10 Bits: the Data News Hotlist – Center for Data Innovation

This week’s list of data news highlights covers May 23-May 29, 2020, and includes articles about delivering medical supplies via drone and using a supercomputer to simulate the impact of the asteroid that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Researchers from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence have developed an AI-enabled tool that can analyze if studies concerning coronavirus follow scientific consensus. The researchers trained the tool on a fact-checking dataset from Wikipedia and another dataset that contained more than 1,400 scientific claims. Individuals can use the tool to search phrases such as “the coronavirus cannot thrive in warmer climates,” and it will provide papers supporting or refuting the assertion. 

Researchers from Seattle Children’s Research Institute, a pediatric research center, and Prevencio, a U.S. life sciences company, are developing a tool that uses machine learning to diagnose Kawasaki disease, a childhood condition linked to COVID-19. Patients suffering from the disease do not consistently show its symptoms, making it difficult to diagnose. The organizations are using machine learning to analyze blood samples for protein markers and other clinical variables, such as the presence of a fever, red eyes, and a swollen lip, to detect arrangements that indicate the presence of the disease. 

Researchers from Nvidia have taught an AI system to recreate the video game Pac-Man by training it on 50,000 episodes of play. The system, which learned the basic tenets of the game, such as eating pellets and avoiding ghosts, uses generative adversarial networks to create realistic gameplay. The system also differentiated between static elements of the game, such as the maze, and dynamic elements, such as the ghosts.

The Mayo Clinic and Ultromics, a startup based in the U.K., have partnered to use AI to speed up the process of identifying COVID-19 patients at  high risk of suffering from cardiac arrest. Ultromics has created AI-enabled software that can analyze echocardiograms, and the Mayo Clinic is using the software as part of a study of 500 people who have COVID-19 and cardiovascular conditions. Ultromics’ software will automate the assessment of the patients’ echocardiograms.  

Researchers from the University of Vermont have analyzed 100 billion tweets to identify how people deliberately stretch words out to create slang words, such as “heellllp.” The research can help natural language processing systems identify the underlying meaning of slang words. For example, the word “dude” refers to a person while “duuuude” is synonymous with yikes. 

Researchers from Binghamton University in New York have shown that AI can help automate the detection of landmines. The researchers used a convolutional neural network to analyze infrared images, finding that the network could detect landmines with up to 99 percent accuracy.