Week 7 [15-21.06.2020] Climate goals

Hello everyone!

Today, I will share with you a link to article about IEA’s Paris-aligned sustainable development scenario goals. 

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/most-clean-energy-tech-is-not-on-track-to-meet-climate-goals/

In this article you can read that most clean energy technologies and sectors are not advancing enough to meet the temperature goals set by the 2015 Paris climate agreement. Of 46 clean energy categories that the International Energy Agency sees as crucial for minimizing the impacts of climate change, only six are “on track” to meet the target of preventing global average temperatures from rising 2 degrees Celsius or more.

Please read this article and answer some questions:

1. In your opinion how could we avoid climate change?
2. Which categories mentioned in the article are not meeting goals and why? 
3. What do you think about renewable energy? Is worth to invest in this kind of source?
4. What do you think about IEA's Paris-aligned sustainable development scenario goals? Are they necessary? Maybe, we should try another way to prevent global average temperatures from rising?

Week 7 [15-21.06.2020] Technical debt in Machine Learning Systems

Today I'd like to share an interesting article from the Google research team. It was published in 2015 but I think it's still very relevant. It describes common problems with Machine Learning systems more from the engineering perspective.

Although many examples are closely related to Machine Learning, I think they still have many in common with general problems arising in software development. What makes the Machine Learning special is, in my opinion, that it's usually being considered the central part of any system using it. Numerous start-ups are trying to build their success on AI models themselves. So much attention is being put into Machine Learning part of the development that it's very easy to forget that in fact developing it is a tiny part of the process (as illustrated in Fig. 1. in the article). What's worse, even the actual programming aspect of the development Machine Learning models often can be belittled leading to substantial errors.

The article is available here: https://papers.nips.cc/paper/5656-hidden-technical-debt-in-machine-learning-systems.pdf
1. Do you care about code quality in your projects?
2. Do you think it's worth the effort to follow some software development standards or best practices while working on research projects?
3. Have you ever experienced or heard about scientific experiments leading to incorrect conclusions due to some problems with the programming code (or software)?

Week 6 [1-7.06.2020] Time Perception

Hello!
I have found an interesting article about time perception. I was impressed with the fact that time perception depends on our anatomy, neurotransmitters and how does the brain  process the information
https://www.exactlywhatistime.com/psychology-of-time/time-perception/

What are the other aspects that influence our time perception?

Have you ever noticed that time was passing longer than usual? Tell about this situations

Have you ever noticed that when you focus on something time passes faster?

Week 6 [1-7.06.2020] Data Driven Healthcare

Information about our individual health can now be gleaned from a variety of data sources – genomic profiles, electronic medical records, smart watches, social media, to name a few. Each data source can potentially inform us about our health at different levels of granularity, ranging from behavioral to physiological to genetic levels. The future of healthcare relies on integrating the available information to build effective descriptive, predictive and prescriptive models. However, the collected data is highly heterogeneous differing in a number of characteristics such as data types, scale, formats and noise levels. The era of big data opens up new opportunities in personalized medicine, preventive care, chronic disease management and in telemonitoring and managing of patients with implanted devices.

This week I want us to discuss about future of healthcare in terms of analytical approach. I came across interesting article: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267734327_Data-driven_healthcare_From_patterns_to_actions where researches from Switzerland consider a specific aspect of data-driven systems that take action autonomously for the benefit of an individual patient through remote monitoring of electrocardio-gram (ECG)

I also found ted talks in this topic where predictive algorithms used as medical guidelines is shown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3phCyMynos

Please check out the materials and answer questions below:

1. Do you think that in future we will have more and more application to monitor ours health? Will you be willing to use such app?

2. What is your opinion in terms of using autonomous systems in healthcare applications? What kind of certification should these apps go through to be safely used?

3. What other use you can think of for big data technologies that could improve / revolutionized healthcare?

Week 5 [18-24.05.2020] Brain training

The brain is a unique organ that we often forget when exercising our body. The brain should be trained as well as our body to remain fully functional for a long time. Many research results indicate that aerobic exercise and cognitive reasoning training help to improve brain health. Such training in older people allows for better fitness in the hippocampus regions particularly vulnerable to aging and dementia. Despite research in a selected narrow-screen group of people between 56-75 years of age, researchers agree that we should begin to care for the efficiency of our brain much earlier, and not only when we experience significant cognitive loss.

For sure each of us has heard a lot that crosswords, Sudoku and similar games are the perfect training for our brains. There are many pros and cons. First of all, it's hard to measure how much playing such games affects neural connections. In addition, by solving a lot of crosswords, we become great at solving them, but they do not affect other brain functions such as making decisions or planning.

Dr. Chapman suggests that first of all we should eliminate bad habits acting against the healthy function of the frontal lobe, e.g. multitasking, studies show that the brain can do only one thing at a time. We should also take breaks from technology even for up to 30 minutes. By building good habits we will be able to improve e.g. innovate thinking or development of new solutions.

Quoting " Our brains become quickly jaded by routine so push past the predictable to better your brain health across the lifespan.”

Read the following articles:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/make-your-brain-smarter/201403/do-brain-games-really-boost-brainpower

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2016.00338/full

 

1. Which training do you think has a better effect on our brain: aerobic or cognitive reasoning?

2. Do you play any games or solve crosswords to improve brain cognition? If not why?

3. Do you think that in a world full of technology and the ubiquitous rat race, can we afford to slow down, put down the phone and allow our brain to relax?

Week 5 [18-24.05.2020] Does the brain wash itself?

Deep, peaceful sleep is essential for our physical and mental health.  It is also necessary  for maintaining cognitive functions.  Slow waves in neural activity contribute to memory consolidation. Cerebrospinal fluid purifies the brain of metabolic products.  Now we have another argument that long and deep sleep is good for us: it triggers rhythmic waves of blood and cerebrospinal fluid that seems to work like a washing cycle, creating oscillations that in turn correlate with the flow of cerebrospinal fluid.  Such oscillations can help to clear the brain of toxic waste in real time. These results were recently published in the Science journal .  The authors of the study are the first to indicate that the brain, through its electrical activity during sleep, can trigger waves of cerebrospinal fluid.   Purifying itself in this way.  Further research into this phenomenon may help to explain why bad sleep or lack of it was previously associated with the spread of toxic proteins and worsening memory loss in people with Alzheimer's disease..

Questions

1. Are you satisfied with your sleep?
2. Did you have any physical or mental effects when you  pulled an all-nighter?
3. Is the combination of fmri and eeg a good idea? Only 13 people were examined in the study.  Is this enough to draw these conclusions? 
4. Do you like to work at night? If yes, do you think that's healthy?

http://212.182.24.236/nextcloud/index.php/s/b7Xna5yRy4CjEkB

Week 5 [18-24.05.2020] How does the brain link events to form a memory?

Hi, everyone!!!

Today I will share with you a link to article about brain.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/05/200508112903.htm

The brain has a powerful ability to remember and connect events separated in time. A scientists at Columbia’s Zukerman Institute uncovered a mechanism by which hippocampus builds bridges across time. They done a research on mice.

Please read the article and answer a few questions

1. Have you ever witnessed an accident? Do you remember it?
2. Do you remember information easily?
3. What do you think about this article? 
4. How could we use the results presented in this article?