Oren Etzioni, the CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, asks the audience at a TEDx talk to raise their hands if they think AI is evil. (TEDx Seattle via YouTube)
Three years after its founding, Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence is racking up recognition in the field of AI research – and some of its research will have an impact on the burgeoning AI market.
The institute, known as AI2, was founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen in 2014 with longtime computer science researcher Oren Etzioni as its CEO. Since its founding, AI2 has spawned two spin-offs: Kitt.ai, which was created a little more than a year ago; and Xnor.ai, which made its debut this month.
AI2 has built its workforce up to 75 people, which Etzioni says makes it the largest nonprofit AI research center in North America. And AI2 is building up its street cred as well.
A cluster of human induced pluripotent stem cells contains dyes that highlight cell membranes (purple) and DNA in the nucleus (blue). Spindles from microtubules, shown in white at the center of the image, aid in cell division. (Allen Institute for Cell Science Photo)
Researchers in Seattle have taken advantage of two of the hottest trends in biotech – cell reprogramming and CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing – to create human stem cells that glow as they turn into different tissue types.
The Allen Institute for Cell Science is making the genetically modified cells available to researchers around the world, with the aim of unlocking the secrets behind cell development.
“These are the first five cell lines in a collection of about 20 that we hope to be releasing in the next year,” Susanne Rafelski, the institute’s director of assay development, told GeekWire in advance of today’s unveiling of the Allen Cell Collection.
The institute’s executive director, Rick Horwitz, explained that each of the millions of cells in our body is like a city, with resources that move around from where they’re made to where they’re used.
“With these cell lines, we aim to give the cell science community a kind of live traffic map, to see when and where the parts of the cell are with the clarity and consistency they need to make progress toward understanding human health and tackling disease,” he said in a news release.
Allen Institute executives say their operation can serve as a model for future research.
Big Science, Team Science, Open Science: In this week’s issue of Neuron, two top executives at Seattle’s Allen Institute for Brain Science lay out a manifesto for the future of large research projects.
Christof Koch, the institute’s president and chief scientific officer, joins forces with President and CEO Allan Jones to explain why they think the approach developed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen provides a model for understanding the brain, the genome and other scientifically complex phenomena.
“One gifted professor working with her graduate student and post-doctoral fellow in isolation will not tame the vast beast that is the genome and the brain,” they write.
Instead, they point to the team approach that’s best exemplified by the legions of physicists who contributed to the discovery of the Higgs Boson at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, and the detection of crashing black holes by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory.
Big Neuroscience isn’t yet in the same league as Big Physics: The LHC’s experimental groups add up to more than 10,000 scientists and engineers, while a mere 100 researchers contribute to the Allen Brain Observatory. Nevertheless, Koch and Jones say they’re learning important lessons from the institute’s experiments in Team Science.
This image shows a cross-section from the “average” brain that serves as the basis for the Allen Institute’s 3-D mouse cortex map. A single neuron has been mapped onto the cortex in purple at upper left. (Credit: Allen Institute for Brain Science
After years of painstaking work, Seattle’s Allen Institute for Brain Science has completed a digital 3-D map of the mouse cortex, filled out with annotations that trace the brain’s neurons, genetic correlations and the connections between different functional regions.
The project provides a standardized coordinate system that should help neuroscientists place data points like pins dropped on an online map, but in three dimensions.
These are just a few of the brain images that appear in a newly published atlas of the human brain. (Credit: Allen Institute for Brain Science)
As neuroscience marches on, researchers are creating more and more brain mapsand atlases – but the Allen Human Brain Reference Atlas is a rarity. This week it’s actually being published as a 350-page atlas you can hold in your hands.
Like most brain references, the detailed map of a single human brain is available online. The Allen Institute for Brain Science’s reference atlas shows brain structure down to the cellular level, at a resolution of 1 micron per pixel. The anatomical map, based on trillions of bytes of imaging data, is supplemented by readings from two different types of brain scans.
This sort of atlas usually stays online. In contrast, the illustration-heavy Comprehensive Cellular-Resolution Atlas of the Adult Human Brain takes up pretty much all of the latest issue of the Journal of Comparative Neurology.
“It’s actually a highly unusual publication. … We’re pretty much lacking in structural maps of the human brain,” Allen Institute neuroscientist Ed Lein, the study’s senior author, told GeekWire. By some accounts, it could be the first such anatomical map of the full human brain to make its print debut in more than a century.
