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GSK partners with CRISPR pioneer Doudna to find new drugs

GSK forms CRISPR alliance with UC Berkeley and UCSF to create functional genomics insitute. The main one, technologywise, is this about using CRISPR as a gene function screen. One can do a gazillion experiments at once, fleshing out connections, sketching the biology, finding drug targets. http://bit.do/eU942


S AN FRANCISCO — The drug maker GlaxoSmithKline announced Thursday that it would team up with some of the nation’s most prominent CRISPR researchers to use the gene-editing technology in a search for new medicines, establishing a new lab in San Francisco and spending up to $67 million over five years.

Jennifer Doudna, the University of California, Berkeley, researcher who co-invented the CRISPR enzyme technology, will help lead the effort, along with Jonathan Weissman, a UC San Francisco researcher who has been using CRISPR to understand the function of individual human genes and how they work together. Both are Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigators.

The lab will be called the Laboratory for Genomic Research and will be based near UCSF’s Mission Bay campus. The money will fund 24 full-time University of California employees, in addition to as many as 14 full-time GSK employees. GSK’s machine learning and artificial intelligence groups will create computer systems that can handle the large amounts of data the project is expected to create. It will focus on immunology, oncology, and neurology.

Millions of Venmo transactions scraped in warning over privacy settings

A computer science student has scraped seven million Venmo transactions to prove that users’ public activity can still be easily obtained, a year after a privacy researcher downloaded hundreds of millions of Venmo transactions in a similar feat.

Dan Salmon said he scraped the transactions during a cumulative six months to raise awareness and warn users to set their Venmo payments to private.

The peer-to-peer mobile payments service faced criticism last year after Hang Do Thi Duc, a former Mozilla fellow, downloaded 207 million transactions. The scraping effort was possible because Venmo payments between users are public by default. The scrapable data inspired several new projects — including a bot that tweeted out every time someone bought drugs.

AI-Aided Video Surveillance Will Watch and Silently Judge Us

Gone are the days when a store’s security cameras only mattered to shoplifters.

Now, with the rising prevalence of surveillance systems constantly monitored by artificial intelligence, ubiquitous security systems can watch, learn about, and discriminate against shoppers more than ever before.

That’s the gist of a new ACLU report titled “The Dawn of Robot Surveillance,” about how emerging AI technology enables security companies to constantly monitor and collect data about people — opening new possibilities in which power is abused or underserved communities are overpoliced.

Technology and Human Potential with Nichol Bradford

Nichol Bradford, MBA, is the CEO & Founder of the Willow Group and the Executive Director and co-founder of the Transformative Technology Lab, Conference, and TT200 List. Prior to becoming a leader in Transformative Technology, Bradford was a senior executive in video games with responsibility for strategy, operations and marketing for major brands that include: Activision Blizzard, Disney, and Vivendi Games — including operating World of Warcraft China. Nichol is a graduate of Singularity University GSP15, has an MBA from Wharton School of Business in Strategy. She is author of a novel, The Sisterhood.

Here she describes developments in the emerging industry of transformative technology. She points out that, in the next 25 years, enormous numbers of jobs will be displaced by automation. This challenge, and others, make it essential that people large numbers of people actualize more of their innate potential. Technology can assist in this process — particularly when it is scalable and can be afforded by the millions. She emphasizes a variety of technological advances while emphasizing the importance of ethics, privacy, and data sovereignty.

New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980).

(Recorded on February 18, 2019)

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