AMEDICALRe

Dude the fact that nobody you know is worried should be the first clue that something is really wrong or you are hanging out with wrong people. Security, Privacy & Data Mining research are ripe for bureaucratic takedown. Incidences like these will only lead to harsher requirements and stifle future research. Its essential for the security community to police itself. As far as Patrick knowing what he's talking about I do not take anyone who has never published a research article, let alone an abstract seriously.

We have access to hundred of millions of medical records, if were to throw away integrity, ethics and morality out of the window. The results would be spectacular enough to warrant a front page news in all major newspapers. And it would completely destroy any future medical research in this field, since we would have betrayed public trust.

Oh and guess what we are exempt from IRB. The true reality is that research to a large extent cannot be completely controlled / monitored. It is thus extremely essential for a research community to hold itself to some ethical standards.

The response by Patio11 regarding how this was acceptable penetration testing was beyond stupid.

Just because you are univesity researcher does not means you can take money and then attack some random company and say LOL JK just doing "Research". Universities have enormous computing power / resources available via various means to do research. Just because I have access to a thousand node cluster does not means I can randomly launch DDOS attack against some company and then claim "Research". This is equivalent to those youtube videos where at the end they justify assault and other egregious behaviour claiming "Social experiment" or "Prank".

Torch has extremely difficult learning curve due to Lua. With Tensor Flow underlying engine in C++ it is likely as efficient as Torch. Special extension such as Nvidia Cudnn could also be used with tensorflow.

As someone who had to go through pain of using caffe, struggled with steep learning curve of Lua/Torch and frustrated by lack of simple features (train on gpu/test on cpu) of Theano. You could not be more wrong. Having a well written, consistent and portable system is a huge plus. Tensor Flow is likely to do to deep learning what Hadoop did to Big Data.

to me the decision to write an article about a technical topic such as "APIs" shows a certain amount of importance given to technology by NYT. However once I read it as a sponsored article, it felt dishonest, as if the topic was not interesting enough to warrant "true" interest.

"paidpost.nytimes.com" AKA native advertising

What?

Glivec, Chemo, Marrow Transplants are extremely effective against several types of cancers. Sure we are powerless against a significant proportion, yet we do "Cure" few types of cancers. and in spite of what Pop-Sci article you might have read, all treatments don't "just extend the dying path".

I will bite. The issue with this presentation is that it create a worst of all worlds narrative, without any space for nuance. Where everything that can go wrong goes wrong.

For every russian LGBT person worried due to acquisition of LiveJournal, there are countless in other countries who have benefitted from Social Networks, who have organized & furthered their cause. Also the state apparatus is so powerful that any additional knowledge gained from LiveJournal data is likely meagre.

These slides espouse the same kind of luddite thinking that brought us Drug Wars, where rather than sane policy making we ended up with war on drugs fueled by morality and lack of introspection. One can easily construct similar set of slides showing why "Free Speech" is evil and ought to be regulated like "Radioactivity".

Also the writer has zero training in Pharmacy or BioMedicine and is talking complete non-sense when it comes to Pharma industry. Over last three decades medicine has had significant improvement thanks to innovation in devices, surgeries and adoption of "Evidence based medicine" and no the evidence comes from "Data" collected on large scale and not randomly injecting patient with chemicals. We have made huge progress in curing some types of cancers, converted HIV-AIDS into a manageable chronic condition from a death sentence. For all the visions of doom, and cherry picked examples of poor leaders, World has been a much better place.

The growing fear is that the data-driven approach is inherently a poor fit for life science. In the world of computers, we learn to avoid certain kinds of complexity, because they make our systems impossible to reason about.

But Nature is full of self-modifying, interlocking systems, with interdependent variables you can't isolate. In these vast data spaces, directed iterative search performs better than any amount of data mining.

All these statements are complete bullshit and presented with zero evidence. This article is so spectacularly bad that I am amazed. The author majored in Russian and Studio Art, and other than some programming (seemingly very proficient) has no knowledge or background in Medicine, Healthcare or Bio-Medical Sciences.