New Centre to tackle intersection between global environmental change and NCDs

 

A £10m grant has established the NIHR Global Health Research Centre on Non-Communicable Diseases and Environmental Change.

The Centre, a partnership led by Imperial College London and The George Institute for Global Health India, will work to tackle the dual challenge of a rapidly growing burden of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and global environmental change in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).

LMICs face unique challenges in delivering equitable, high-quality primary care services for the prevention and treatment of NCDs such as diabetes, kidney disease, hypertension and cardiovascular disease, and mental health. This is especially true among marginalised populations that are affected by - or have migrated due to - environmental risks and exposures including air pollution, flooding, and heatwaves. The Centre will focus on populations in Bangladesh, Indonesia and India which are amongst the most vulnerable to the impact of climate change on health.

Despite an increased recognition of a need for action there is limited evidence on cost-effective interventions to address major challenges emerging at the intersection of NCDs and environmental change in LMICs.

Professor Vivekanand Jha, co-lead of the Centre and Executive Director of The George Institute for Global Health, India remarked: “LMICs face dual, intertwined challenges of a rapidly growing burden of NCDs and the existential threat of global environmental change. Our Centre will focus on three major challenges at the interface of NCDs and environmental change - air pollution, water salinity and food systems and generate actionable evidence for improving health outcomes and reducing inequities in a cost-effective manner”,

The National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Global Health Research Centre for NCDs and Environmental Change includes an interdisciplinary group of academics from the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Research (Bangladesh), Sri Ramachandra Institute of Higher Education & Research (India), and University of Brawijaya (Indonesia), who will work to address specific health concerns related to environmental change.

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One of the Companies, Shahed Aviation Industries Research Center , Has Designed and ... - Latest Tweet by The Kyiv Independent

 

The latest Tweet by The Kyiv Independent states, 'One of the companies, Shahid Aviation Industries Research Center, has designed and manufactured several Shahid-series drones, including the Shahid-136 one-way attack UAV that Russian forces have used in recent attacks targeting civilian infrastructure across Ukraine.'

" One of the companies, Shahed Aviation Industries Research Center (SAIRC), has designed and manufactured several Shahed-series drones, including the Shahed-136 one-way attack UAV that Russian forces have used in recent attacks targeting civilian infrastructure across Ukraine."

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China Strengthens Control over Geographic Data Processing by ICVs

On 25 August 2022, the Ministry of Natural Resources issued the Notice on Promoting Development of Intelligent and Connected Vehicles and Protecting Security of Geographic Mapping Information (“Notice”).

In this article, we highlight the key provisions of the Notice and set out our observations.

BACKGROUND

Under the Surveying and Mapping Law (“SML”), only companies licensed by the government are permitted to conduct any surveying or mapping activities. Results of any surveying or mapping activities must be submitted to the government, which will publish a catalogue of surveying and mapping results received.

The rapid development of the intelligent and connected vehicles (“ICV”) industry has given rise to concerns of the government as to the collection of geographic mapping data. In 2016, the National Bureau of Surveying and Mapping issued a notice that requires all automotive manufacturers and research institutions to engage licensed institutions to conduct any surveying and mapping activities relevant to digital maps. In addition, any mapping data used for road testing and experiment of autonomous driving technology should also be treated as confidential surveying results that must not be provided to foreign organisations or individuals or foreign-invested companies.

The Notice is a step further taken by the government to bring more geographic mapping data processing activities in the ICV industry under the jurisdiction of surveying and mapping laws.

KEY PROVISIONS AND OBSERVATIONS

I. What activities are regulated by the Notice?

The Notice specifies that the following activities (“Regulated Activities”) are considered surveying and mapping activities: collecting, storing, transferring and processing by vehicles geographic mapping information (“Regulated Data”) of vehicles and surrounding road infrastructure, such as spatial coordinates, images, point clouds and attribute information. The vehicles here refer to the ICVs installed or equipped with sensors, such as satellite signal receiver and positioning receiver modules, inertial measurement units, cameras, and LIDAR.

Notably, the Notice explicitly excludes the manufacturing, integration and sale of vehicle sensors and ICVs from the scope of surveying and mapping activities.

II. Who will be subject to the Notice?

The Notice applies to the processors of the Regulated Data. In particular, the Notice applies to automotive manufacturers, service providers and certain intelligent driving software providers (“Regulated Entities”), who collect, store, transfer and process geographic mapping data, but excludes from the scope drivers and passengers of ICVs.

