Tag: Allen Institute

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ClusterOne will build its AI platform in Seattle

Oren Etzioni
Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, asks attendees at the AI NextCon conference in Bellevue, Wash., to raise their hands if they think artificial intelligence will someday pose a threat to humanity. Some put their hands up. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

A California-based AI startup called ClusterOne is moving its headquarters to Seattle to become the latest venture to benefit from the incubator program at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

“Allen AI makes a lot of sense for us, because they have the best researchers in AI,” ClusterOne co-founder and CEO Mohsen Hejrati told GeekWire. “They are investors and incubators, but more importantly, they are great partners in research … the best partners we could get.”

First word of the team-up came today from Oren Etzioni, the institute’s CEO, during the AI NextCon conference in Bellevue, Wash.

“Today, we’re just announcing for the first time that a company called ClusterOne, which was founded by some ex-Google folks in California — they’re moving to Seattle, joining our incubator,” Etzioni told the crowd.

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Scientist tracks where consciousness comes from

Claustrum neurons
A digital 3-D reconstruction shows a handful of neurons that wrap around a mouse’s brain and are connected to a sheet of brain cells known as the claustrum. (Allen Institute for Brain Science)

SAN FRANCISCO — For decades, neuroscientist Christof Koch has been searching for the seat of consciousness — a quest that has taken him deep within the brains of mice, and to the doorstep of the Dalai Lama.

Now the president and chief scientific officer of Seattle’s Allen Institute for Brain Science is closing in on a big part of the answer in a small part of the brain.

The part in question is known as the claustrum, a thin, irregular sheet of neurons that’s found in each hemisphere of the brain, underneath the cortex.

Koch and the late biologist Francis Crick, a co-discoverer of DNA’s double helix structure, took note of the claustrum more than a decade ago — but it’s taken that long for experimental techniques to progress to the point where neuroscientists can literally shed light on how the claustrum and its network of connected neurons work.

“It connects to every point of the cortex, bidirectionally,” Koch said Oct. 27 at the World Conference of Science Journalists in San Francisco. “Crick and I hypothesized that the function of the claustrum is to do something like consciousness. In a sense, it acts like the conductor of the cortical symphony.”

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Data harvested from bits of living human brains

Brain slices
Slices of human brain tissue, extracted from patients during neurosurgery, are kept alive in a special bath of chilled, oxygenated fluid. (Allen Institute for Brain Science)

Zapping brain cells from living human tissue? It sounds like a creepy Halloween tale, but for the Allen Institute for Brain Science, it’s a clever way to understand more fully how the brain works — and potentially bring healing to future patients.

“It doesn’t creep me out at all,” Jonathan Ting, an assistant investigator at the Seattle institute who’s been deeply involved in the project, told GeekWire. “I feel like it’s our obligation as scientists.”

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AI2’s search engine gets a biomedical boost

AI2's Marie Hagman
AI2’s Marie Hagman drew upon person experience during her work on Semantic Scholar. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

As senior product manager at Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, or AI2, Hagman played a key role in figuring out how to incorporate documents from PubMed and other biomedical databases in the academic search tool.

She drew upon her personal experience from 15 years earlier, when she was a software engineer suffering from two stomach ulcers and gastritis. Her specialist gave her a prescription to deal with the issue, but told her she’d probably have to keep taking pills for the rest of her life.

“I was thinking, ‘Hmm … I’m young and healthy. That just doesn’t sound right,’” Hagman recalled. “They still couldn’t tell me why I had this problem. So I decided to be my own advocate.”

She searched through the medical literature on stomach ulcers, and found a study in which researchers pointed to a type of bacteria known as Helicobacter pylori as a potential cause. Armed with that knowledge, she persuaded another specialist to put her on a two-week round of antibiotics.

“I’ve been cured ever since,” Hagman told GeekWire.

Now her objective is to help researchers, and even regular folks, find the most relevant studies that address the medical questions they want to answer.

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Scientist maps path to merge humans and machines

Christof Koch
Christof Koch, chief scientific officer for the Allen Institute for Brain Science, addresses the GeekWire Summit. (Photo by Dan DeLong for GeekWire)

It may sound like a zombie movie, but Seattle’s Allen Institute for Brain Science is studying fresh human brain tissue to see up close how our neurons work — and perhaps eventually figure out how to meld minds with machines.

Integrating artificial intelligence chips into our own neural wiring may be the best way to address concerns about the rapid rise of AI, and the potential that the machines could outpace humans, said neuroscientist Christof Koch, the institute’s chief scientific officer.

