2,082 research outputs found
Software Engineering for the Mobile Application Market
One of the goals of the current United States government is to lower healthcare costs. One of the solutions is to alter the behavior of the population to be more physically active and to eat healthier. This project will focus on the latter solution by writing applications for the Android and iOS mobile platforms that will allow a user to monitor their dietary intake to see and correct patterns in their eating behavior
ActiveRemediation: The Search for Lead Pipes in Flint, Michigan
We detail our ongoing work in Flint, Michigan to detect pipes made of lead
and other hazardous metals. After elevated levels of lead were detected in
residents' drinking water, followed by an increase in blood lead levels in area
children, the state and federal governments directed over $125 million to
replace water service lines, the pipes connecting each home to the water
system. In the absence of accurate records, and with the high cost of
determining buried pipe materials, we put forth a number of predictive and
procedural tools to aid in the search and removal of lead infrastructure.
Alongside these statistical and machine learning approaches, we describe our
interactions with government officials in recommending homes for both
inspection and replacement, with a focus on the statistical model that adapts
to incoming information. Finally, in light of discussions about increased
spending on infrastructure development by the federal government, we explore
how our approach generalizes beyond Flint to other municipalities nationwide.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figures, To appear in KDD 2018, For associated
promotional video, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbIn_axYu9
Statistical Machine Translation Features with Multitask Tensor Networks
We present a three-pronged approach to improving Statistical Machine
Translation (SMT), building on recent success in the application of neural
networks to SMT. First, we propose new features based on neural networks to
model various non-local translation phenomena. Second, we augment the
architecture of the neural network with tensor layers that capture important
higher-order interaction among the network units. Third, we apply multitask
learning to estimate the neural network parameters jointly. Each of our
proposed methods results in significant improvements that are complementary.
The overall improvement is +2.7 and +1.8 BLEU points for Arabic-English and
Chinese-English translation over a state-of-the-art system that already
includes neural network features.Comment: 11 pages (9 content + 2 references), 2 figures, accepted to ACL 2015
as a long pape
Excess death rates for Republicans and Democrats during the COVID-19 pandemic
Political affiliation has emerged as a potential risk factor for COVID-19,
amid evidence that Republican-leaning counties have had higher COVID-19 death
rates than Democrat-leaning counties and evidence of a link between political
party affiliation and vaccination views. This study constructs an
individual-level dataset with political affiliation and excess death rates
during the COVID-19 pandemic via a linkage of 2017 voter registration in Ohio
and Florida to mortality data from 2018 to 2021. We estimate substantially
higher excess death rates for registered Republicans when compared to
registered Democrats, with almost all of the difference concentrated in the
period after vaccines were widely available in our study states. Overall, the
excess death rate for Republicans was 5.4 percentage points (pp), or 76%,
higher than the excess death rate for Democrats. Post-vaccines, the excess
death rate gap between Republicans and Democrats widened from 1.6 pp (22% of
the Democrat excess death rate) to 10.4 pp (153% of the Democrat excess death
rate). The gap in excess death rates between Republicans and Democrats is
concentrated in counties with low vaccination rates and only materializes after
vaccines became widely available
A Data Science Approach to Understanding Residential Water Contamination in Flint
When the residents of Flint learned that lead had contaminated their water
system, the local government made water-testing kits available to them free of
charge. The city government published the results of these tests, creating a
valuable dataset that is key to understanding the causes and extent of the lead
contamination event in Flint. This is the nation's largest dataset on lead in a
municipal water system.
In this paper, we predict the lead contamination for each household's water
supply, and we study several related aspects of Flint's water troubles, many of
which generalize well beyond this one city. For example, we show that elevated
lead risks can be (weakly) predicted from observable home attributes. Then we
explore the factors associated with elevated lead. These risk assessments were
developed in part via a crowd sourced prediction challenge at the University of
Michigan. To inform Flint residents of these assessments, they have been
incorporated into a web and mobile application funded by \texttt{Google.org}.
We also explore questions of self-selection in the residential testing program,
examining which factors are linked to when and how frequently residents
voluntarily sample their water.Comment: Applied Data Science track paper at KDD 2017. For associated
promotional video, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g66ImaV8A
Sashimi plots: Quantitative visualization of RNA sequencing read alignments
We introduce Sashimi plots, a quantitative multi-sample visualization of mRNA
sequencing reads aligned to gene annotations. Sashimi plots are made using
alignments (stored in the SAM/BAM format) and gene model annotations (in GFF
format), which can be custom-made by the user or obtained from databases such
as Ensembl or UCSC. We describe two implementations of Sashimi plots: (1) a
stand-alone command line implementation aimed at making customizable
publication quality figures, and (2) an implementation built into the
Integrated Genome Viewer (IGV) browser, which enables rapid and dynamic
creation of Sashimi plots for any genomic region of interest, suitable for
exploratory analysis of alternatively spliced regions of the transcriptome.
Isoform expression estimates outputted by the MISO program can be optionally
plotted along with Sashimi plots. Sashimi plots can be used to quickly screen
differentially spliced exons along genomic regions of interest and can be used
in publication quality figures. The Sashimi plot software and documentation is
available from: http://genes.mit.edu/burgelab/miso/docs/sashimi.htmlComment: 2 figure
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Functional and Categorical Analysis of Waveshapes Recorded on Microelectrode Arrays
Dissociated neuronal cell cultures grown on substrate integrated microelectrode arrays (MEAs) generate spontaneous activity that can be recorded for up to several weeks. The signature wave shapes from extracellular recording of neuronal activity display a great variety of shapes with triphasic signals predominating. I characterized extracellular recordings from over 600 neuronal signals. I have preformed a categorical study by dividing wave shapes into two major classes: (type 1) signals in which the large positive peak follows the negative spike, and (type 2) signals in which the large positive peak precedes the negative spike. The former are hypothesized to be active signal propagation that can occur in the axon and possibly in soma or dendrites. The latter are hypothesized to be passive which is generally secluded to soma or dendrites. In order to verify these hypotheses, I pharmacologically targeted ion channels with tetrodotoxin (TTX), tetraethylammonium (TEA), 4-aminopyridine (4-AP), and monensin
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