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Again Garbage In, Garbage Out

I feel like Marty McFly in Back to the Future when I see this stuff. Wait, Ive seen this one! This is a classic!

Just like every other whizbang computer science invention, it suffers from the same weakness that weve seen every other AI thing do. If you put bad data into it, youll get bad data back out. Only this time, its worse, because the computer is deciding what bits of the data are important, and you cant always know what its looking at and why its getting things right. Something that works 99% of the time can fail spectacularly or in comical ways when the neural net is found to be looking at the wrong stuff.

These problems can probably be solved, though, but lets explore this a little further.

By now, I hope readers know three things:

But, artificial neural networks are still amazing. One super cool thing they do is help computers chew on qualitative information (uncountable things something theyve always struggled with). Traditional programs can readily deal with hard facts like an objects size, position, and velocity (these are all expressible as numbers), but they couldnt tell us what the thing was. Autonomous vehicles will be impossible if a vehicles computer cant identify objects, so this is vitally important to that mission.

They dont identify things the way we do, though. Artificial neural networks exist to convert qualitative judgments (what is that thing?) into quantitative ones for a program to deal with (this is Thing #3481, so now these mathematical rules will apply to the program). This enables a computer to do things that were previously not well suited to it, and thats amazing.

But, the ability to make limited qualitative judgments (categorizing objects) doesnt mean a computer system is good at making all such judgments like we are. Once they get to the end of their training, they have no ability to improvise or adapt and go on.

It is the pinnacle of bad AI thinking to compare the human mind to a computer. We have popularly done this for decades, but its fundamentally wrong.

Now, notice I didnt say brain. I said mind. We often use those terms interchangeably, but when we do that, we ignore the fact that we dont know how the human mind and the human brain relate to each other. The mind may be in the brain and due to a physical process we dont yet understand, or it could be something else. We dont know that much yet.

We do know a lot about the brain, including how its wired up to our nerves, how different parts of the brain connect to different senses, and how diseases or problems in the brain lead to problems a person subjectively experiences. We know that when a person is happy, certain parts of the brain light up with activity in scans. We know that when a person smells pheromones, different parts of the brain light up depending on the persons gender identity and/or sexual orientation (and not necessarily their sex).

We also know that we can get the brain to affect peoples consciousness through manipulation. Chemicals can make a person enter altered states of consciousness, lose consciousness, or see things that arent there. Electromagnetic stimulation, ultrasound, and even direct electrical stimulation can all have predictable effects. Neuralink isnt lying to us when they say they could eventually do things like pipe audio or even image overlays into the brain that our consciousness would perceive.

Using the human brain for inspiration has led to the development of artificial neural networks, and those are doing amazing things, but they cant reproduce the mind at this point, and may never be able to do so.

The biggest roadblock is that we havent solved the Hard Problem of Consciousness. Despite the many things we do know about the brain, we dont know what mechanism drives a human beings experience of consciousness. Somehow, the human brain is doing something thats beyond the sum of its parts, and a mind somehow exists that the brain or body interacts with. How do we know that a mind and consciousness is happening? Only because the person tells us that they experience consciousness.

This idea of believing people without evidence may seem to fly in the face of science, but science was never meant to be a faith, nor was it meant to explain stuff like this. Again, see Goffs book on the topic for a lot more details (or a video here where he goes over it).

As stated earlier, this goes all the way back to Galileo. We dont know what consciousness is, or how it happens, because Galileo deliberately set that very issue aside for later so scientists could focus on that which could be measured and computed. Now, were trying to take a philosophical approach to inquiry that was specifically designed to exclude consciousness and use it to explain something we cant even prove exists beyond taking each others words for it (our experience of consciousness). Will that approach work? We simply dont know.

While physical science as started by Galileo has been hugely successful, theres simply no guarantee that it will lead to an understanding of consciousness, and if it does, it might not be something we can reproduce with computers.

In the last part, Ill finish explaining how these artificial neural networks arent alive or conscious, but that it really doesnt keep companies like Tesla from doing what it aims to do (build self-driving cars).

