Ogden is also grateful that Bethel allowed her to merge her love of science and her faith. I love that I am able to have deep conversations on a regular basis about faith and science with friends that I have made here, she says. Ogden has been involved in Bethels Science and Religion Clubs Christmas and Easter events, and shes able to explore the intersection of science and religion in classes. But shes also able to blend in her love of theology and philosophy. I love that my interests in theology and science can inform one another and that I am allowed to wrestle, ask hard questions, and evolve my thinking, she says.

Through classes and clubs, Odgen has been able to follow many eclectic interests at Bethel. She loves writing poetry and was published in The Coeval, Bethels student literary journal, and she says her love of artistic expression helps her as a scientist. I am also a creative, and I think that inviting my creativity into intellectual and scientific spaces improves my writing and helps me spread a sense of wonder and curiosity about the world, she says. Along with the creativity, I think that my analytical nature and open-mindedness make me a stronger scientist and truth-seeker. Ogden also loves climbing, and she has been involved with Bethels Beta Climbing Club. She joined the Oxford University Mountaineering Club, too, even climbing in Snowdonia National Park in Wales.

Ogden is still early in her educational journey, but shes received numerous opportunities already. She was recently one of two recipients from a pool of 350 to receive Women in Science and Technology Scholarships through Watermark. Along with an affirmation of her journey, Ogden says the scholarship helps ease her financial burden so she can focus on her studies. After graduation from Bethel, Odgen hopes to return to Oxford to pursue her Master of Science in Clinical and Therapeutic, and then she plans to start an MD/Ph.D. program and eventually complete a four-year neurology physician-scientist residency. Though that means she likely wont be a board-certified physician until her 30s, Ogden remains committed to one day serving families like her own. After honing my research skills through the lengthy art of becoming a physician-scientist, I hope to work on clinical trials for diseases similar to HD, she says. Hopefully there will be a cure by the time I am in practice.

See the original post:
Family Hardship Helps Inspire Student's Sense of Wonder and Appreciation for the Mind and Body. - Bethel University News

Written by Paromita Chakrabarti | New Delhi | Updated: October 25, 2020 8:31:26 amHere's 2 books which talk about mental health, deep friendships, depression and more.

On one of her Instagram posts on World Mental Health Day on October 10, Kairavi Bharat Ram noted, Weve all had those moments when giving up is on our mind,/ When to your dark future you feel totally resigned,/But pat yourself on your back and keep repeating this phrase, So far you have survived 100 % of your bad days. Its the memory of the darkness that she has overcome and her deep sense of empathy that Bharat Ram shares in her latest book, C is for Cat, D is for Depression (Scholastic, Rs 495, appropriate for young adults). Depression. There I said it. Its always spoken of with a hush./ Such an important topic upon which in school they dont even brush./ You may have heard the word but not know what it means,/ Its hard to really understand unless in depression you have been, she writes, taking her readers on a journey into the dark, clammy world of a mental health affliction that continues to affect a considerable percentage of children and young adults across the world and that has found few expressions in popular literature, especially for children.

Bharat Ram, 22, identifies depression as a dark pit, a ceaseless radio commentary of negativity in her head, a churning ocean that leaves her floundering for lack of swimming skills or a nightmare without end. Her spare narrative is lit with the patient awareness of one who has walked the difficult path herself, telling her readers about the different ways depression manifests itself, the havoc it wreaks and the coping mechanisms that have worked for her. Facing it head-on is best, youve got nothing to fear,/ After all Ive been through, Im still HERE, she writes.

As always, illustrator Priya Kuriyans work blends into the narrative with intuitive precision, her colour palette moving from bleak monochromes to a hopeful, warm-hearted burst of colours. This is a gorgeous, sensitive book on mental health that needs to be read over and over again, not just by those trying to understand its vagaries, but by everyone who hopes to be there when a loved one is in need of empathy and solidarity.

Ten-year-old Susruta Patel, better known as SP, just cannot seem to find the light at the end of the long tunnel that he tumbles into ever so often. He feels things deeply be it the barbs of school bullies or his fathers disappointment at his lack of prowess in football. His inability to match up to the expectations of those around him makes him feel smaller every day. The only thing that gives him comfort is his art book, where he sketches episodes from his life. But, some days, all he can manage are squiggles and loops, just like the reels of his own inadequacies that runs through his mind.

