetic risks for depression have failed, probably because the efforts have been too small to find anything.
“Everyone is recognizing that this is a numbers problem,” says Ashley Winslow, formerly a neuroscientist at Pfizer and now the director of neurogenetics at the Orphan Disease Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Winslow led the research effort. “It’s hard if not impossible to get to the numbers that we saw in the 23andMe study.”
The results emerged from what is termed a “genome-wide association study.” In this approach, the DNA of many people with a disease is compared to that of healthy controls, using a computerized search. Any genetic differences appearing more often in sick people can hint at what genes are involved.
This gene-hunting tactic has led to important insights into diabetes, schizophrenia, and other common diseases. But depression has remained mostly untouched, until now. Previously, a study in 6,000 severely depressed Chinese women located two signals in the genome, but other surveys came up empty.
“The big story is that 23andMe got us over the inflection point for depression,” says Douglas Levinson, a psychiatrist and gene researcher at Stanford University involved with the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, another gene-hunting group. “That is exciting. It makes us optimistic that we are finally there.”
23andMe has sold more than a million gene-test kits. The product, costing $199, is mostly for entertainment, like finding out about one’s ethnic background. But more than half of its customers have agreed to allow their DNA to be used in further research and answer survey questions about their health.
Through its surveys, the company was able to locate more than 141,000 people who said they’d been diagnosed with depression. That is about 10 times more than the next-largest depression study ever carried out, says Levinson.
The need for ever larger databases is keenly felt by geneticists. At their urging, the U.S. government this year began implementing plans for a million-person precision medicine database. The genetic risk for depression is actually due to hundreds of genes, each having a very small effect.
The authors of the report called the finding an endorsement of 23andMe’s data. But Levinson noted that depression is also the perfect test case for a consumer database. It’s a common disease and no longer highly stigmatized, so people are willing to say they have it. “It they tried to do it in schizophrenia or anorexia they’d probably fail,” says Levinson. “That’s the caveat here.”
China Gives Ride-Hailing a Green Light
TechnologyChina Gives Ride-Hailing a Green Light
New guidelines finally confirm the legal status of Uber and its rivals in China, but it’s unlikely that drivers will be considered full employees.
The Chinese government has issued new regulations that confirm the legal status of the ride-hailing industry in the country.
New documents issued by China’s Cabinet describe a series of broad guidelines about the ways in which ride-hailing operations should be run. Meanwhile, finer details will be left to cities to determine.
Until now, Uber and its rivals—chief among them the homegrown Chinese company Didi Chuxing, which significantly outperforms the U.S. company—have operated in a legal gray area in many regions of China. As such, they’ve been left wide open to legal disputes. Last year, for instance, Uber’s Guangzhou offices were raided over claims that the company was running unlicensed taxi operations.
Vice Minister of Transportation Liu Xiaoming explained to Reuters that “in managing online ride hailing, on the one hand we want to promote its development, on the other hand we want to regulate its behavior.”
Many of the rules will be welcomed by riders. Drivers will be expected to: pass a crime check, have three years of driving experience, and be using a vehicle that’s less than eight years old and with under 370,000 miles on the clock. Cities, meanwhile, may place limits on pricing or specify that drivers use only certain types of vehicles.
Some critics, however, may argue that the rules don’t do enough to protect workers. Just as in the U.S., Uber and Didi Chuxing treat drivers in China as contractors. In a previous draft of the new guidelines, it was proposed that ride-hailing companies would have to sign agreements with drivers that registered them as employees. The new rules, however, explain that different types of labor contracts will be permitted, suggesting that the companies may still be able to avoid providing workers with, say, vacation time or sick leave.
Responding to the news, Uber referred to it as a "welcome step" that would send a "message of support for ride-sharing and the benefits that it offers riders, drivers, and cities." Didi Chuxing, meanwhile, simply said that it will make an "earnest effort" to comply with the new regulations.
Didi Chuxing can perhaps afford to sound relaxed. It’s thought to command around 87 percent of the private car-hailing business in China, and it recently received $1 billion in funding from Apple. Uber, meanwhile, has admitted that it’s losing $1 billion a year in China.
With new regulations in place, the pair will hope to avoid scuffles with lawmakers and instead concentrate on the task at hand. For Uber, though, that still involves a lot of catch-up.
Google and Microsoft Want Every Company to Scrutinize You with AI
TechnologyGoogle and Microsoft Want Every Company to Scrutinize You with AI
The tech giants are eager to rent out their AI breakthroughs to other companies.
