Street Corner Symphony

Street Corner Symphony is an a cappella group based out of Nashville, Tennessee. They became internationally known in 2010 after becoming runners up on Season 2 of NBC\u27s all vocal competition, The Sing-Off. Their music covers a wide range of style, appealing to young and old alike.https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/musicprograms/1954/thumbnail.jp

Maximum Likelihood Training of Autoencoders

Maximum likelihood training has favorable statistical properties and is popular for generative modeling, especially with normalizing flows. On the other hand, generative autoencoders promise to be more efficient than normalizing flows due to the manifold hypothesis. In this work, we introduce successful maximum likelihood training of unconstrained autoencoders for the first time, bringing the two paradigms together. To do so, we identify and overcome two challenges: Firstly, existing maximum likelihood estimators for free-form networks are unacceptably slow, relying on iteration schemes whose cost scales linearly with latent dimension. We introduce an improved estimator which eliminates iteration, resulting in constant cost (roughly double the runtime per batch of a vanilla autoencoder). Secondly, we demonstrate that naively applying maximum likelihood to autoencoders can lead to divergent solutions and use this insight to motivate a stable maximum likelihood training objective. We perform extensive experiments on toy, tabular and image data, demonstrating the competitive performance of the resulting model. We call our model the maximum likelihood autoencoder (MLAE)

Investing in late-stage clinical trials and manufacturing of product candidates for five major infectious diseases: a modelling study of the benefits and costs of investment in three middle-income countries

BACKGROUND : Investing in late-stage clinical trials, trial sites, and production capacity for new health products could improve access to vaccines, therapeutics, and infectious disease diagnostics in middle-income countries. This study assesses the case for such investment in three of these countries: India, Kenya, and South Africa. METHODS: We applied investment case modelling and assessed how many cases, deaths, and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) could be averted from the development and manufacturing of new technologies (therapeutics and vaccines) in these countries from 2021 to 2036, for five diseases—HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, pneumonia, and diarrhoeal diseases. We also estimated the economic benefits that might accrue from making these investments and we developed benefit–cost ratios for each of the three middle-income countries. Our modelling applies two investment case perspectives: a societal perspective with all costs and benefits measured at the societal level, and a country perspective to estimate how much health and economic benefit accrues to each middle-income country for every dollar invested in clinical trials and manufacturing by the middle-income country government. For each perspective, we modelled two scenarios: one that considers only domestic health and economic benefits; and one that includes regional health and economic benefits. In the regional scenarios, we assumed that new products developed and manufactured in India would benefit eight countries in south Asia, whereas new products developed and manufactured in Kenya would benefit all 21 countries in the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA). We also assumed that all 16 countries in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) would benefit from products developed and manufactured in South Africa. FINDINGS : From 2021 to 2036, product development and manufacturing in Kenya could avert 4·44 million deaths and 206·27 million DALYs in the COMESA region. In South Africa, it could prevent 5·19 million deaths and 253·83 million DALYs in the SADC region. In India, it could avert 9·76 million deaths and 374·42 million DALYs in south Asia. Economic returns would be especially high if new tools were produced for regional markets rather than for domestic markets only. Under a societal perspective, regional returns outweigh investments by a factor of 20·51 in Kenya, 33·27 in South Africa, and 66·56 in India. Under a country perspective, the regional benefit–cost ratios amount to 60·71 in India, 8·78 in Kenya, and 11·88 in South Africa. INTERPRETATION : Our study supports the creation of regional hubs for clinical trials and product manufacturing compared with narrow national efforts.The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/homehttps://datahelpdesk.worldbank.org/knowledgebase/articles/906519-world-bank-country-and-lending-groupsam2023Graduate School of Technology Management (GSTM

Rethinking how development assistance for health can catalyse progress on primary health care

Global campaigns to control HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, and vaccine-preventable illnesses showed that large-scale impact can be achieved by using additional international financing to support selected, evidence-based, high-impact investment areas and to catalyse domestic resource mobilisation. Building on this paradigm, we make the case for targeting additional international funding for selected high-impact investments in primary health care. We have identified and costed a set of concrete, evidence-based investments that donors could support, which would be expected to have major impacts at an affordable cost. These investments are in: (1) individuals and communities empowered to engage in health decision making, (2) a new model of people-centred primary care, and (3) next generation community health workers. These three areas would be supported by strengthening two cross-cutting elements of national systems. The first is the digital tools and data that support facility, district, and national managers to improve processes, quality of care, and accountability across primary health care. The second is the educational, training, and supervisory systems needed to improve the quality of care. We estimate that with an additional international investment of between US$1·87 billion in a low-investment scenario and$3·85 billion in a high-investment scenario annually over the next 3 years, the international community could support the scale-up of this evidence-based package of investments in the 59 low-income and middle-income countries that are eligible for external financing from the World Bank Group's International Development Association