Mumbai-based writer Vaishali Shroffs The Boy in the Dark Hole (Eklavya, Rs 110; appropriate for: 8+ years) addresses an important theme the fragility of mental health in children and how tenuously balanced it often is for those who dont always conform to general standards. In keeping with SPs anxiety, Samidha Gunjals artwork moves from a mostly blue-and-grey colour palette to a burst of colours towards the end. While a tighter editing, especially in the early chapters, would have served the book better, Shroff does a good job of bringing out the casual cruelty of peers, the burden of expectations on hypersensitive children and the comfort of deep friendships.

The Indian Express is now on Telegram. Click here to join our channel (@indianexpress) and stay updated with the latest headlines

For all the latest Books And Literature News, download Indian Express App.

The Indian Express (P) Ltd

See the article here:
The Deep Dark - The Indian Express

We may be living in a time of mandated physical distancing, but organizers of Minnesotas semiannual African Mental Health Summit say they are committed to bringing event participants closer together by building strong connections between individuals and by emphasizing the innate strengths of African and African American culture.

The conference, titled Building Mindful Connections: The Invincibility of Mindful Self-Care for Helping Professionals, will be held virtually on Oct. 31 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. CDT.

Richard Oni

Because of the fact that now everything is done online and people are practicing social distancing, he said, we want to talk about how we can still stay emotionally connected, how can we keep emotional connections with one another even when we are physically distancing.

Article continues after advertisement

Elder Atum Azzahir, founder and executive director of Cultural Wellness Center, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit that offers classes, coaching and consulting around developing culturally based solutions to real-world problems, will be delivering the summits keynote presentation.

In these uncertain, trying times, she said, taking a deeper look at ones own culture and learning about its innate strengths can build a sense of inner knowing and a confidence that can help forge connections to people from a variety of backgrounds.

Elder Atum Azzahir

Youve probably heard a lot about trauma-informed ways of communication, she said. Youve heard about historical trauma. Youve heard about the way people carry forward the memories of their ancestors. Azzahir encourages people to embark on a cultural self-study, where they take a deeper look at their own family histories.

Cultural self-study and cultural wellness go hand in hand, she said. Cultural self-study gives you a sense of what is good about your nature and helps you to know how to carry those good elements forward.

Conference presenters will emphasize this approach to understanding history, added Tolulope Ola, summit co-organizer and executive director of Restoration for All, a St. Paul-based organization that partners with communities to restore cultural connections. Culture is at the heart of all we do, she believes, and encouraging people of all backgrounds, but especially those of African descent, to build a deeper understanding and appreciation of their cultural ways of knowing can help to improve and support mental health.

Knowing our culture is a necessary factor in our self-care, Ola said. If we are going to question the system and be able to act courageously to make change in it, we need to appreciate our own culture and the culture of others. We live in uncertain times, she said: If we keep talking about the necessity of resilience, why dont we teach people to be resilient?

Building cultural competency is a key part of developing resilience in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, Ola added: This is the essence of this conference.

Growing up in in the 1940s and 50s in segregated Mississippi, Azzahir, 76, said that she inherited a sense of hope and optimism from her parents and grandparents, who, she explained, endured some of the most horrific things and still walked around with a sense of joy and gratitude.

Tolulope Ola

As she moved into adulthood, Azzahir began a lifelong quest to better understand the origins of her African culture.

As I grew up and I lived my life I knew those terrible things had happened to my family members, but I didnt spend time focusing on them, she said. Instead, I spent time in community organizing, community building and talking to and watching Black people recover and hold on to themselves. I learned from my mother and father and those around me who hung on to a level of honor and beauty and grace and the capacity to be loving and forgiving.

Her curiosity and wonder piqued, Azzahir eventually traveled through Africa, reading every book I could get my hands on, talking to every Black person I could talk to. What she learned on her journeys, she said, was that there is a cultural value system, distinct customs, cultural ceremonies, yes, but there is also a way of knowing that is distinctly African.