When some patients of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in New Hampshire step on their bathroom scale at home, Microsoft’s computers know about it. The corporation’s machines also get blood pressure readings taken at home. And they can even listen to calls between nurses and patients to gauge a person’s emotional state. Microsoft’s artificial intelligence software parses that data to try and warn patients and staff of emerging health problems before any human notices.
The hospital is previewing both the future of health care and of Microsoft’s business. It’s using a suite of new “cognitive” services recently added to Microsoft’s cloud computing service, called Azure. The company says renting out its machine-learning technology will unlock new profits, and enable companies of all kinds to subject their data—and customers—to artificial-intelligence techniques previously limited to computing giants.
“Customers are going to mature from classic cloud services to services that use elements of machine learning and AI,” says Herain Oberoi, director of product management at Microsoft, who oversees the company’s cloud machine-learning services. “Every company I talk with has someone extremely senior tasked with thinking about how to make this technology work for them.”
Microsoft’s competitors Google, IBM, and Amazon are making the same bet. Google announced in June that it had invented a new kind of chip to accelerate machine-learning software and make its cloud services more competitive. The company lags Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud market, and CEO Sundar Pichai has said machine-learning services provide a way for Google to differentiate itself. Amazon’s cloud division, Amazon Web Services, launched its first machine-learning cloud services last year, and in June the group’s head, Andy Jassy, pledged to expand them significantly in the coming months.
Amazon and its largest competitors stepped up their investments in machine-learning technology in recent years after breakthroughs in software that can be trained to do tasks such as interpret photos or speech (see “10 Breakthrough Technologies 2013: Deep Learning”).
Some of the first consumer products to take advantage of those breakthroughs were Amazon’s Alexa voice-operated home assistant and Google’s new Photos service, which understands the content of images and has more than 200 million users. Adding machine learning to the cloud services that corporations already use to outsource tasks such as data storage and analysis is seen as another way to extract money from the technology and enhance the very lucrative market. IDC estimates that corporations spent almost $70 billion with cloud providers last year, and predicts that will double before the end of the decade.
Rob Craft, who leads product management for Google's cloud machine-learning offerings, says that most companies are in a position to benefit from machine learning right away because they have a lot of data on hand about their operations, business, and customers. “Our goal is to help them have more direct value from that data,” he says.
The most straightforward of the new services offered by Google and others do things like describe the content of images, transcribe audio files such as phone calls, extract key terms from text, or translate text between languages. Although seen as lagging behind Google in machine-learning technology, Microsoft and IBM have so far rolled out the broadest range of such services, known as APIs.
Microsoft has an API that tries to decipher facial expressions, for example. IBM has one that assesses the personality of the author of text such as social media posts. Marketing company Influential uses it to help brands such as Corona and Red Bull identify the most useful social media users for promotional efforts. Different APIs can be combined. For example, a company could set up a system that spots its logo in social media images, notes the facial expression of any people in the photo, and extracts key terms from any accompanying text.
Many key software components needed to build the kind of machine-learning systems that Google and others hope will be so valuable are free (see “Facebook Joins Stampede of Tech Giants Giving Away AI Technology”). But Jimoh Ovbiagele, cofounder and chief technology officer at startup ROSS Intelligence, which provides software that speeds up legal research to major law firms, says that the time and expense of building and operating a top-notch machine-learning system means many companies are better off renting the technology.
“It makes sense to stand on the shoulders of giants,” says Ovbiagele. ROSS’s ability to understand legal questions is built on IBM’s suite of language processing technology, some of which originated with the Watson computer that beat two Jeopardy! champions in 2011.
Chris Curran, chief technologist with PwC, says most large corporations are still far from ready to spend significantly on machine-learning services, though. He estimates about three quarters are in “watch and learn” mode, waiting to see what these new capabilities offer.
And while the new services from Microsoft and others make it easy for non-technology companies like Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center to use preprogrammed machine-learning systems, the technology is most valuable when customized for an organization’s specific needs, says Curran. Google and Microsoft’s image APIs are good at general assessments, such as whether a photo contains a cat or a skyscraper, for example. But a food manufacturer would get more value from a vision system able to spot specific defects in items on its production line.
All the cloud providers either already offer or have promised ways for customers to train algorithms on their own data, for their own problems. But creating customized artificial intelligence software can only be made so easy, says Curran. “You need to have the right people and expertise, and those are in short supply,” he says.
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