III. Licensing requirements and foreign investment

As the SML requires entities engaged in surveying and mapping activities to obtain a relevant license first, under the Notice only licensed entities can carry out the Regulated Activities. Where the Regulated Entities do not hold the license for mapping and surveying, they must engage the licensed entities to carry out the Regulated Activities on their behalf.

Whilst it is possible for the Regulated Entities to obtain the license, the requirements are relatively onerous for new applicants to meet, and some may opt to cooperate with licensed entities.

As foreign investment is prohibited in most categories of mapping and surveying activities, the Notice requires foreign-invested entities to engaged licensed entities to carry out the Regulated Activities.

IV. Export of Regulated Data

The Notice requires that entities providers of after-sale and operation services in relation to ICVs should seek approval of the authorities before exporting the Regulated Data.

Under the current laws and regulations, export of the Regulated Data must be approved if the Regulated Data contains the following information:State secret: the authorities have identified the scope of surveying and mapping data that is likely to be identified as state secrets;
Important data: the geographic information of important and sensitive areas such as military administration zones, defence science and industry entities, and party and government offices of county level or above (for our comments on important data in the automotive industry please click here);
mapping data used for road testing and experiment of autonomous driving technology; and
results of surveying and mapping activities conducted by a collaboration between Chinese and foreign parties.

CONCLUSION

The Notice brings the processing of geographic mapping data in the ICV industry into the scope of surveying and mapping activities, which are now under close scrutiny by the authorities. The Regulated Entities in the ICV industry are now required to obtain a license or engage a licensed entity to process geographic mapping data. Export of such data is also subject to strict approval process. Entities in the ICV industry are advised to take immediate measures to adapt to the requirements of the Notice.

more info : https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=a5cdd925-8145-4d9f-991f-9bc49f94631c

Vulnerability and policing research centre launches

 

A ground-breaking new research centre aims to change how the police, public services and local government work together to help vulnerable people.

The Vulnerability & Policing Futures Research Centre is a joint initiative led by the University of Leeds and University of York, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

The centre brings together a wide range of national and regional partners to study how policing and other services can better tackle problems associated with vulnerabilities. These include exploitation by county lines drug networks, online child sexual exploitation, domestic abuse, modern slavery, mental illness and homelessness.

The launch event, on 12 October at the Leeds’ School of Law, outlines the centre’s ambitious agenda and brings together police, councils and representatives of partner organisations from across Yorkshire.

It also includes a talk from Zoë Billingham, who served as Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services for 12 years and is currently Chair of Norfolk & Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust. She will highlight the importance of the centre’s research for policing, health and beyond.

An important dimension of the centre’s immediate work begins in Bradford. The researchers will analyse police, health, education, and social care datasets to gather new insights in how organisations work together to address vulnerability, as well as vulnerable people’s experiences.

The research team will map the services used by vulnerable people who are in contact with the police in Bradford to better understand the nature, distribution, and concentrations of vulnerabilities across the city.

The team will study how different services interact, and how they can best work together to prevent harm arising from vulnerabilities. Working collaboratively with partner organisations, the team will help inform improvements in the provision of integrated services for vulnerable individuals, groups and neighbourhoods.

Professor Adam Crawford, of Leeds’ School of Law, and York Law School, is Co-Director of the centre.

He said: “Collaboration between different organisations and sectors is absolutely crucial if we are going to address the challenges that vulnerable people face and that organisations come up against when trying to respond to these issues.

“Understanding how different local services work together in Bradford, and subsequently Leeds, will be incredibly valuable. It will enable us to identify where the research can be used to improve services and inform how public services from different cities across the country can best work together to improve outcomes for vulnerable people.”

Charlie Lloyd, Professor of Social Policy and Criminal Justice at York, and Co-Director of the centre, said: “The police are increasingly having to respond to a wide range of social problems involving vulnerable people, such as homelessness and mental health illnesses. They are often a ‘service of first resort’ yet they are not always the most appropriate organisation to deal with these issues.

“This raises fundamental questions about the nature of ‘policing’ and how organisations can best work together to respond to these complex challenges. Our centre aims to offer evidence-based solutions to this through our research.”