A cross-section of the neocortex and cerebellum from an adult rhesus monkey brain has been labeled with a stain that highlights brain cells. (Credit: Allen Institute)
A project led by Seattle’s Allen Institute for Brain Science has mapped out how genes get fired up in key areas of a rhesus monkey’s brain as it develops – and the results could help researchers unlock the mysteries surrounding autism, microcephaly, schizophrenia and other neurological conditions.
The gene expression map, laid out today in research published by the journal Nature, shows that rhesus macaque monkeys are much better models than the usual mice for humans when it comes to brain development. It also confirms the view that different neurological disorders follow dramatically different genetic pathways.
“The sets of genes that turn on early, and the sets of genes that turn on in the adult, shift dramatically,” Allen Institute neuroscientist Ed Lein, the study’s senior author, told GeekWire.
The gene map follows up on earlier work that Lein and his colleagues have done with mice, to track how the brain develops from its fetal stage to adulthood. The Allen Institute has done similar work with adult human brains and fetal brains as well.
Senior scientist Jerome Lecoq and research associate Kate Roll inspect a microscope platform from the Allen Brain Observatory that was used to record real-time cellular activity in the visual cortex of mice as they were shown pictures and movies. (Credit: Allen Institute)
The Allen Brain Observatory is open for business, revealing what’s running through the mind of a mouse as it sees patterns of light and dark, pictures of butterflies and tigers – or even the opening scene of Orson Welles’ 1958 classic film, “Touch of Evil.”
The Allen Institute’s president and chief scientific officer, Christof Koch, has compared the project to a Hubble Space Telescope for the brain.
“No one has ever taken this kind of industrial approach to surveying the active brain at cellular resolution in order to measure how the brain processes information in real time,” Koch said today in the institute’s announcement of the data release. “This is a milestone in our quest to decode how the brain’s computations give rise to perception, behavior and consciousness.”
This brain tissue has undergone antibody labeling for the Aging, Dementia and TBI Study. Dark brown spots are amyloid plaques, implicated in Alzheimer’s Disease. (Credit: Allen Institute)
Scientists from Seattle’s Allen Institute for Brain Science, the University of Washington and Group Health Research Institute have put together a first-of-its-kind database of brain imagery and medical data, to help unravel the potential links between brain injuries, aging and dementia.
The database for the Aging, Dementia and Traumatic Brain Injury Study is hosted at the Allen Institute’s Brain-Map.org website. For years, the institute has been mapping the connections between brain function and gene expression, but this database goes way beyond genetics.
The study’s brain samples come from a bigger study called Adult Changes in Thought. That longitudinal research effort, led by Eric Larson and Paul Crane of the Group Health Research Institute and UW, looks at health records and cognitive assessments from thousands of aging adults.
Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, scribbles on a whiteboard to illustrate who’s connected to whom in research. (Geekwire photo by Alan Boyle)
Baseball players are judged by their batting averages, RBIs, ERAs and other statistics voluminous enough to fill a scorecard. But how do you rate researchers?
The classic measure is citations: that is, who’s quoting whom in their research papers. But just as in baseball, the statistics are becoming more nuanced. NowSemantic Scholar, a scientific search engine developed at Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, is introducing a whole new set of stats.
If you’re in the “publish-or-perish” game, get ready to find out how you score in acceleration and velocity. Get ready to find out who influences your work, and whom you influence, all with the click of a mouse.
“We give you the tools to slice and dice to figure out what you want,” said Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for AI, a.k.a. AI2.
This graphic traces a network of cortical neurons from a trillions of bytes’ worth of 3-D data. Some of the neurons are color-coded according to their activity patterns in the living brain. (Credit: Clay Reid, Allen Institute; Wei-Chung Lee, Harvard Medical School; Sam Ingersoll, graphic artist)
Scientists say they’ve analyzed trillions of bytes’ worth of mapping data from the brain of a mouse to trace the connections within a tangle of neurons that’s smaller than a pinhead.
“This is the culmination of a research program that began almost 10 years ago,” study co-author R. Clay Reid, senior investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, said in a news release. “Brain networks are too large and complex to understand piecemeal, so we used high-throughput techniques to collect huge data sets of brain activity and brain wiring.”