For ease of navigation for this long series of articles, links to all of them will be here once they are published:

Part 1: Why Computers Only Crunch Numbers

Part 2:Miscalibrated Trust In Mathematics

Part 3: Computers Only Run Programs

Part 4: How Neural Networks Really Work

Part 5 (you are here): What Artificial Neural Networks Cant Do

Part 6: Self Driving Cars Are Still Very Much Possible, Despite Not Being Alive

Featured image: Screenshot from Teslas AI Day

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Demystifying Neural Networks: Teslas Are (Probably) Not Alive, But Thats OK! (Part 5) - CleanTechnica

Since the COVID-19 pandemic reached the United States in early 2020, scientists have struggled to find laboratory models of SARS-CoV-2 infection, the respiratory virus that causes COVID-19. Animal models fell short; attempts to grow adult human lungs have historically failed because not all of the cell types survived.

Undaunted, stem cell scientists, cell biologists, infectious disease experts and cardiothoracic surgeons at University of California San Diego School of Medicine teamed up to see if they could overcome multiple hurdles.

Writing in a paper publishing August 31, 2021 in eLife, the team describes the first adult human lung-in-a-dish models, also known as lung organoids that represent all cell types. They also report that SARS-CoV-2 infection of the lung organoids replicates real-world patient lung infections, and reveals the specialized roles various cell types play in infected lungs.

This human disease model will now allow us to test drug efficacy and toxicity, and reject ineffective compounds early in the process, at Phase 0, before human clinical trials begin, said Pradipta Ghosh, MD, professor, director of the Institute for Network Medicine and executive director of the HUMANOID Center of Research Excellence (CoRE) at UC San Diego School of Medicine. Ghosh co-led the study with Soumita Das, PhD, associate professor of pathology at UC San Diego School of Medicine and founding co-director and chief scientific officer of HUMANOID CoRE.

Lung organoids are human stem cell-derived mini lungs in a laboratory dish.

Stem cell scientists at the HUMANOID CoRE, led by Das, reproducibly developed three lung organoid lines from adult stem cells derived from human lungs that had been surgically removed due to lung cancer. With a special cocktail of growth factors, they were able to maintain cells that make up both the upper and lower airways of human lungs, including specialized alveolar cells known as AT2.

By infecting the lung organoids with SARS-CoV-2, the team discovered that the upper airway cells are critical for the virus to establish infection, while the lower airway cells are important for the immune response. Both cell types contribute to the overzealous immune response, sometimes called a cytokine storm that has been observed in severe cases of COVID-19.

A computational team led by Debashis Sahoo, PhD, assistant professor of pediatrics at UC San Diego School of Medicine and of computer science and engineering at Jacobs School of Engineering, validated the new lung organoids by comparing their gene expression patterns which genes are on or off to patterns reported in the lungs of patients who succumbed to the disease, and to those that they previously uncovered from databases of viral pandemic patient data.

Whether infected or not with SARS-CoV-2, the lung organoids behaved similar to real-world lungs. In head-to-head comparisons using the same yardstick (gene expression patterns), the researchers showed that their adult lung organoids replicated COVID-19 better than any other current lab model. Other models, for example fetal lung-derived organoids and models that rely only on upper airway cells, allowed robust viral infection, but failed to mount an immune response.

Our lung organoids are now ready to use to explore the uncharted territory of COVID-19, including post-COVID complications, such as lung fibrosis, Das said. We have already begun to test drugs for their ability to control viral infection from entry to replication to spread the runaway immune response that is so often fatal, and lung fibrosis.

Since their findings in human organoids are more likely to be relevant to human disease than findings in animal models or cell lines, the team hopes that successful drug candidates can be rapidly progressed to clinical trials.

Because our HUMANOID CoRE lung organoids are scalable, personalized, propagatable and cost-effective, they are quite unlike any other existing model, said Ghosh. This is a significant advance that can enable the modeling of lung diseases and pandemics beyond COVID-19. In fact, other academic and industry partners are already beginning to use these organoids in disease modeling and drug discovery. This is when I feel that translational research is immediately transformative.

Co-authors include: Courtney Tindle, MacKenzie Fuller, Ayden Fonseca, Sahar Taheri, Stella-Rita Ibeawuchi, Gajanan Dattatray Katkar, Amanraj Claire, Vanessa Castillo, Moises Hernandez, Hana Russo, Jason Duran, Ann Tipps, Grace Lin, Patricia A. Thistlethwaite, Thomas F. Rogers, UC San Diego; Nathan Beutler, Scripps Research; Laura E. Crotty Alexander, UC San Diego and VA San Diego Healthcare System; Ranajoy Chattopadhyay, UC San Diego and Cell Applications, Inc.

