Week 6 [06-12.01.20] Climate changes and pollution

Nowadays climate changes and pollution topic is more popular than ever.  I have prepared several articles about this topic.
First of all, an article on the decomposition of plastic, and the cleaning of plastic contaminants(this article) 
Also an article about an enzyme that devours plastic (this article)
The whole world is now trying to reduce pollution and carbon dioxide emissions. Many countries refuse coal (this article) and diesel engines.

• Do you know any other new projects to combat pollution or global warming?
• Is it too late to prevent climate change?
• Is it worth reducing the number of animals(livestock) to combat global warming?
• Are countries doing enough to combat global warming? What would you suggest more?
• How should we deal with countries that pollute the environment, and do not want to participate in cleaning the planet? 

Week 6 [06-12.01.20] Talent vs Luck

Hi everyone!

I've noticed a quite interesting paper on one of news sites, where it scored no comments and went unnoticed. Maybe it will get more attention here then.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.07068.pdf (abstract at https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068 of course)

Author of the paper compares typical distribution of talent (attributes in general) in human populations (Gaussian) with distribution of wealth - as proxy for success - being Pareto. Using simple simulation points out that discrepancy might be caused by randomness, that is by luck.
Then the interesting stuff starts: assigning funds to researchers, when total amount of money is constant, using different algorithms:

• all equal
• only some percentage of "best" (that is those who succeeded before)
• some to successful ones and rest split among rest
• percentage of randomly selected

The goal is get "most bang for a buck". Surprising conclusion is that equal distribution of funding is most effective.

The questions:
1. Do You think the author might be onto something, regarding funding distribution? Or agent model is too simplistic and does not account for human motivations?
2. Is it common that luck factor is ignored when its about success, but accounted for in cases of failures?
3. Are there any human endeavours You can think of, where luck can be mostly ignored, and the best of the best succeed?

WEEK6 [06-12.01.20] PhD students mental health

Hi everyone

I have found a very interesting articles about PhD students mental health.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01492-0
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03489-1

In May 2019 there was organized a international conference to discuss about mental health and wellbeing of postgraduate researcher. Many PhD students are depressed, overworkd and overstressd. It's a very important problem. I'm very interesting about your opinions.

Please answer some questions

1. How do you think what should be done to avoid PhD students mental health problems?
2. Have you ever feel overworked and overstressed after beginning PhD studies? If yes what was the reason for that feeling?
3. Do you agree with PhD student mentioned in article that PhD students more than twice as likely to suffer from mental-health difficulties than the highly educated population in general?

WEEK 5[16-22.12.19]Analysis of Decision-Making Process Using Methods of Quantitative Electroencephalography and Machine Learning Tools

Hi everyone, this is our’s last article:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fninf.2019.00073/full

Long story short, it’s about pilot study on 41 healthy men and 30 men with some mental disorders. They did Iowa Gambling Test which is a psychological task thought to simulate real-life process of decision making.

We found some difference in brain activity during this exam between healthy people and ill ones.

For example our experiment showed that the people with psychiatric disorders have the amygdala more frequently hyperactive compared to healthy participants from the control group.

The amygdala is an almond-shape set of neurons located deep in the brain's medial temporal lobe.

Unfortunately, we did not have enough research sample to build a classifier for recognizing specific mental illnesses.
Here are some questions for You:

1.How does Iowa Gambling Test look? Have you heard about this test before?

2.Do You think that with much more participants we will be able to build classifiers for recognizing specific diseases?

 

3.What do you think about using AI in diagnosis of mental ilnesses or other sickness? 

4. Will it replace psychiatrists or other specialists in the future?

Week 5 [16.12-22.12.2019] What can artificial intelligence tell us about unicorns?

Hello,
this week I would like to talk to you about automatic text generation by neural networks. Natural Language Processing is a rapidly growing field of science. It touches on problems like speech recognition, langage understanding, machine translation, but the one I personally find the most interesting is natural language generation. Recent years the neural networks techniques seems to be the most promising in this area. In 2019 OpenAI group released very impressive language model called GPT-2 based on Transformer architecture. An example of what it can create might be this text about unicorns.

Articles that tell more about the model:
https://openai.com/blog/better-language-models/
https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

If you would like to try it by yourself, check TalkToTransformer or TabNine tools. 

What do you think about generating texts in natural language by AI?
Is it a chanse or threat?
What practical applications of this technology do you see?

Week 5 [16-22.12.19] Dark energy

Today I'd like to turn your attention to this interesting article:
https://www.livescience.com/34052-unsolved-mysteries-physics.html

It is conjectured that dark energy makes up about 74% of the universe (with dark matter a distant second at 22%, and only about 0.4 % in solid celestial bodies). It's the energy that powers the expansion of the universe (which would otherwise not happen due to gravity).

1. Do you think we can use the dark energy to our benefit?
2. How could we go about tapping into this resource?
3. Can you propose any other energy that could be useful in long-haul space travel (beyond the solar system, far from the sunlight)?

WEEK 5 [16.12-22.12.2019] Blending Realities with the ARCore Depth API

Hello, most of you may have heard of ARCore from Google, which is an android library that allows you to handle augmented reality. Today, looking for a presentation topic, I found a new function for this library, which has recently been presented. The ARCore Depth API allows developers to use our depth-from-motion algorithms to create a depth map using a single RGB camera. The depth map is created by taking multiple images from different angles and comparing them as you move your phone to estimate the distance to every pixel. I think that creating a well-functioning depth recognition feature is another big step in the development of AR.
"Occlusion helps digital objects feel as if they are actually in your space by blending them with the scene. We will begin making occlusion available in Scene Viewer, the developer tool that powers AR in Search, to an initial set of over 200 million ARCore-enabled Android devices today."
I tried to check whether this function works already in my case for 3D models of animals but all the time the model is only superimposed on the image without recognizing the depth. If your phone supports ARCore, you can also check it at yourself.

Video presenting new functions:
https://youtu.be/VOVhCTb-1io

Articles:
https://developers.googleblog.com/2019/12/blending-realities-with-arcore-depth-api.html
https://techxplore.com/news/2019-12-google-flag-ar-depth-builders.html

If you have an idea for a project and would like to use this API in early access mode, please apply here:
https://developers.google.com/ar/develop/call-for-collaborators#depth-api

Questions:
1. Have you ever used AR in your projects? If so, what was it and what tools did you use?
2. What do you think the new function can be used for (apart from the ones mentioned in the article)?
3. Which AR or VR technology do you think is more future-proof? Or is it just their combination in MR (mixed reality) that is what we should develop?