The unmapped chemical complexity of our diet
Albert-László Barabási, Giulia Menichetti & Joseph Loscalzo
Nature Food (2019)
Our understanding of how diet affects health is limited to 150 key nutritional components that are tracked and catalogued by the United States Department of Agriculture and other national databases. Although this knowledge has been transformative for health sciences, helping unveil the role of calories, sugar, fat, vitamins and other nutritional factors in the emergence of common diseases, these nutritional components represent only a small fraction of the more than 26,000 distinct, definable biochemicals present in our food—many of which have documented effects on health but remain unquantified in any systematic fashion across different individual foods. Using new advances such as machine learning, a high-resolution library of these biochemicals could enable the systematic study of the full biochemical spectrum of our diets, opening new avenues for understanding the composition of what we eat, and how it affects health and disease.
Source: www.nature.com
Survey: AI adoption proves its worth, but few scale impact
Most companies report measurable benefits from AI where it has been deployed; however, much work remains to scale impact, manage risks, and retrain the workforce. A group of high performers with AI capabilities show the way.
Source: www.mckinsey.com
Editorial: Novel Technological and Methodological Tools for the Understanding of Collective Behaviors
Elio Tuci1, Vito Trianni, Andrew King and Simon Garnier
Front. Robot. AI, 10 December 2019
The social processes that give rise to coordinated actions of a group of agents and the emergence of global structures—referred to as collective behaviors—are observed in a range of biological and artificial systems. Collective behavior research, therefore, focuses upon a range of different phenomena with the common goal of understanding the dynamics of emergent group level responses, and has resulted in a burgeoning, diverse, and interdisciplinary research community.
Studying collective behaviors in biological and artificial systems is particularly challenging because of their intrinsic complexity, requiring novel approaches that can help unraveling these systems in order to explain how and why certain patterns are produced and maintained. This Research Topic brings together a collection of studies that focus on technological and methodological tools that can support the understanding of collective behaviors. The contributions included within the Research Topic can be broadly categorized as: (i) Review Articles, (ii) Tools and Technologies, and (iii) Empirical Studies.
Our goal is to facilitate the dissemination of ideas, theories, and methods among scientists that share an interest on the study of collective behavior in all its diverse manifestations. It is our hope that, together, this Research Topic and contributions may afford a more complete understanding of the nature of proximate and ultimate causes of collective behaviors in biological systems, and provide opportunity to generate a theoretical framework to engineer robust, resilient, and effective technologies, such as multi-robot systems, smart grids, and sensor networks.
Source: www.frontiersin.org
On cycling risk and discomfort: urban safety mapping and bike route recommendations
David Castells-Graells, Christopher Salahub, Evangelos Pournaras
Computing
Bike usage in Smart Cities is paramount for sustainable urban development: cycling promotes healthier lifestyles, lowers energy consumption, lowers carbon emissions, and reduces urban traffic. However, the expansion and increased use of bike infrastructure has been accompanied by a glut of bike accidents, a trend jeopardizing the urban bike movement. This paper leverages data from a diverse spectrum of sources to characterise geolocated bike accident severity and, ultimately, study cycling risk and discomfort. Kernel density estimation generates a continuous, empirical, spatial risk estimate which is mapped in a case study of Zürich city. The roles of weather, time, accident type, and severity are illustrated. A predominance of self-caused accidents motivates an open-source software artifact for personalized route recommendations. This software is used to collect open baseline route data that are compared with alternative routes minimizing risk and discomfort. These contributions have the potential to provide invaluable infrastructure improvement insights to urban planners, and may also improve the awareness of risk in the urban environment among experienced and novice cyclists alike.
Source: link.springer.com
Helping machines to perceive laws of physics by themselves
ADEPT, an artificial intelligence model developed by MIT researchers, demonstrates an understanding of some basic “intuitive physics” by registering a surprise signal when objects in a scene violate assumed reality, similarly to how human infants and adults would register surprise.
We often think of artificial intelligence as a tool for automating certain tasks. But it turns out that the technology could also help give us a better understanding of ourselves. At least that’s what a team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) think they’ll be able to do with their new AI model.