Professor Alison Park, interim executive chair of ESRC, said: “We are pleased to be investing in this new centre, which will examine how vulnerable groups interact with the police, and how policy can evolve to tackle harms such as exploitation and mental illness.

“Working with national and regional partners, the centre will provide robust research evidence that can be used by policymakers and practitioners to help understand, prevent and reduce vulnerabilities.

“For ESRC, research centres are major investments which aim to have significant economic and societal impact. They also add value by creating new research infrastructure, supporting researchers to develop new skills, and encouraging interdisciplinary working.”

MORE INFO : https://www.miragenews.com/vulnerability-and-policing-research-centre-872947/

Research center will help industries connect with Penn State's AI prowess

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — In a world of increasingly complex supply chains, quickly shifting workforce trends, a deepening need for productivity, and a need for addressing societal challenges, organizations are looking at artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) (collectively AI/ML) as an ally to navigate the competitive landscape and deliver needed goods and services to customers.



Penn State’s Institute for Computational and Data Sciences (ICDS) has announced the creation of the Center for Applications of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to Industry, or AIMI (pronounced Aim-ee), which will connect experienced AI/ML researchers at Penn State with industry partners to identify and pursue collaborative, industry-sponsored, exploratory research projects. The funding model uses industry memberships similar to how the National Science Foundation has created Industry-University Cooperative Research Centers (IUCRC), for which Penn State has six. The IUCRC experience has enabled Penn State to refine how AIMI can position research to readily tackle industry challenges while also advancing new AI and ML research directions.

“The AIMI center brings a fresh, dynamic opportunity for industries to partner with Penn State. The membership model allows partners to directly communicate their top research needs in AI and ML while remaining apprised of hot trends globally,” said Lora Weiss, senior vice president for research at Penn State. “Our industry partners want to be engaged in the advances we are making in AI and ML, and by pooling their interests, we are powering top partnerships to address critical issues.”

Soundar Kumara, Allen E. Pearce and Allen M. Pearce Professor of Industrial Engineering at Penn State, who is a pioneer in the application of AI/ML in smart manufacturing and health care, has stepped up to serve as the research center’s inaugural director.

The membership model will provide industry partners with access to cutting-edge AI-related projects and enable them to collaborate directly with Penn State researchers on those projects. Kumara said the innovative model will make AIMI a leading center for AI and ML research for business and industry.

“My vision is to make AIMI the global hub for AI and ML industry research,” said Kumara. "By joining forces with AIMI at Penn State, industry members benefit in many ways and become a community focused on advancing AI/ML research.”

Kumara said that AI-powered technologies are dramatically transforming health care, finance, business, manufacturing and nearly every industry sector. The technology is helping businesses to create new tools for machine monitoring, weather prediction, e-commerce, education, defense and more. Kumara’s own research has used AI to optimize complex supply chains, offer warnings for illicit online pharmaceutical sales, and monitor manufacturing equipment, among other topics.

Kumara stressed the careful need for organizations to use evidence-based research when they incorporate AI and ML tools.

“AI and ML applications to broader industry problems need careful thinking to evaluate what is important and what is irrelevant. It is not simply throwing data at the algorithm and collecting the responses; we need to focus on interpretability and explainability,” added Kumara. “Though high-accuracy algorithms are great, algorithms that are scalable, interpretable and explainable take the front seat. AI and ML algorithms must also be fair and unbiased. This will be the focus of AIMI.”

AIMI will serve as a critical hub to connect business and industry with Penn State’s world-class expertise in AI and ML. Penn State has more than 400 researchers using AI or ML methods in their innovative research, publishing on topics such as detecting discrimination, monitoring the health of mothers and children, predicting severe weather, diagnosing crop diseases, studying river water quality, guiding online privacy decisions, improving suicide prevention interventions, assisting with cancer diagnosis and treatment paths, tracking hurricanes, designing better chemical catalysts, and speeding up vaccine manufacturing, among other cutting-edge projects.

“We think of AIMI as the perfect catalyst to combine the power of AI with the ingenuity of our researchers and our partners in business and industry to create needed solutions and to seize new opportunities,” said Todd Price, corporate relations director for research in the Penn State Institute for Computational and Data Sciences.

“AIMI is uniquely positioned to combine Penn State’s global reputation of building interdisciplinary research teams with the expertise of the center’s industry partners to provide an effective platform for industry-relevant, impactful research into AI and ML,” said Jenni Evans, professor of meteorology and atmospheric science and ICDS director.

