Discovering the anticancer potential of non-oncology drugs by systematic viability profiling

New work from a group of researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard unveils the cancer-fighting potential of non-cancer drugs. The article describes how the PRISM profiling method was used to to create viability profiles for over $$4000$$ drugs across $$578$$ human cancer cell lines. Many non-oncology drugs, including one previously a... Read more

Music in the wild

Neural networks have become popular tools for transfering the style of one artistic work or photograph to another. Methods for performing style transfer are distinguished from one another by features of the neural network’s design as well as the loss function that guides network updates. In a recent project, I teamed up with Alessandro Zito to u... Read more

Implementing minimum-Wasserstein deconvolution

Recently, Rigollet and Weed (2019)1 introduced a consistent estimator for the problem of uncoupled isotonic regression. The authors also proposed a computationally efficient procedure for computing a relaxed version of the estimator, which achieves the same minimax rate. Rigollet and Weed’s estimator relaxed estimator minimizes the Wasserstein-... Read more

Simon Newcomb and the Legacy of Meta Analysis in Determining Fundamental Constants

The diversity in the adopted values of the elements and constants of astronomy is productive of inconvenience to all who are engaged in investigations based upon these quantities, and injurious to the precision and symmetry of much of our astronomical work 1 Few works have survived the scrutiny of decades of scientific progress as well as S... Read more

AI for art

By definition, music is confined to travel through the audio domain. Once it reaches an observer, though, it is free to speak through other sensory channels. Music evokes imagery: colors, shapes and motion. For some people, this imagery is incredibly vivid and fantastical. For most people – myself included – the imagery is more pedestrian. For ... Read more