Dubbed ADEPT, the system is able to, like a human being, understand some laws of physics intuitively. It can look at an object in a video, predict how it should act based on what it knows of the laws of physics and then register surprise if what it was looking at subsequently vanishes or teleports. The team behind ADEPT say their model will allow other researchers to create smarter AIs in the future, as well give us a better understanding of how infants understand the world around them.
"By the time infants are three months old, they have some notion that objects don’t wink in and out of existence, and can’t move through each other or teleport," said Kevin A. Smith, one of the researchers that created ADEPT. "We wanted to capture and formalize that knowledge to build infant cognition into artificial-intelligence agents. We’re now getting near human-like in the way models can pick apart basic implausible or plausible scenes."
ADEPT depends on two modules to do what it does. The first examines an object, determining its shape, pose and velocity. What’s interesting about this module is that it doesn’t get caught up in details. It only looks at the approximate geometry of something, rather than analyzing every facet of it, before it moves onto the next step. This was by design, according to the ADEPT team; it allows the system to predict the movement of a variety of different objects, not just ones it was trained to understand. Moreover, it’s an aspect of the system’s design that makes it similar to infants. Like ADEPT, it turns out that children don’t care much about the specific physical properties of something when they’re thinking about how it may move.
The second module is a physics system. It shares similarities with the software video game developers employ to replicate real-world physics in their games. It takes the data captured by the graphics module and simulates how an object should act based on the laws of physics. Once it has a couple of predicted outcomes, it will compare those against the next frames of a video. If it notices a discrepancy in what it thought would happen with what actually occurred, it will send out a signal. The stronger the signal, the more surprised it was by what just happened. What’s interesting about ADEPT is that its level of surprise matched those of humans who were shown the same set of videos.
Moving forward, the team says they want to further explore how young children see the world, and incorporate those findings into their model. "We want to see what else needs to be built in to understand the world more like infants, and formalize what we know about psychology to build better AI agents," Smith said.
Source: news.mit.edu
Understanding and reducing the spread of misinformation online
Gordon Pennycook, Ziv Epstein, Mohsen Mosleh, Antonio Arechar, Dean Eckles, David Rand
The spread of false and misleading news on social media is of great societal concern. Why do people share such content, and what can be done about it? In a first survey experiment (N=1,015), we demonstrate a disconnect between accuracy judgments and sharing intentions: even though true headlines are rated as much more accurate than false headlines, headline veracity has little impact on sharing. We argue against a “post-truth” interpretation, whereby people deliberately share false content because it furthers their political agenda. Instead, we propose that the problem is simply distraction: most people do not want to spread misinformation, but are distracted from accuracy by other salient motives when choosing what to share. Indeed, when directly asked, most participants say it is important to only share accurate news. Accordingly, across three survey experiments (total N=2775) and an experiment on Twitter in which we messaged N=5,482 users who had previously shared news from misleading websites, we find that subtly inducing people to think about the concept of accuracy increases the quality of the news they share. Together, these results challenge the popular post-truth narrative. Instead, they suggest that many people are capable of detecting low-quality news content, but nonetheless share such content online because social media is not conducive to thinking analytically about truth and accuracy. Furthermore, our results translate directly into a scalable anti-misinformation intervention that is easily implementable by social media platforms.
Source: psyarxiv.com
Modeling somatic computation with non-neural bioelectric networks
The field of basal cognition seeks to understand how adaptive, context-specific behavior occurs in non-neural biological systems. Embryogenesis and regeneration require plasticity in many tissue types to achieve structural and functional goals in diverse circumstances. Thus, advances in both evolutionary cell biology and regenerative medicine require an understanding of how non-neural tissues could process information. Neurons evolved from ancient cell types that used bioelectric signaling to perform computation. However, it has not been shown whether or how non-neural bioelectric cell networks can support computation. We generalize connectionist methods to non-neural tissue architectures, showing that a minimal non-neural Bio-Electric Network (BEN) model that utilizes the general principles of bioelectricity (electrodiffusion and gating) can compute. We characterize BEN behaviors ranging from elementary logic gates to pattern detectors, using both fixed and transient inputs to recapitulate various biological scenarios. We characterize the mechanisms of such networks using dynamical-systems and information-theory tools, demonstrating that logic can manifest in bidirectional, continuous, and relatively slow bioelectrical systems, complementing conventional neural-centric architectures. Our results reveal a variety of non-neural decision-making processes as manifestations of general cellular biophysical mechanisms and suggest novel bioengineering approaches to construct functional tissues for regenerative medicine and synthetic biology as well as new machine learning architectures.
