'Periodic table' for AI methods aims to drive innovation

Eslam Abdelaleem led the work as an Emory graduate student. The day of the final breakthrough, the AI health tracker on his watch recorded his racing heart as three hours of cycling. "That's how it interpretated the level of excitement I was feeling," Abdelaleem says. (Photo by Barbara Conner)

Artificial intelligence is increasingly used to integrate and analyze multiple types of data formats, such as text, images, audio and video. One challenge slowing advances in multimodal AI, however, is the process of choosing the algorithmic method best aligned to the specific task an AI system needs to perform. 

Scientists have developed a unified view of AI methods aimed at systemizing this process. The Journal of Machine Learning Research published the new framework for deriving algorithms, developed by physicists at Emory University. 

“We found that many of today’s most successful AI methods boil down to a single, simple idea — compress multiple kinds of data just enough to keep the pieces that truly predict what you need,” says Ilya Nemenman, Emory professor of physics and senior author of the paper. “This gives us a kind of ‘periodic table’ of AI methods. Different methods fall into different cells, based on which information a method’s loss function retains or discards.”

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Epigenetics linked to high-altitude adaptation in Andes

Indigenous people living at high altitude in the Andean highlands have adapted to one of the most extreme environments ever inhabited by humans. (Getty Images/Oleh Slobodeniuk)

DNA sequencing technology makes it possible to explore the genome to learn how humans adapted to live in a wide range of environments. Research has shown, for instance, that Tibetans living at high altitude in the Himalayas have a unique variant of a gene that expands the oxygen-carrying capacity of their blood. 

Scientists, however, have not found a strong signal for this “high-altitude gene” in the genomes of Indigenous people living in the Andes Mountains of South America. It’s been less clear how people adapted to the altitudes greater than 2,500 meters in the Andean highlands, where low-oxygen levels, frigid temperatures and intense ultraviolet radiation make life challenging in the extreme. 

A study led by anthropologists at Emory University took a new approach to explore this Andean mystery.

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Unlocking design secrets of deep-sea microbes

"The molecular study of proteins is rapidly expanding as the technology supporting the field keeps advancing," says Vincent Conticello. "You're only limited by your interest and your imagination." (Photo by Carol Clark)

The microbe Pyrodictium abyssi is an archaeaon — a member of what’s known as the third domain of life — and an extremophile. It lives in deep-sea thermal vents, at temperatures above the boiling point of water, without light or oxygen, withstanding the enormous pressure at ocean depths of thousands of meters. 

A biomatrix of tiny tubes of protein, known as cannulae, link cells of Pyrodictium abyssi together into a highly stable microbial community. No one knew how these single-celled microbes accomplished this feat of extreme engineering — until now. 

A study using advanced microscopy techniques reveals new details about the elegant design of the cannulae and the remarkable simplicity of their method of construction. Nature Communications published the work, led by scientists at Emory University; the University of Virginia, Charlottesville; and Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium. 

The discovery holds the potential to inspire innovations in biotechnology, from the development of new “smart” materials to nanoscale drug delivery systems. 

“Not only are the cannulae strong enough to endure extreme conditions, they’re beautiful,” says Vincent Conticello, Emory professor of chemistry and co-senior author of the paper. “To me, they resemble columns from the classical architecture of ancient Greece or Rome,” he adds, citing their fluted edges and precise regularity.

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Electric charge connects jumping worm to prey

A tiny worm that leaps high into the air — up to 25 times its body length — to attach to flying insects uses static electricity to perform this astounding feat, scientists have found. The journal PNAS published the work on the nematode Steinernema carpocapsae, a parasitic roundworm, led by researchers at Emory University and the University of California, Berkeley. 

“We’ve identified the electrostatic mechanism this worm uses to hit its target, and we’ve shown the importance of this mechanism for the worm’s survival,” says co-author Justin Burton, an Emory professor of physics whose lab led the mathematical analyses of laboratory experiments. “Higher voltage, combined with a tiny breath of wind, greatly boosts the odds of a jumping worm connecting to a flying insect.” 

“You might expect to find big discoveries in big animals, but the tiny ones also hold a lot of interesting secrets,” adds Victor Ortega-Jiménez, co-lead author and assistant professor of biomechanics at the University of California, Berkeley. He conducted the experiments, including the use of highspeed microscopy techniques to film the parasitic worm — whose length is about the diameter of a needle point — as it leaped onto electrically charged fruit flies. 

The researchers showed how a charge of a few hundred volts, similar to that generated by an insect’s wings beating the air, initiates an opposite charge in the worm, creating an attractive force. They identified electrostatic induction as the charging mechanism driving this process.

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New Method to Control Dengue Mosquito Shows Public Health Benefit

In advance of the rainy season, local public health officials sprayed a long-lasting insecticide, safe for indoor use, targeted to areas where the Aedes mosquito prefers to hang out.

A novel disease prevention strategy — targeting a mosquito that spreads the dengue virus — significantly reduces both the mosquito numbers and cases of disease across a community, finds a major new study. New England Journal of Medicine published the results of the large, randomized clinical trial — considered the gold standard for evaluating the effectiveness of an intervention — led by Emory University. 

The research was conducted in Merida, a city of one million in the Mexican state of the Yucatan, through a close collaboration with the Autonomous University of the Yucatan, the Yucatan Ministry of Health and the Federal Ministry of Health of Mexico. 

The project tested an intervention that previous Emory research found promising: Targeted indoor residual spraying of insecticide, or TIRS, conducted before an outbreak occurs. The method is aimed at a particular species of mosquito, Aedes aegypti, that is perfectly adapted to live with humans in an urban setting. 

“Our study showed that the TIRS method reduced numbers of these mosquitos by 6o percent for a period of six months,” says Gonzalo Vazquez-Prokopec, senior author of the study and Emory professor of environmental sciences. “The results also quantified a 24 percent mean reduction community-wide in cases of dengue fever, even in the context of a record-breaking outbreak of dengue in Merida.”

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