In her keynote address, Azzahir said she will discuss how a general lack of cultural understanding has played a role in the larger reaction to current social events. This unrealized awareness of their deep, inherited cultural strengths has put many Africans and African Americans at a distinct disadvantage during this difficult time in world history.

The coronavirus and other things have now brought to surface in a very profound way some of the preexisting conditions that relate to people of African heritage in the United States, Azzahir said. We have experienced such profound uprootedness and the disconnecting from culture and the stripping of language. This has to be addressed.

But the present and the future doesnt have to be dark, she insisted. Building a deeper understanding of cultural strengths can help build stores of resilience and emotional well-being.

How do you reassure yourself that you have an emotional storage bin and within that storage bin there are all these things that you can pull forward to build your emotional strength? Azzahir asked. These cultural strengths preexisted the trauma youve just experienced. If you really study your culture, you can go all the way beyond the pain, suffering and struggle.

Article continues after advertisement

Azzahir said that she is pleased to be able to deliver an inspiring message in these dark days.

I get to be the cheerleader, she said with a laugh. Thats a role Im happy to play.

The summits intended audience, Oni said, is individuals in caring professions, including teachers, physicians, medical professionals and social workers. He said that conference organizers wanted to help participants increase feelings of empathy and understanding of the cultural mores and nuances that impact the behaviors of the people they serve.

Increasing empathy and understanding helps build relationships, Oni said. You build connection through empathy. When you look at people emotionally and align with them emotionally, that is empathy and that is a good approach.

Teachers, especially, can benefit from increased understanding of and sympathy with the unique cultures of students and their families.

As a teacher, how do you look at your students and empathize with them? Oni asked. Through your teaching, through your approaches, through observing people and the way they express their culture.

This patient, observational approach can improve teaching styles, he said: Some people, for instance, are very much oriented to writing and reading. Some people just listen. Their orientation is to the oral tradition. When you have students who prefer to listen, because that is their cultural orientation, you need to be able to present some lessons to them orally.

This approach requires an understanding that the accepted ways of looking at the world arent necessarily the best way. My presentation topic will be more on the area of how do you see yourself in other peoples shoes, Oni said. As helpers, as doctors, as social workers, as janitors in schools, how do you contribute, how do you become humble?

Article continues after advertisement

Humility can be difficult to cultivate for some people, he added, but being humble can benefit everyones emotional well-being.

When it comes to mental health, we are saying, How do you connect with someone who is suffering from mental illness? How do you do you build connections? Putting yourself in their shoes helps build understanding and community.

Jane Reilly

Im going to be talking about resilience and how during this time of COVID, when we are overwhelming communities, our health care, individuals, our teachers, our education systems, how we can dip into that internal strength and how we can do that collectively, she said.

Reilly explained that emphasizing the importance of building connections and collective learning is a way to help people facing severe challenges build resilience.

People right now are finding themselves isolated from one another, she said. Often the feeling of distance that mandated isolation creates it is not necessary. I will talk about reaching in to not only find individual strength but also community strength and helping to support each other.

Resilience, Reilly added, is a state of mind and a state of heart. We say social distancing, but its not distant. Yes, we need to physically distance, but we dont need to be emotionally distant from each other.

Though this physical distance is mandated for the time being, she said, Our hearts dont need to be distanced. It is about staying emotionally connected and looking at the individual as part of a whole community. It is also about individual resilience and strength. Were not separate. Were all connected.

The connections between cultural understanding and mental health are clear, Oni said. When a person is confident in their own culture, they innately understand the best way to approach and treat mental illness. This cultural understanding should be acknowledged by mental health workers and other people in caring professions.

In a culturally aware approach, he said, professionals will encourage people to apply what best works for them when they are working on their own mental health.

In his professional life, Oni said hes learned that not all cultures see mental illness the same way: A lot of the time I see people experience and express mental health differently. Some people may prefer to see a shaman for mental health issues, rather than a therapist working in a Western-based tradition: A shaman may approach treatment differently from a doctor who would push medication.