Source: www.nature.com
Dynamical Inference of Simple Heteroclinic Networks
Maximilian Voit and Hildegard Meyer-Ortmanns
Front. Appl. Math. Stat., 10 December 2019
Heteroclinic networks are structures in phase space that consist of multiple saddle fixed points as nodes, connected by heteroclinic orbits as edges. They provide a promising candidate attractor to generate reproducible sequential series of metastable states. While from an engineering point of view it is known how to construct heteroclinic networks to achieve certain dynamics, a data based approach for the inference of heteroclinic dynamics is still missing. Here, we present a method by which a template system dynamically learns to mimic an input sequence of metastable states. To this end, the template is unidirectionally, linearly coupled to the input in a master-slave fashion, so that it is forced to follow the same sequence. Simultaneously, its eigenvalues are adapted to minimize the difference of template dynamics and input sequence. Hence, after the learning procedure, the trained template constitutes a model with dynamics that are most similar to the training data. We demonstrate the performance of this method at various examples, including dynamics that differ from the template, as well as a regular and a random heteroclinic network. In all cases the topology of the heteroclinic network is recovered precisely, as are most eigenvalues. Our approach may thus be applied to infer the topology and the connection strength of a heteroclinic network from data in a dynamical fashion. Moreover, it may serve as a model for learning in systems of winnerless competition.
Source: www.frontiersin.org
Transitivity and degree assortativity explained: The bipartite structure of social networks
Demival Vasques Filho, Dion R. J. O’Neale
Dynamical processes, such as the diffusion of knowledge, opinions, pathogens, "fake news", innovation, and others, are highly dependent on the structure of the social network on which they occur. However, questions on why most social networks present some particular structural features, namely high levels of
transitivity and degree assortativity, when compared to other types of networks remain open. First, we argue that every one-mode network can be regarded as a projection of a bipartite network, and show that this is the case using two simple examples solved with the generating functions formalism. Second, using synthetic and empirical data, we reveal how the combination of the degree distribution of both sets of nodes of the bipartite network — together with the presence of cycles of length four and six — explains the observed levels of transitivity and degree assortativity in the one-mode projected network. Bipartite networks with top node degrees that display a more right-skewed distribution than the bottom nodes result in highly transitive and degree assortative projections, especially if a large number of small cycles are present in the bipartite structure.
Source: arxiv.org
Digital Fingerprints of Cognitive Reflection
Mohsen Mosleh, Gordon Pennycook, Antonio Arechar, David Rand
Social media is playing an increasingly large role in everyday life. Thus, it is of both scientific and practical interest to understand behavior on social media platforms. Furthermore, social media provides a unique window for social scientists to deepen our understanding of the human mind. Here we investigate the relationship between individual differences in cognitive reflection and behavior on Twitter in a sample of large N = 1,953 users recruited via Prolific Academic. In doing so, we differentiate between two competing accounts of human information processing: an “intuitionist” account whereby reflection plays little role in daily life, and a “reflectionist” account whereby reflection (and, in particular, overriding intuitive responses) does play an important role. We found that people who score higher on the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) – a widely used measure of reflective thinking – were more discerning in their social media use: They followed more selectively, shared news content from more reliable sources, and tweeted about weightier subjects. Furthermore, a network analysis indicated that the phenomenon of echo chambers, in which discourse is more likely with like-minded others, is not limited to politics: we observe “cognitive echo chambers” in which people low on cognitive reflection tend to follow the same set of accounts. Our results help to illuminate the drivers of behavior on social media platforms, and challenge intuitionist notions that reflective thinking is unimportant for everyday judgment and decision-making.
Source: psyarxiv.com
