HPMOR Wrap Parties: Resources, Information and Discussion [link to Main post]
Posted to Main. X-posting for visibility
I know a lot of people don't check Main very often. Wanted to make sure everyone interested saw this.
[Link] IBM to set Watson loose on cancer genome data
http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/03/ibm-to-set-watson-loose-on-cancer-genome-data/
Can anyone more informed about Watson or Machine Learning in general comment on this application? Specifically, I'm interested in an explanation of this part:
[...] the National Institutes of Health has compiled lists of biochemical pathways—signaling networks and protein interactions—and placed them in machine-readable formats. Once those were imported, Watson's text analysis abilities were set loose on the NIH's PubMed database, which contains abstracts of nearly every paper published in peer-reviewed biomedical journals.
Over time, Watson will develop its own sense of what sources it looks at are consistently reliable. Royyuru told Ars that, if the team decides to, it can start adding the full text of articles and branch out to other information sources. Between the known pathways and the scientific literature, however, IBM seems to think that Watson has a good grip on what typically goes on inside cells.
It sounds like Watson will be trained through some standard formatted input data and then it's going to read plaintext articles and draw conclusions about them? It sounds like they're anticipating that Watson will be able to tell which studies are "good" studies as well, which sounds incredible (in both senses of the word).
Self-Study Questions Thread
Gauging Interest: Santa Barbara, CA Meetup
I live in Santa Barbara. Los Angeles is a bit too far away for me to travel for LW meetups, so I wanted to see if anyone would be interested in a Santa Barbara meetup. I would be happy to arrange it and plan content.
If anyone would be interested in attending *at least one* Santa Barbara meetup provided that it was on a day and time that worked for your schedule, please post a comment or send me a private message.
Thanks!
[Meta] Post-meetup reports and discussion
Looking at the discussion section recently, it seems like over half of the posts are meetups. I think it's really great that so many LessWrongers are able to get together and do interesting stuff. Looking at a lot of the topics, I often find myself thinking "I wonder what they ended up talking about." I looked at the meetups page and it looks like many give a description of the topic, but there is rarely any public followup. I also did a search which turned up surprisingly few post-meetup posts.
For example, this Los Angeles meetup from a few days ago about resolutions looked really interesting to me and I'm curious to hear what kinds of strategies were proposed and if there were any insights or anecdotes that came up that would be useful to share with those of us that couldn't attend.
I remember reading a meetup report back in November that told the story of the exercises they went through and it seemed to spark some good discussion. It even forced me to make a note to try some things on my own. This one was atypical in that it was very detailed and was a crosspost from a personal blog, but I feel like even short reports would give a chance for the rest of the community to chime in and give praise, suggestions, and feedback.
When I tried to think of reasons not to share what happened in meetups, I came up with a few potential factors:
- It's extra work
- Keeping it private increases the feeling of community within the group
- Meetups are supposed to be a safe place where your actions or comments won't be broadcast to the world
- Nothing really post-worthy happened
- It would allow LessWrongers who weren't in attendance to get involved in the discussion
- Insights would be shared with the whole community
- Meetup organizers and attendees could get suggestions for ways to improve future meetups
- Non-attendees could use these ideas to host their own meetups
- Summarizing key points of a discussion is helpful for those involved to retain the information they discussed
Ray Kurzweil is speaking at my university tonight. What questions should I ask him?
I realize this is late notice, but I just found out. He goes on at 8pm and will likely be answering questions by 9:30. I would like to ask him some great questions and I will ask as many of the best that I see here as possible. Any ideas?
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