Studying the brain should be a “matter of great urgency,” whether you believe that AI will lead to a work-free paradise or a Terminator-style nightmare, Koch said today at the 2017 GeekWire Summit.

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Business is booming at two idea factories

Startup panel
AI2’s Jacob Colker gestures while Intellectual Ventures’ Azam Khan and Seven Peaks Ventures’ Dave Parker look on during a Seattle Startup Week session titled “Founders Wanted.” (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

Less than two months after Intellectual Ventures and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence put out the call for entrepreneurs, business is booming.

“We might be sitting here in a year telling you something very different, but right now, it’s like, ‘Come one, come all,’” Azam Khan, Intellectual Ventures’ director of new ventures, told a roomful of entrepreneurs at the University of Washington’s CoMotion Labs.

Jacob Colker, entrepreneur in residence at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, was similarly bullish. “I’m constantly looking for brilliant entrepreneurs, ideally some folks who have some scars on their back,” he said.

After the Oct. 5 talk, audience members swarmed around the two speakers as well as moderator Dave Parker, a venture partner at Seven Peaks Ventures. But what else would you expect at a Seattle Startup Week session titled “Founders Wanted”?

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AI2 challenge puts computer vision to the test

Charades Challenge
For AI2’s Charades Challenge, visual systems had to recognize and classify a wide variety of daily activities in realistic videos. This is just a sampling of the videos. (AI2 Photos)

Some of the world’s top researchers in AI have proved their mettle by taking top honors in three challenges posed by the Seattle-based Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

The institute, also known as AI2, was created by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen in 2014 to blaze new trails in the field of artificial intelligence. One of AI2’s previous challenges tested the ability of AI platforms to answer eighth-grade-level science questions.

The three latest challenges focused on visual understanding – that is, the ability of a computer program to navigate real-world environments and situations using synthetic vision and machine learning.

These aren’t merely academic exercises: Visual understanding is a must-have for AI applications ranging from self-driving cars to automated security monitoring to sociable robots.

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Tech titans team up on academic search

Academic search engines
Academic search engines include Microsoft Academic, Google Scholar, Baidu Scholar and Semantic Scholar. (GeekWire Graphic)

Microsoft, Google and Baidu may be competitors in the business world, but when it comes to open-access academic resources, they’re all working together – thanks to a collaboration created by Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

The Open Academic Search working group, or OAS, was set up to unite a wide spectrum of researchers working on academic search tools.

“It’s a number of connected initiatives, but all centered on how we promote discovery,” said Marie Hagman, OAS product manager as well as product lead for Semantic Scholar at the Allen Institute.

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Mozak turns brain mapping into video game

Mozak video game
Mozak employs citizen scientists and gamers to trace the intricate shapes of neurons, as shown by the purple lines above, and to speed fundamental brain science research. (UW Graphic)

A game called Mozak is turning thousands of Internet users into “tracers” who help neuroscientists map out the tangled circuitry of brain cells.

The citizen-science project was created by the University of Washington’s Center for Game Science in partnership with the Allen Institute for Brain Science.

Mozak took a share of the spotlight at last October’s White House Science Fair, but the project is just now coming out of beta. In a news release, UW says results gleaned from the game have helped the Allen Institute’s researchers reconstruct neurons 3.6 times faster than previous methods.

Guided by online tutorials, the game’s tracers can produce neuron reconstructions that are 70 to 90 percent complete, compared to the 10 to 20 percent success rate for the most effective computer-generated reconstructions.

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Get a colorful 3-D view of human stem cells

3-D stem cell
A color-coded visualization shows a human stem cell as its nucleus undergoes mitosis and segmentation. (Allen Institute for Cell Science)

Imagine being able to see inside a transparent human stem cell, like the “Visible Man and Woman” models in biology class. That’s what the Seattle-based Allen Institute for Cell Science lets you do with its brand-new data imaging platform, the Allen Cell Explorer.

The cells you see on the screen aren’t made-up animations: They’re based on an analysis of high-quality photomicrographs documenting more than 6,000 induced pluripotent stem cells, or IPS cells, derived from human skin cells.

The IPS cells underwent gene editing to attach fluorescent markers to 11 different types of structures that make up the cells’ machinery – and that’s not all. The institute then applied deep-learning computational methods to predict the complete structure of each cell, based on their glowing patterns.

“This is the first time researchers have used deep learning to try and understand the elusive question of how actual cells are organized,” Rick Horwitz, the institute’s executive director, said in a news release.

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