“This center will serve as a nexus to everything Penn State is renowned for: innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration and expertise in using artificial intelligence to solve real-world problems,” Evans added.

In addition to talented faculty and other researchers, AIMI will leverage Penn State’s administrative organization and processes, and ICDS’s expertise, as well as its Roar supercomputer and its computational and data infrastructure to execute AIMI’s mission, according to Gretta Kellogg, assistant director of AIMI.

“Through AIMI, we have set up a membership model that encourages industry to partner with Penn State faculty from across the various disciplines, and the Research Innovations with Scientists and Engineers (RISE) team’s AI/ML programming experts,” said Kellogg. “It provides an easy entrance for companies who want to explore working with the latest technologies to meet and develop new solutions with faculty, while engaging with students for internship opportunities or to hire students with relevant experience working on areas of interest for their own projects.”

Kellogg added that the initiative takes a big tent approach to uniting the dynamism of AI research at the University with entrepreneurship around the globe.

“AIMI is also looking for ways to include the faculty and students across all campuses because there are potential industry partnerships available across the state,” said Kellogg. “We want to help encourage small and medium companies to discover what a partnership with our AI researchers can enable them to accomplish, while at the same time, we can help the campus locations build workforce development pipelines that are best suited for the industry partners in their own regions.”

MORE INFO : https://www.psu.edu/news/institute-computational-and-data-sciences/story/research-center-will-help-industries-connect-penn/

Study finds the risks of sharing health care data are low

Greater availability of de-identified patient health data would enable better treatments and diagnostics, the researchers say.

In recent years, scientists have made great strides in their ability to develop artificial intelligence algorithms that can analyze patient data and come up with new ways to diagnose disease or predict which treatments work best for different patients.

The success of those algorithms depends on access to patient health data, which has been stripped of personal information that could be used to identify individuals from the dataset. However, the possibility that individuals could be identified through other means has raised concerns among privacy advocates.

In a new study, a team of researchers led by MIT Principal Research Scientist Leo Anthony Celi has quantified the potential risk of this kind of patient re-identification and found that it is currently extremely low relative to the risk of data breach. In fact, between 2016 and 2021, the period examined in the study, there were no reports of patient re-identification through publicly available health data.

The findings suggest that the potential risk to patient privacy is greatly outweighed by the gains for patients, who benefit from better diagnosis and treatment, says Celi. He hopes that in the near future, these datasets will become more widely available and include a more diverse group of patients.

“We agree that there is some risk to patient privacy, but there is also a risk of not sharing data,” he says. “There is harm when data is not shared, and that needs to be factored into the equation.”


Celi, who is also an instructor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and an attending physician with the Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, is the senior author of the new study. Kenneth Seastedt, a thoracic surgery fellow at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, is the lead author of the paper, which appears today in PLOS Digital Health.

Risk-benefit analysis

Large health record databases created by hospitals and other institutions contain a wealth of information on diseases such as heart disease, cancer, macular degeneration, and Covid-19, which researchers use to try to discover new ways to diagnose and treat disease.

Celi and others at MIT’s Laboratory for Computational Physiology have created several publicly available databases, including the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC), which they recently used to develop algorithms that can help doctors make better medical decisions. Many other research groups have also used the data, and others have created similar databases in countries around the world.

Typically, when patient data is entered into this kind of database, certain types of identifying information are removed, including patients’ names, addresses, and phone numbers. This is intended to prevent patients from being re-identified and having information about their medical conditions made public.

However, concerns about privacy have slowed the development of more publicly available databases with this kind of information, Celi says. In the new study, he and his colleagues set out to ask what the actual risk of patient re-identification is. First, they searched PubMed, a database of scientific papers, for any reports of patient re-identification from publicly available health data, but found none.

To expand the search, the researchers then examined media reports from September 2016 to September 2021, using Media Cloud, an open-source global news database and analysis tool. In a search of more than 10,000 U.S. media publications during that time, they did not find a single instance of patient re-identification from publicly available health data.

In contrast, they found that during the same time period, health records of nearly 100 million people were stolen through data breaches of information that was supposed to be securely stored.

“Of course, it’s good to be concerned about patient privacy and the risk of re-identification, but that risk, although it’s not zero, is minuscule compared to the issue of cyber security,” Celi says.

