'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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Emory chemists invent shape-shifting nanomaterial