In her talk, Ola said that she will emphasize the concept that deep cultural understanding of your own culture and that of others should inform a professionals approach to care. She believes that building strong self-understanding is key not only in trying times but also in normal ones.

I will be talking about culturally oriented mindful self-care, she said. If I have a self-knowledge of myself I will know when to understand when I am tired and when I need to take time for myself. She wants to pass that self-knowledge on to summit participants. As Africans, sometimes we dont know when to stop. We are always out there. As immigrants, too, we dont always know when to stop and take care of ourselves.

Ola said she plans to emphasize the importance of prioritizing responsibilities in supporting mental health: You have the ability to say no to what you dont have time to take on. When you take on too much you cannot perform in all the areas of your life. It is part of having that cultural competence and mindful self-care.

Continuing education credits are available to African Mental Health summit attendees. The event is free, and registration is available online.

View post:
African Mental Health Summit to emphasize the importance of cultural understanding - MinnPost

The scientific world is in the midst of a decade-long psychedelic renaissance. This revolution is expanding our understanding of one of the most captivating scientific puzzles: human consciousness.Numerous research fields are revealing new insights into how psychedelics affect the brain and which neural processes underly consciousness.

Multiple studies testing psychedelic drugs for treating mental illness provide compelling evidence of their therapeutic benefit. Treated disorders have included depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, anorexia, obsessive compulsive disorder and addiction. Dozens of clinical trials are underway, the majority investigating the therapeutic effect of psilocybin, the active component in so-called magic mushrooms.This natural compound belongs to the class of serotonergic psychedelics those that activate serotonin (type 2A) receptors.

Researchers are examining the distribution of serotonin 2A receptors to help pinpoint the brain areas affected by psychedelics. The greater the density of these receptors, the greater the likelihood that a particular brain region contributes to the psychedelic experience, according to a study published in Neuropsychopharmacology.Knowing this helps us understand how psychedelics exert their positive therapeutic effect, as well as which brain regions are involved in various states of consciousness.

The claustrum is one of multiple brain regions that is rich in serotonin 2A receptors and organizes brain activity.Cognitive neuroscientist Frederick Barrett and colleagues at the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research recently examined how psilocybin affects neural activity in the claustrum.

Published in NeuroImage, their breakthrough study used real-time brain scans in humans to show that psilocybin reduces activity in the claustrum by up to 30 percent. This coincides with people's subjective feelings of ego dissolution and oneness with their environment while under the influence of the drug. The less active the claustrum, the stronger the psychedelic effect reported by participants, including mystical and emotional experiences, and a reduced sense of self.The authors write that the work supports a possible role of the claustrum in the subjective and therapeutic effects of psilocybin.

In this mysterious part of the brain, a thin sheet of neurons sends and receives signals to and from other brain regions. Growing evidence suggests the claustrum orchestrates consciousness gathering, sending and integrating information from almost every brain region. Some, like neuroscientist Christof Koch, believe that the sense of self and ego rest here.

Several years ago, Koch and colleagues of the Allen Brain Institute for Brain Science found anatomical evidence in mice to support this idea. They identified several large neurons projecting from the claustrum, with one wrapping around the circumference of the brain.Around the same time, they published a paper in the Journal of Comparative Neurology describing the vast connections between the claustrum and various brain regions in mice.

Read More: This Is Your Brain On Magic Mushrooms

Barrett says that while the claustrum has received attention as a potential mediator of consciousness as well as psychedelic experience, our current thinking is that the claustrum helps to integrate and orchestrate the coherence of brain networks as they support perception and cognition.

Variations in activity levels of the claustrum are associated with different states of consciousness.For example, the claustrum coordinates synchronized slow-wave activity in the brain. This particular state of consciousness is a feature of certain deep sleep stages during which the brain maintains synapses and consolidates memories. Neuroscientist Yoshihiro Yoshihara and colleagues of the RIKEN Center for Brain Science recently published a compelling study in Nature Neuroscience. They showed in mice that increased neural activity in the claustrum mediates a global silencing of brain activity through resting state slow-waves.

