An Art Movement Where Art and Science Collide

Science Friday is one of my favorite podcasts. Filled with tons of interesting interviews, comments and reports, this is my weekend "radio station."

In last Friday's, one of the topics was "An Art Movement Where Art and Science Collide". The part that totally baffled me was the two tunes: one is from Johann Sebastian Bach, the other was generated by an algorithm written by David Cope (here are some other references: 1, 2 and 3). While I had no difficulties identifying the "real" Bach (I know that piece for having played it), I was really impressed by the likeliness to the real works composed by JS Bach.

I do remember, in the olden days of the 3DO, a program by Sid Meyer called "CPU Bach" that composed works "in the style of" Johann Sebastian Bach. This one goes a step further. I wonder if we should create a "Music Turing Test"

There is another piece on David Cope's page on the USCS website. Though I think that some parts would not have been written that way by Johann Sebastian Bach, the end result is truly amazing.

Applying Computer Science skills to Medicine and Biology

Interesting story: following her husband's disease, a computer scientist started applying her skills in natural language processing to parse texts and papers, and has drawn some conclusions. You may find her paper on her MIT page.

Can Big Data Make Our Healthcare Systems Better?

"The corridor was empty, except for the two maintenance drones which tirelessly disinfected the walls, ceiling and floor 24/7. In room 109, a large Heart Emergency Unit was setting its electrodes on Mr. Doe's chest: Tammy, the automated brain behind the health monitoring systems, had detected the precursor signs of a potential cardiac arrest."

Fiction? Maybe. But two searchers have devised an approach that shows better results than treatment-as-usual performed by real doctors. The latter have to face multiple challenges: an always increasing complexity and costs, the numerous treatment options, with new ones added daily, the delay between researches and practice in the field, the multiplicity of information sources to cite but a few.

A computer can analyse hundreds of options in a short time, finding the costs and benefits of each and determining what course of action would be the best under a number of constraints. It can also take into consideration new treatments and discoveries faster than a human doctor would be able to.

As the therapeutic options expands, so do the specialization of doctors: training is a lengthy and costly process, and the limited human abilities force doctors to increasingly specialize. The result is that possible treatments out of a doctor's area of specialization might be ignored, resulting in a potential increase in cost and decrease in patient outcome.

Two searchers have used Artificial Intelligence techniques: machine learning, Markov Decision Process (MDP) and Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) to model Dynamic Decision Networks (DDN) for therapeutic options, such as continuing a treatment or stopping it and so forth. The results are encouraging and the outcome was a modeled better patient outcome as defined by the Outcome Rating Scale (ORS) of the Client-Directed Outcome-Informed (CDOI). It also showed a number of improvement with lowered costs.

Remains the question on how these new techniques will be used: it can be for "good", i.e. to help doctors designs better treatment options, but also for "bad", for instance by insurance companies to set a maximal reimbursement based on the number calculated by the system.

The paper has been published on arXiv as arXiv:1301.2158v1 [cs.AI].

Potty-mouthed Watson!

Do you remember Watson, IBM's super AI which socked two human players at Jeopardy? Well, it seems that an experimenter played Frankenstein and let the beast awakens after a visit to Urban Dictionary. A now potty-mouthed Watson had to be piped down and refrained from going on curse parades. Other reference and here.

Maybe a new AI test is needed: after the Turing test, let's have the Tourette test!