Better representation

More widespread sharing of de-identified health data is necessary, Celi says, to help expand the representation of minority groups in the United States, who have traditionally been underrepresented in medical studies. He is also working to encourage the development of more such databases in low- and middle-income countries.

“We cannot move forward with AI unless we address the biases that lurk in our datasets,” he says. “When we have this debate over privacy, no one hears the voice of the people who are not represented. People are deciding for them that their data need to be protected and should not be shared. But they are the ones whose health is at stake; they’re the ones who would most likely benefit from data-sharing.”

Instead of asking for patient consent to share data, which he says may exacerbate the exclusion of many people who are now underrepresented in publicly available health data, Celi recommends enhancing the existing safeguards that are in place to protect such datasets. One new strategy that he and his colleagues have begun using is to share the data in a way that it can’t be downloaded, and all queries run on it can be monitored by the administrators of the database. This allows them to flag any user inquiry that seems like it might not be for legitimate research purposes, Celi says.

“What we are advocating for is performing data analysis in a very secure environment so that we weed out any nefarious players trying to use the data for some other reasons apart from improving population health,” he says. “We’re not saying that we should disregard patient privacy. What we’re saying is that we have to also balance that with the value of data sharing.”

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health through the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering.

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ROUX INSTITUTE RESEARCHER TO CAPTURE REAL-TIME DATA FROM ICU MONITORS FOR BETTER PATIENT OUTCOMES

Bedside monitors in cardiac intensive care units measure everything from patients’ blood pressure and blood oxygen levels to their heart rate and rhythm.



The numerical and waveform measurements provide valuable information for doctors and nurses monitoring patients for immediate signs of distress. But once that information flashes across a screen, it is gone forever.

What if the data could be captured and crunched in real time?Could big data help predict which patients might be susceptible to infections that could lead to potentially deadly sepsis?

Could it identify patients who are at heightened risk for readmission?

Raimond “Rai” Winslow, a national leader in computational medicine based at Northeastern’s Roux Institute in Portland, Maine, thinks so.

He is a principal investigator in a research project being conducted with MaineHealth that aims to take complex data sets about patients in the state’s largest cardiothoracic ICU and translate them into metrics that could better predict adverse outcomes—in time for physicians to avert them whenever possible.

The project is known as HEART for Healthcare Enabled by AI in Real-Time and is funded in large part by Northeastern University’s Impact Engine program.

“The goal of HEART is to use machine learning models to collect data from patients while they are recovering in the CT ICU, and at every moment of time a new measurement comes in to predict their risk for developing a complication,” says Winslow, director of Life Science and Medicine Research at the Roux.

Twenty percent of cardiac surgical patients develop complications, and of those patients, 20% do not survive, he says.

Physicians can use the level of risk assigned to patients by computational medicine to determine which patients need more intense treatment and which are doing fine, he says.

“The idea being that if you can make this prediction in advance before the complication has actually occurred you can intervene and help with it.”

Winslow says he started working on the HEART project about a year ago, after coming to the Roux Institute from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he was the founding director of the Institute for Computational Medicine.

Dr. Douglas Sawyer, chief academic officer at MaineHealth and the Maine Medical Center, posed the project to him, and “it’s moved quickly,” Winslow says.

He says he expects to enroll recovering cardiac surgery patients in MaineHealth’s 12-bed ICU in clinical trials in 18 months.But first the researchers have to develop a model of the cardiovascular disease process using large patient datasets and animal models of disease.

The next step is to take streaming data from individual patients, send it to the cloud for de-identification, and analyze what the data bodes for the patients’ recovery.

“We use machine learning methods applied to population data to learn an algorithm that could reliably select patients with sepsis who are going to develop septic shock,” for instance, Winslow says.

If the estimation of developing the often-fatal syndrome is 90%, physicians likely will take a different approach than if the risk for a particular patient is 20%, he says.

The final step is to find a way to deliver the information to medical staff in a digestible, timely format, Winslow says.

“We don’t tell (physicians) what to do, what interventions to take,” he says. “We’re simply notifying them that that patient is headed toward a complication. ‘Use your knowledge and your savvy and your intuition and your experience to treat that patient as you see fit.’”

Winslow predicts the HEART project will help reduce readmissions by helping patients recover more fully in the hospital.

for more info : https://news.northeastern.edu/2022/10/11/heart-research-icu-data/