Psilocybin likely subdues the so-called gate-keeper function of the claustrum, causing a loss of organized, constrained brain activity, according to neuroscientists Robin Carhart-Harris and Karl Friston. Such desynchronization increases connectivity between brain regions that are otherwise not engaged with one another, producing a change in consciousness.

Combined with supportive psychotherapy, such expansive, unconstrained cross-talk between brain regions is believed to help break habitual patterns of thinking and behavior, leading to psychological breakthroughs. This mechanism may also explain how psilocybin can affect positive change in such a wide variety of psychiatric conditions. Neuropsychopharmacologist David Nutt and colleagues of the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London discuss these ideas in a paper published in Cell.

Though anecdotal, Albert Einstein believed that his most profound scientific breakthroughs happened because he played the violin. He said this practice encouraged communication between different parts of his brain in unique ways that were otherwise inaccessible to his conscious mind. Is it possible that Einstein was describing a state of consciousness invoked by creative pursuits that mimic, albeit to a far lesser extent, the effect of psychedelics in the brain?

Barrett believes that listening to and playing music require a similar presence of mind to deep meditation a connection to the here and now. Barrett says that one of the unique anecdotal effects of psychedelics is said to be complete absorption in the present moment, and to this degree, I do believe that musical experiences can involve similar states of consciousness (albeit to a far lesser extent) to the effects of psychedelics.

Regarding the role of the claustrum, Barrett adds that its function during musical experiences has not yet been studied.Theoretically, this brain structure would be necessary for helping to coordinate brain states during musical experiences. He points out that the claustrum would need to function like a highly controlled orchestra conductor in order to support musical experiences unlike psychedelics, which undermine claustrum activity.If musical experiences and psychedelic experiences both involve the claustrum he says, they may do so in very different ways.

Psychedelic-like experiences and altered states of consciousness can occur in the absence of mind-altering drugs. For example, sensory deprivation is known to trigger hallucinations. In fact, sensory deprivation therapy may help treat some of the same psychological disorders as psychedelic therapy, such as depression and anxiety. Given the claustrums role in integrating multisensory inputs, investigating its function in drug-free, psychedelic-like experiences may answer some intriguing questions in the future.

Barrett suggests that the claustrum probably plays a fundamental, yet different, role in all of these experiences: Lack of sensory input may indeed lead to an imbalance in or disruption of the typical networks and circuits that are involved in claustrum function, however the mechanism by which this might happen is unclear.

While we have yet to crack the code of human consciousness, incremental discoveries from different disciplines may stimulate scientific creativity and enable ongoing progress.Perhaps it is precisely such expansive, unconstrained communication between research areas that will lead us towards the most profound breakthroughs.

Excerpt from:
What Psychedelic Mushrooms Are Teaching Us About Human Consciousness - Discover Magazine

The State of AI Report 2020 is a comprehensive report on all things AI. Picking up from where we left off in summarizing key findings, we continue the conversation with authors Nathan Benaich and Ian Hogarth. Benaich is the founder of Air Street Capital and RAAIS, and Hogarth is an AI angel investor and a UCL IIPP visiting professor.

Key themes we covered so far were AI democratization, industrialization, and the way to artificial general intelligence. We continue with healthcare and biology's AI moment, research and application breakthroughs, AI ethics, and predictions.

A key point discussed with Benaich and Hogarth was the democratization of AI: What it means, whether it applies, and how to compete against behemoths who have the resources it takes to train huge machine learning models at scale.

One of the ideas examined in the report is to take pre-existing models and fine-tune them to specific domains. Benaich noted that taking a large model, or a pre-trained model in one field, and moving it to another field can work to bootstrap performance to a higher level:

"As far as biology and healthcare are becoming increasingly digital domains with lots of imaging, whether that relates to healthcare conditions or what cells look like when they're diseased, compiling data sets to describe that and then using transfer learning from ImageNet into those domains has yielded much better performance than starting from scratch."

This, Benaich went on to add, plays into one of the dominant themes in the report: Biology -- in which Benaich has a background -- and healthcare have their AI moment. There are examples of startups at the cutting edge of R&D moving to production tackling problems in biology. An application area Benaich highlighted was drug screening:

"If I have a software product, I can generate lots of potential drugs that could work against the disease protein that I'm interested in targeting. How do I know out of the thousands or hundreds of thousands of possible drugs, which one will work? And assuming I can figure out which one might work, how do I know if I can actually make it?"

