Copyright: news.mit.edu – “Using AI, scientists find a drug that could combat drug-resistant infections”

Using an artificial intelligence algorithm, researchers at MIT and McMaster University have identified a new antibiotic that can kill a type of bacteria that is responsible for many drug-resistant infections.

If developed for use in patients, the drug could help to combat Acinetobacter baumannii, a species of bacteria that is often found in hospitals and can lead to pneumonia, meningitis, and other serious infections. The microbe is also a leading cause of infections in wounded soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Acinetobacter can survive on hospital doorknobs and equipment for long periods of time, and it can take up antibiotic resistance genes from its environment. It’s really common now to find A. baumannii isolates that are resistant to nearly every antibiotic,” says Jonathan Stokes, a former MIT postdoc who is now an assistant professor of biochemistry and biomedical sciences at McMaster University.

The researchers identified the new drug from a library of nearly 7,000 potential drug compounds using a machine-learning model that they trained to evaluate whether a chemical compound will inhibit the growth of A. baumannii.

“This finding further supports the premise that AI can significantly accelerate and expand our search for novel antibiotics,” says James Collins, the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering and Science in MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) and Department of Biological Engineering. “I’m excited that this work shows that we can use AI to help combat problematic pathogens such as A. baumannii.”

Collins and Stokes are the senior authors of the new study, which appears today in Nature Chemical Biology. The paper’s lead authors are McMaster University graduate students Gary Liu and Denise Catacutan and recent McMaster graduate Khushi Rathod.[…]

Read more: www.news.mit.edu

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Copyright by: https://www.zdnet.com

Humans in the Loop is a social enterprise founded in 2017. It helps refugees from conflict zones like Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan settle in the country by acquiring digital skills that they can use for working on artificial-intelligence and machine-learning-related projects.

So far, the enterprise has helped around 2,000 refugees find work and integrate into Bulgarian society.

According to its CEO, Iva Gumnishka, Humans in the Loop can provide workers for any stages of the machine-learning model training and development cycle.

“The work ranges from collecting and labeling the ground truth dataset, to verifying the model’s predictions once it’s trained, and handling edge cases, which it’s not sure about,” Gumnishka tells ZDNet.

“We do quite a lot of work in the field of labeling and annotating images and video for computer-vision purposes, which is where the biggest demand in the market is coming from.”

The organization works mostly with refugees, internally displaced people, and people living in conflict zones. It looks to offer employment for those who are left out of the labor market. Aside from the 100-people team based in Bulgaria, the company also works with 150 people across Turkey, Syria, and Iraq.

“In most countries, we partner with local NGOs, which provide digital skills and IT training. We ourselves organize upskilling training for our workforce, which includes computer skills and English,” she explains.

According to Gumnishka, these opportunities are especially suitable for women who prefer to work from home and are looking to combine their projects with housework and childcare.

“We always distribute projects according to a priority score that each worker has, determined by their legal status, number of dependents, employment status, and other vulnerability factors.” she tells ZDNet.

Over the past few years, the company has worked with many startups across Europe and the US, developing products in the fields of AI and computer vision.

Its workers have also been involved in precision agriculture projects involving the segmentation of crops from drone images, insurance tech projects related to car-damage detection and assessment, facial detection, and spoofing detection for CCTV cameras.

The company is currently looking for additional partners in the Middle East, especially in Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, and Yemen. By 2020, Humans in the Loop aims to employ up to 500 people from conflict-affected countries, and to forge many new partnerships with AI companies.

Read more: https://www.zdnet.com

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Scientists are constantly figuring out how to expand the field of use of this incredible invention, which enables computer software to progressively improve its actions by adopting knowledge gained from previous experience.

Machine learning, also referred to as artificial intelligence due to its ability to perform tasks using its own judgment, has been the subject of both praise and controversy.   

However, the sophisticated algorithms that have served in providing you ads on social networks might have a grand future in philology, archaeology, and linguistics.

According to Émilie Pagé-Perron, a Ph.D. candidate in Assyriology at the University of Toronto, we might be closer than we thought to deciphering numerous Middle-Eastern cuneiform tablets written in Sumerian and Akkadian languages, all of which are several thousand years old.

Pagé-Perron is in charge of the project officially titled Machine Translation and Automated Analysis of Cuneiform Languages, which currently operates in Frankfurt, Toronto, and Los Angeles, using combined efforts to create a program capable of translating the clay tablets.

These relics of ancient languages printed in cuneiform ― literally meaning “wedge-formed” ― are among the oldest written documents known to humanity and were mostly used in Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq) more than 5,000 years ago.

While one might think that these scientists are handling a handful of texts, there are in fact more than 500,000 preserved cuneiform tablets scattered all over the world, with around 369,000 of them digitized.

Zodiac calendar of the cycle of Virgo. Clay tablet of the Seleucid period, end of 1st millennium BC, copy of an older original. From the site of the ancient city of Uruk, Southern Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq). Photo by Applejuice – Own work CC BY-SA 4.0

Although a great number of clay tablets are available for viewing, only a limited number of them have so far been translated. The texts allude to an advanced civilization which used written language to great extent ― from administration to myths, prayers, and poetry. In fact, the Epic of Gilgamesh was first recorded using this method.

The scientists currently developing the program that would sift through the hundreds of thousands of untranslated cuneiform texts are using a sample of 67,000 administrative documents, from which they hope the software will “learn” to decipher others.

But this is no simple task. In an interview for CBC in December, Émilie Pagé-Perron described in detail the process of developing the program:

“We’re using two different methods, so we are training our algorithms on a specific set that we’ve created manually, but we’re also using methods that don’t require training. We’re using both and we’re trying to find the best methods in both camps. And at the end of the project, we hope to merge them into a pipeline that will render the best machine translation results possible.”[…]

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