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We sought to define the host immune response, a.k.a, the “cytokine storm” that has been implicated in fatal COVID-19 using an AI-based approach. Over 45,000 transcriptomic datasets of viral pandemics were analyzed to extract a 166-gene signature using ACE2 as a ‘seed’ gene; ACE2 was rationalized because it encodes the receptor that facilitates the entry of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) into host cells. Surprisingly, this 166-gene signature was conserved in all viral pandemics, including COVID-19, and a subset of 20-genes classified disease severity, inspiring the nomenclatures ViP and severe-ViP signatures, respectively. The ViP signatures pinpointed a paradoxical phenomenon wherein lung epithelial and myeloid cells mount an IL15 cytokine storm, and epithelial and NK cell senescence and apoptosis determines severity/fatality. Precise therapeutic goals were formulated and subsequently validated in high-dose SARS-CoV-2-challenged hamsters using neutralizing antibodies that abrogate SARS-CoV-2•ACE2 engagement or a directly acting antiviral agent, EIDD-2801. IL15/IL15RA were elevated in the lungs of patients with fatal disease, and plasma levels of the cytokine tracked with disease severity. Thus, the ViP signatures provide a quantitative and qualitative framework for titrating the immune response in viral pandemics and may serve as a powerful unbiased tool to rapidly assess disease severity and vet candidate drugs.One Sentence SummaryThe host immune response in COVID-19.PANEL: RESEARCH IN CONTEXTEvidence before this studyThe SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has inspired many groups to find innovative methodologies that can help us understand the host immune response to the virus; unchecked proportions of such immune response have been implicated in fatality. We searched GEO and ArrayExpress that provided many publicly available gene expression data that objectively measure the host immune response in diverse conditions. However, challenges remain in identifying a set of host response events that are common to every condition. There are no studies that provide a reproducible assessment of prognosticators of disease severity, the host response, and therapeutic goals. Consequently, therapeutic trials for COVID-19 have seen many more ‘misses’ than ‘hits’. This work used multiple (> 45,000) gene expression datasets from GEO and ArrayExpress and analyzed them using an unbiased computational approach that relies upon fundamentals of gene expression patterns and mathematical precision when assessing them.Added value of this studyThis work identifies a signature that is surprisingly conserved in all viral pandemics, including Covid-19, inspiring the nomenclature ViP-signature. A subset of 20-genes classified disease severity in respiratory pandemics. The ViP signatures pinpointed the nature and source of the ‘cytokine storm’ mounted by the host. They also helped formulate precise therapeutic goals and rationalized the repurposing of FDA-approved drugs.Implications of all the available evidenceThe ViP signatures provide a quantitative and qualitative framework for assessing the immune response in viral pandemics when creating pre-clinical models; they serve as a powerful unbiased tool to rapidly assess disease severity and vet candidate drugs.

In recent years, Earth system sciences are urgently calling for innovation on improving accuracy, enhancing model intelligence level, scaling up operation, and reducing costs in many subdomains amid the exponentially accumulated datasets and the promising artificial intelligence (AI) revolution in computer science. This paper presents work led by the NASA Earth Science Data Systems Working Groups and ESIP machine learning cluster to give a comprehensive overview of AI in Earth sciences. It holistically introduces the current status, technology, use cases, challenges, and opportunities, and provides all the levels of AI practitioners in geosciences with an overall big picture and to “blow away the fog to get a clearer vision” about the future development of Earth AI. The paper covers all the majorspheres in the Earth system and investigates representative AI research in each domain. Widely used AI algorithms and computing cyberinfrastructure are briefly introduced. The mandatory steps in a typical workflow of specializing AI to solve Earth scientific problems are decomposed and analyzed. Eventually, it concludes with the grand challenges and reveals the opportunities to give some guidance and pre-warnings on allocating resources wisely to achieve the ambitious Earth AI goals in the future.

教学IRにおいては、従来は説明モデルによる解析や可視化にもとづく意思決定支援が主要な機能であったが、近年では予測モデルにもとづく種々の予測に関してその重要性が高まっているといわれている。そこで本稿では、教学IRにおける機械学習の意義と可能性について、われわれの経験を題材として検討した。われわれの経験では、機械学習を用いることで、大学における中途退学や学力進捗を予測できる可能性があることが明らかになっている。このことから、いわゆる教学データを用いた機械学習により、今までなし得なかった教学上の種々の予測が可能となり、今後のわが国の教学IRが飛躍的に進展する可能性が示唆された。, In institutional research (IR) for education, the decision-making support based on the analysis and visualization by the explanation model was the main function in the past. However, the importance of various predictions based on predictive models is currently increasing in IR for education. Therefore, this paper examined the significance and possibility of artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) in IR for education using our experience as subjects. Our experience reveals that using AI/ML can predict dropouts and academic progress in university and college. Thus, it is suggested that using students' educational data, AI/ML could make various predictions in higher education that were not possible earlier, leading to dramatic progress in Japan's IR for education.

International audience; Designing plausible network models typically requires scholars to form a priori intuitions on the key drivers of network formation. Oftentimes, these intuitions are supported by the statistical estimation of a selection of network evolution processes which will form the basis of the model to be developed. Machine learning techniques have lately been introduced to assist the automatic discovery of generative models. These approaches may more broadly be described as "symbolic regression", where fundamental network dynamic functions, rather than just parameters, are evolved through genetic programming. This chapter first aims at reviewing the principles, efforts and the emerging literature in this direction, which is very much aligned with the idea of creating artificial scientists. Our contribution then aims more specifically at building upon an approach recently developed by us [Menezes & Roth, 2014] in order to demonstrate the existence of families of networks that may be described by similar generative processes. In other words, symbolic regression may be used to group networks according to their inferred genotype (in terms of generative processes) rather than their observed phenotype (in terms of statistical/topological features). Our empirical case is based on an original data set of 238 anonymized ego-centered networks of Facebook friends, further yielding insights on the formation of sociability networks.

— In the context of connected cars, some technologies or approaches are unavoidable: data-centric and big data; AI/ML-based systems; cloud computing and agility. These points are not limited to connected cars, but are trends in all transportation fields at least. In this paper, we analyze the interest of these technologies. Then, we analyze that these techniques are not completely in phase with traditional ways of developing safety critical software because the standards used for this purpose do not rely fundamentally on the same approaches to develop software.