Beyond computer vision, Benaich went on to add, there are several examples of AI language models being useful in protein engineering or in understanding DNA, "essentially treating a sequence of amino acids that encode proteins or DNA as just another form of language, a form of strings that language models can interpret just in the same way they can interpret characters that spell out words."

The FDA published a new proposal to embrace the highly iterative and adaptive nature of AI systems in what they call a "total product lifecycle" regulatory approach built on good machine learning practices.

Transformer-based language models such as GPT3 have also been applied to tasks such as completing images or converting code between different programming languages. Benaich and Hogarth note that the transformer's ability to generalize is remarkable, but at the same time offer a word of warning in the example of code: No expert knowledge required, but no guarantees that the model didn't memorize the functions either.

This discussion was triggered by the question -- posed by some researchers -- whether progress in mature areas of machine learning is stagnant. In our view, the fact that COVID19 has dominated 2020 is also reflected in the impact it has had on AI. And there are examples of how AI has been applied in biology and healthcare to tackle COVID19.

Benaich used examples from biology and healthcare to establish that beyond research, the application area is far from stagnant. The report includes work in this area ranging from startups such as InVivo and Recursionto Google Health, DeepMind, and the NHS.

What's more, the US Medicaid and Medicare system has approved a medical imaging product for stroke that's based on AI. Despite pre-existing FDA approvals for deep-learning based medical imaging, whether that's for stroke, mammography, or broken bones, this is the only so far that has actually gotten reimbursement, noted Benaich:

"Many people in the field feel that reimbursement is the critical moment. That's the economic incentive for doctors to prescribe, because they get paid back. So we think that's a major event. A lot of work to be done, of course, to scale this and to make sure that more patients are eligible for that reimbursement, but still major nonetheless."

Interestingly, the FDA has also published a new proposal to embrace the highly iterative and adaptive nature of AI systems in what they call a "total product lifecycle" regulatory approach built on good machine learning practices.

The report also includes a number of examples that Benaich stated: "Prove that the large pharma companies are actually getting value from working with their first drug discovery companies." This discussion naturally leads to the topic of progress in a specific area of machine learning: graph neural networks.

The connection was how graph neural networks (GNNs) are used to enhance chemical property prediction and guide antibiotic drug screening, leading to new drugs in vivo. Most deep learning methods focus on learning from two-dimensional input data. That is, data represented as matrices. GNNs are an emerging family of methods that are designed to process 3D data. This may sound cryptic, but it's a big deal. The reason is that it enables more information to be processed by the neural network.

"I think it comes down to one topic, which is the right representation of biological data that actually expresses all the complexity and the physics and chemistry and living nuances of a biological system into a compact, easy to describe mathematical representation that a machine learning model can do something with," said Benaich.

Sometimes it's hard to conceptualize biological systems as a matrix, so it could very well be that we're just not exploiting all of that implicit information that resides in a biological system, he went on to add. This is why graphical representations are an interesting next step -- because it feels intuitive as a tool to represent something that is connected, such as a chemical molecule.

Graph neural networks enable the representation of 3-dimensional structures for deep learning. This mean being able to capture, and use, more information, and lends itself well to the field of biology. Image: M. Bronstein

Benaich noted examples in molecule property prediction and chemical synthesis planning, but also in trying to identify novel small molecules. Small molecules are treated as Lego building blocks. By using advances in DNA sequencing, all of these chemicals are mixed in a tube with a target molecule, and researchers can see what building blocks have assembled and bound to the target of interest.

When candidate small molecules that seem to work have been identified, GNNs can be used to try and learn what commonalities these building blocks have that make them good binders for the target of interest. Adding this machine learning layer to a standard and well-understood chemical screening approach gives a several-fold improvement on the baseline.