The evolving SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in Africa: Insights from rapidly expanding genomic surveillance

INTRODUCTION Investment in Africa over the past year with regard to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) sequencing has led to a massive increase in the number of sequences, which, to date, exceeds 100,000 sequences generated to track the pandemic on the continent. These sequences have profoundly affected how public health officials in Africa have navigated the COVID-19 pandemic. RATIONALE We demonstrate how the first 100,000 SARS-CoV-2 sequences from Africa have helped monitor the epidemic on the continent, how genomic surveillance expanded over the course of the pandemic, and how we adapted our sequencing methods to deal with an evolving virus. Finally, we also examine how viral lineages have spread across the continent in a phylogeographic framework to gain insights into the underlying temporal and spatial transmission dynamics for several variants of concern (VOCs). RESULTS Our results indicate that the number of countries in Africa that can sequence the virus within their own borders is growing and that this is coupled with a shorter turnaround time from the time of sampling to sequence submission. Ongoing evolution necessitated the continual updating of primer sets, and, as a result, eight primer sets were designed in tandem with viral evolution and used to ensure effective sequencing of the virus. The pandemic unfolded through multiple waves of infection that were each driven by distinct genetic lineages, with B.1-like ancestral strains associated with the first pandemic wave of infections in 2020. Successive waves on the continent were fueled by different VOCs, with Alpha and Beta cocirculating in distinct spatial patterns during the second wave and Delta and Omicron affecting the whole continent during the third and fourth waves, respectively. Phylogeographic reconstruction points toward distinct differences in viral importation and exportation patterns associated with the Alpha, Beta, Delta, and Omicron variants and subvariants, when considering both Africa versus the rest of the world and viral dissemination within the continent. Our epidemiological and phylogenetic inferences therefore underscore the heterogeneous nature of the pandemic on the continent and highlight key insights and challenges, for instance, recognizing the limitations of low testing proportions. We also highlight the early warning capacity that genomic surveillance in Africa has had for the rest of the world with the detection of new lineages and variants, the most recent being the characterization of various Omicron subvariants. CONCLUSION Sustained investment for diagnostics and genomic surveillance in Africa is needed as the virus continues to evolve. This is important not only to help combat SARS-CoV-2 on the continent but also because it can be used as a platform to help address the many emerging and reemerging infectious disease threats in Africa. In particular, capacity building for local sequencing within countries or within the continent should be prioritized because this is generally associated with shorter turnaround times, providing the most benefit to local public health authorities tasked with pandemic response and mitigation and allowing for the fastest reaction to localized outbreaks. These investments are crucial for pandemic preparedness and response and will serve the health of the continent well into the 21st century

Comparing research and development, launch, and scale up timelines of 18 vaccines: lessons learnt from COVID-19 and implications for other infectious diseases

Over the next decade, millions of deaths could be prevented by increasing access to vaccines in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs). The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that the research and development (R&D), launch and scale up timelines of vaccines can be drastically shortened. This study compares such timelines for eighteen vaccines and identifies lessons and implications for accelerating the R&D, launch and scale up process for other vaccine candidates. To replicate the rapid R&D process of the COVID-19 vaccines, future vaccine R&D should capitalise on public–private knowledge sharing partnerships to promote technology innovation, establish regional clinical trial centres and data sharing networks to optimise clinical trial efficiency, and create a funding mechanism to support research into novel vaccine platforms that may prove valuable to quickly developing vaccine candidates in future global health emergencies. To accelerate the launch timeline, future efforts to bring safe and efficacious vaccines to market should include LMICs in the decision-making processes of global procurement and delivery alliances to optimise launch in these countries, strengthen the WHO prequalification and Emergency Use Listing programs to ensure LMICs have a robust and transparent regulatory system to rely on, and invest in LMIC regulatory and manufacturing capacity to ensure these countries are vaccine self-sufficient. Lastly, efforts to accelerate scale up of vaccines should include the creation of regional pooled procurement mechanisms between LMICs to increase purchasing power among these countries and an open line of clear communication with the public regarding pertinent vaccine information to combat misinformation and vaccine hesitancy