Early Career Research Day winner improves neural network training for biological research
 IDRE’s Early Career Research Day recognized Shawn Schwartz’s research, High-Throughput Phenoscaping Using Deep Learning for Accurate Automatic Instance Segmentation of Fish Images, as one of the top four posters presented. More than 80 researchers participated in the poster session event with 40 high-quality research posters on November 20, 2019.
Schwartz, a UCLA Ecology and Evolutionary Biology graduate student, was studying the diversity of fish color patterns when he noticed a limitation in his toolset. He needed to segment each fish from their picture’s background to process the data, and there were too many photos to do it by hand. Schwartz and his research team enlisted the help of COCO (Common Objects in Context), a dataset used to train neural networks to cut the background out of a large number of images.
He ran into one issue with COCO: it had no data on fish — in the biological sense.
The current research aims to help biologists’ research involving big data by creating biologically inspired datasets that can better train neural networks to fit researchers’ needs.
“We want to attack this problem that a lot of the databases and hierarchically structured pre-trained sets for model training for machine learning and deep learning are not biologically inspired,” Schwartz said.
Read the full article on IDRE's website.
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UCLA researchers discover increase in domestic violence reports as COVID-19 keeps people at home
A UCLA-led research team, including Executive Committee member Andrea Bertozzi, has found an increase in the incidence of domestic violence reports in two cities, Los Angeles and Indianapolis, since stay-at-home restrictions were implemented in March in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The researchers analyzed police calls from before and after the coronavirus pandemic and reported crime statistics through mid-April. Their study is published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Criminal Justice.
Read the UCLA Newsroom article.
Professors advocate for 'physical distancing' instead of 'social distancing'
A group of UCLA sociology professors, including Executive Committee member Jacob Foster, believe that using the more accurate “physical distancing” to emphasize that remaining socially connected during quarantine is critical for supporting our mental health and communities.
Read the Daily Bruin article.
UCLA researchers use machine learning to forecast COVID-19
Computer Science Professor Quanquan Gu detailed UCLA's Statistical Machine Learning Lab's successful COVID-19 mapping forecast model in a talk held by IDRE's Early Career Research Group on June 5th, 2020. The model, which is featured on the CDC's website, uses machine learning to forecast the confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths, estimate a peak date, and estimate the reproduction number and prevalence.
View this model's forecasts on the UCLA Statistical Machine Learning Lab's website.
More than 300 UCLA scientists condemn acts of racist violence
In an open letter, the faculty members, including IDRE Executive Committee members Pablo Saide and Marco Velli, recommit to promoting diversity.
"As scholars dedicated to the study of the sciences, we know that there are intergenerational effects of trauma, and that the longstanding racism and injustice perpetrated against some of our citizens by police and by others in positions of power has worked to hobble the very nation we love," reads the letter.
Read the full letter and the list of signatories on UCLA newsroom.
Labor Studies Major Chair sends off 2020 graduates
In a recent UCLA newsroom article, HASIS Committee member Toby Higbie voiced his confidence in the 2020 graduating class of UCLA Labor Studies majors.
"It’s populated by an amazing group of students who are mainly first-gen from across the L.A. region, coming from working class families," Higbie said. "Often they have experience as workers in the labor market already so they bring a different level of engagement on topics like farm workers, industrial regulations, labor law and labor history."
Read the full UCLA newsroom article.
Popular blood pressure medicines do not put patients at greater COVID-19 risk, UCLA study finds
Two blood pressure-lowering drug classes, called ACE inhibitors and ARBs, came under scrutiny after the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in April that 72% of hospitalized COVID-19 patients 65 or older had hypertension.
The new study, co-led by IDRE Executive Committee member Marc Suchard, found no clinically significant increased risk of either a diagnosis or hospitalization of COVID-19 with ACE or ARB use compared with other first-line drug treatments for hypertension.
Read the full Reuters article.
Data scientists invent new tools to analyze the spread, evolution of COVID-19
Scripps Research is collaborating with top computational scientists at Johns Hopkins University and UCLA, including IDRE Executive Committee member Marc Suchard, to develop better statistical models and visualization software for COVID-19.
“Through the creation of new, scalable statistical models, we’ll be able to more clearly identify the factors that affect viral transmission and virulence for SARS-CoV-2,” said Suchard. “Not only will this allow us to understand whether certain public health measures are working, but it also will help predict how the disease could spread under different circumstances.”
The project has won a $1.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, and seeks to answer questions such as: How did the virus travel from country to country, or region to region? Do weather patterns affect its ability to spread? What demographic or socioeconomic factors put certain populations at higher risk?
Read the full Science Magazine article.
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OPPORTUNITIES FOR RESEARCHERS
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TACC Summer Institute Series
The TACC Summer Institutes Series offers an intense, immersive online training in advanced computation from onsite experts.
Topics include developing parallel applications for modern high performance computers, visualizing and analyzing large data sets, machine learning and deep learning techniques for diving into your datasets, and developing and executing reproducible experiments in the cloud.
Register for the TACC Summer Institute Series.
Apply for the TACC Summer Institute Fellowship Program for registration cost assistance.
MathWorks Simulink Seminar
Mathworks is offering a complimentary MATLAB seminar on Wednesday, July 8, 2020 for researchers, students, faculty, and staff! The online Webex seminar will introduce Simulink as a graphical environment for engineering dynamic systems and a platform for Model-Based Design. MATLAB and Simulink allow engineers to develop system-level models in a multi-domain simulation environment and take their models from concept to implementation.
Register for MathWorks' free seminar.
XSEDE Research Allocation Requests
XSEDE is now accepting Research Allocation Requests for the allocation period, October 1, 2020 to September 30, 2021. The submission deadline is July 15, 2020.
Almost all U.S.-based university and non-profit researchers are eligible to request allocations via XSEDE for access to more than a dozen computational and storage resources. These resources include multi-core and many-core high-performance computing (HPC) systems, distributed high-throughput computing (HTC) environments, visualization and data analysis systems, large-memory systems, data storage, and cloud systems.
View the full list of available resources, review criteria and guidelines, and submit a request on the XSEDE User Portal.
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July 7, 2020 @ 9:00 am - 11:00 am
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Current Opportunities
Learn about grant and funding opportunities on the IDRE and OVCR (Office of the Vice Chancellor of Research) websites.
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