Hogarth on his part mentioned a recent analysis, arguing that GNNs, the transformer architecture, and attention-based methods used in language models share the same underlying logic, as you can think of sentences for the connected word graphs. Hogarth noted the way that the transform architecture is creeping into lots of unusual use cases, and how scaling it up is increasing the impact:

"The meta point around the neural networks and these attention-based methods, in general, is that they seem to represent a sort of a general enough approach that there's going to be progress just by continuing to hammer very hard on that nail for the next two years. And one of the ways in which I'm challenging myself is to assume that we might see a lot more progress just by doing the same thing with more aggression for a bit.

And so I would assume that some of the gains that have been found in these GNNs cross-pollinate with the work that's happening with language models and transformers. And that approach continues to be a very fertile area for the kind of super general, high-level AGI-like research."

There's a ton of topics we could pick to dissect from Benaich and Hogarth's work, such as the use of PyTorch overtaking TensorFlow in research, the boom in federated learning, the analysis on talent and retainment per geography, progress (or lack thereof) in autonomous vehicles, AI chips, and AutoML. We encourage readers to dive into the report to learn more. But we wrap up with something different.

Hogarth mentioned that the speculation phase in AI for biology and healthcare is starting, with lots of capital flowing. There are going to be some really amazing companies that come out of it, and we will start to see a real deployment phase kick in. But it's equally certain, he went on to add, there are going to be instances that will be revealed to be total frauds.

So, what about AI ethics? Benaich and Hogarth cite work by pioneers in the field, touching upon issues such as commercial gender classification, unregulated police facial recognition, the ethics of algorithms, and regulating robots. For the most part, the report focuses on facial recognition. Facial recognition is widespread the world over and has lead to controversy, as well as wrongful arrests. More thoughtful approaches seem to gather steam, Benaich and Hogarth note.

The duo's report cites examples such as Microsoft deleting its database of 10 million faces (the largest available) collected without consent, Amazon announced a one-year pause on letting the police use its facial recognition tool Rekognition to give "congress enough time to put in place appropriate rules." And IBM announced it would sunset its general-purpose facial recognition products.

Hogarth referred to an incident in which a UK citizen claimed his human rights were breached when he was photographed while Christmas shopping. Although judges ruled against the claimant, they also established an important new duty for the police to make sure that discrimination is proactively "eliminated." This means that action on bias cannot be legally deferred until the tech has matured:

"This creates a much higher bar to deploying this software. And it creates almost a legal opportunity for anyone who experiences bias at the hands of an algorithm to have a foundation for suing the government or a private act of defiance technology," Hogarth said.

AI ethics often focuses on facial recognition, but there are more and more domains it's becoming relevant in.

Hogarth also emphasized another approach, which he termed "API driven auditability." He referred to a new law passed in Washington State with active support from Microsoft. This law restricts law enforcement's use of facial recognition technology, by demanding that the software used must be accessible to an independent third party via an API to assess for "accuracy and unfair performance differences" across characteristics like race or gender.

Of course, even narrowing our focus on AI ethics, the list is endless: From bias to the use of technology in authoritarian regimes and/or for military purposes, AI nationalism, or the US tax code incentivizing replacing humans with robots, there's no shortage of causes for concern. Benaich and Hogarth, on their part, close their report by offering a number of predictions for the coming year:

The race to build larger language models continues and we see the first 10 trillion parameter model. Attention-based neural networks move from NLP to computer vision in achieving the state of the art results. A major corporate AI lab shuts down as its parent company changes strategy. In response to US DoD activity and investment in US-based military AI startups, a wave of Chinese and European defense-focused AI startups collectively raise over $100 million in the next 12 months.

One of the leading AI-first drug discovery startups (e.g. Recursion, Exscientia) either IPOs or is acquired for over $1 billion. DeepMind makes a major breakthrough in structural biology and drug discovery beyond AlphaFold. Facebook makes a major breakthrough in augmented and virtual reality with 3D computer vision. And NVIDIA does not end up completing its acquisition of Arm.

The record for predictions offered in last year's State of AI Report was pretty good - they made 5 out of 6. Let's see how this year's set of predictions fares.

See more here:
The state of AI in 2020: Biology and healthcare's AI moment, ethics, predictions, and graph neural networks - ZDNet