Funding for this research came, in part, from the National Institutes for Health (grants 1R01DK107585-01A1, 3R01DK107585-05S1, R01-AI141630, CA100768, CA160911, R01-AI 155696, R00-CA151673, R01-GM138385, R01-HL32225, UCOP-R00RG2642, UCOP-R01RG3780), Sanford Stem Cell Clinical Center at UC San Diego Health and VA San Diego Healthcare System.

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Human Mini-Lungs Grown in Lab Dishes are Closest Yet to Real Thing - UC San Diego Health

In an effort to bolster the number of Black and Latino students studying STEM-related fields, the University of Illinois Chicago has established a merit-based scholarship program within the College of Engineering and College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

The DuSable Scholars Program identifies and supports talented Black and Latino students, who are often underrepresented in STEM fields, to help them graduate on time in a STEM major at UIC and encourages their matriculation to a research-based STEM graduate program, according to Jeremiah Abiade, director of the program.

The first cohort of the program consists of 19 first-year students who will receive housing as well as food and research stipends. Tuition for these students is being paid for through scholarships and fellowships.

The program is partnering with the DuSable Museum of African American History, said Abiade, associate professor of mechanical and industrial engineering in the UIC College of Engineering.

The program is named after Jean-Baptiste Pointe DuSable, a Haitian-born Black trader who was the first permanent, non-indigenous settler in the area and the recognized founder of Chicago, Abiade told students at a recent program orientation.

The name that we chose for our program, DuSable, was intentional because we want to root this program in the local community of Chicago, and we want to connect this program to the legacy of people who are not often represented in STEM programs at UIC, Abiade said, adding that for much of his career, he was the only Black tenure-track professor in engineering.

He said he expects the DuSable Scholars to be the next generation of leaders in research and teaching. The main features of the DuSable Scholars Program are:

The aim of the four-year program is to help students achieve their academic goals by helping them maintain high academic achievement and provide the research experiences in Chicagos only public research university that would make them competitive and give them the tools and experience to go on to post-graduate work, including Ph.D. programs.

Associate Chancellor and Vice Provost for Diversity Amalia Pallares, who oversees the program as the chief diversity officer on campus, said the program serves to enhance her mission to make the campus even more diverse, equitable and inclusive.

When people ask me, What is your goal for UIC? I say, My goal is for everyone who comes here to be able to reach their potential,' Pallares said.

Joshua Nwonye, a freshman studying biochemistry in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences who graduated from Hinsdale South High School, said what attracted him initially to the program was the scholarship assistance he will be receiving during his four years at UIC. But he said the final selling point for him was the camaraderie that the program will instill.

I think its going to be really cool to be in touch with other students studying sciences with me and I think its going to be great because we can learn together, grow together and be successful people in the future, Nwonye said.

When Blossom Egbuonu, an Oswego East grad who is a freshman in biochemistry, first heard about the program, what caught her attention was the community she would be part of.

Its nice to have a community of people who are thinking in the same direction as you are as far as a field of study, Egbuonu said. Knowing people who are also going through the same thing as you and having amazing mentors who can also help you along the way and advise you, its nice that you have that.

Kaliah Linear, a freshman studying mechanical engineering in the College of Engineering from Roseville, Minnesota, said what also solidified her decision to attend UIC and move to Chicago was knowing that program mentors include both people of color and women two groups that are underrepresented in STEM fields.

I liked the support aspect of it, knowing that if I come to a big city like Chicago, Ill have support from professionals within STEM who look like me making sure that Im staying in STEM and keeping me encouraged, Linear said.

Shaun Shannon, who graduated from the Sarah E. Goode STEM Academy in Chicago, said what he liked about the program was how it partners with organizations like the DuSable museum and other campus organizations, such as the CHANCE program, the African American Academic Network, the Center for Student Involvement, and the African American Cultural Center.

I didnt know I would be involved with all of the joint organizations this early, said Shannon, a freshman studying computer science in the College of Engineering. What stood out to me with the DuSable Scholars Program was that I would be able to meet with a bunch of people like me and be able to connect with them.

Scholars will participate in curricular and extracurricular activities organized by associate directors Miquel Gonzalez-Meler (biological sciences) and Carmen Lilley (mechanical and industrial engineering) in coordination with Erin OLeary (director, Center for Advancement of Teaching Excellence), Bernard Santarsiero (pharmaceutical sciences), Sue Farruggia (Student Affairs) and Carol Fendt (Learning Sciences Research Institute). Aisha El-Amin (Office of Diversity) will coordinate the parent and community engagement for student support.

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DuSable Scholars Program aims to increase number of students of color in STEM | UIC Today - UIC Today