Tag Archives: Italy

Get free tickets to attend Galileo exhibition at Perimeter Institute (Waterloo, Ontario) in person on Monday, January 20, 2025 at 9 am ET

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I received (via email) a January 17, 2025 notice from Canada’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI) about obtaining free tickets to their upcoming Galileo exhibition,

Explore Galileo and His Ingenious Discoveries at Perimeter Institute

Monday, February 8 – Monday, February 17, 2025 

Perimeter Institute, in collaboration with the Embassy of Italy in Canada and the Galileo Museum in Florence, invites you to the exhibition “Galileo and His Ingenious Discoveries.” This celebration of Galileo’s groundbreaking inventions and writings is part of Perimeter’s 25th anniversary.

Explore replicas of historical instruments and documents, highlighting how Galileo’s work continues to influence science and technology. The exhibition is free and open to the public at Perimeter Institute. 

Don’t miss out! Free tickets to attend this event in person will become available on Monday, January 20 [2025], at 9 am ET. 

In-Person Tickets

I will have more about this exhibit in a future posting.

Restoring artworks in Valencia (Spain) with bacteria

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I’m glad to see this follow up to a post (my June 7, 2011 posting) which featured research on using bacteria to benefit art restoration in Spain. Maria Mocerino’s September 30, 2024 article for Interesting Engineering provides the update,

A mother [Pilar Roig] and daughter have teamed up to restore frescos in Valencia’s Santos Juanes church using bacteria.

When her mother ran into trouble with a restoration project in Spain, Pilar Bosch, her daughter, a microbiologist, found an old paper on the application of bacteria in art restoration.

As a microbiologist, she was only searching for a subject for PhD, but her mother’s troubles restoring 18th-century paintings in Santos Juanes church made her take a closer look.

The restoration project in Valencia faced particular challenges. A botched effort in the 1960s damaged the priceless artwork even further, leaving behind a layer of glue made of animal collagen, according to the Beijing Times.

Having found a lead that could benefit her mother’s work and a historical and cultural landmark, science and art joined forces in a 4-million-euro initiative to apply this technique. And it worked.

…

Here’s more about the project along with some technical details, from my June 7, 2011 posting,

Here’s the background on the problem the art restorers were trying to fix (from the news item),

The project came about when the IRP [Institute of Heritage Restoration] was in the process of restoring the murals of the Church of Santos Juanes that were virtually destroyed after a fire in 1936 and were improperly restored in the 1960s. The researchers tested new techniques for filling with transferred printed digital images in spaces without painting, but had great difficulty dealing with salt efflorescence, the white scabs caused by the build up of crystallized salts and the enormous amount of gelatine glue remaining on the pulled-off murals.

With the problem defined, the researchers then investigated a technique developed in Italy that looked promising (from the news item),

Therefore, Rosa María Montes and Pilar Bosch travelled to Italy to learn from the authors about the pioneering studies that used bacteria to remove hardened glue that was very difficult to treat with conventional methods.

The restoration of the Campo Santo di Pisa wall paintings was performed under the direction of Gianluiggi Colalucci, restorer of the Sistine Chapel, and his colleagues Donatella Zari and Carlo Giantomassi who applied the technique developed by microbiologist Giancarlo Ranalli. The researcher had also been testing with black crusts that appear on sculptures and artistic monuments.

The team returned to Spain to practice the technique and add some refinements (from the news item),

Back in Valencia, the multidisciplinary team perfected this method and trained the most suitable strain of Pseudomonas bacteria to literally eat the saline efflorescence found in the lunettes of the vault behind which pigeons nest.

“By the action of gravity and evaporation, the salts of organic matter in decomposition migrate to the paintings and produce a white crust hiding the work of art and sometimes can also cause the loose of the painting layer” says Pilar Bosch.

These scientists have managed to reduce the application time, and have also innovated in the way of extending the bacteria. According to Dr. Bosch: “In Italy they use cotton wool to apply the micro-organisms. We, however, have developed a gel that acts on the surface, which prevents moisture from penetrating deep into the material and causing new problems.

“After an hour and a half, we remove the gel with the bacteria. The surface is then cleaned and dried.” Without a wet environment, the remaining bacteria die.

…

13 years! Brava to the two Pilars!

A Reuters article (September 27, 2024 by Horaci Garcia and Eva Manez) was the basis for most of the other articles about the two Pilars and their project that you’ll find on an internet search; you can find the Reuters article here.

You can find listings for (and possibly get access to) Pilar Bosch-Roig’s (also known as, Pilar Bosch) research publications on her ResearchGate profile page or on her Loop Frontiers profile page.

Regenerate damaged skin, cartilage, and bone with help from silkworms?

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A July 24, 2024 news item on phys.org highlights research into regenerating bone and skin, Note: A link has been removed,

Researchers are exploring new nature-based solutions to stimulate skin and bone repair.

In the cities of Trento and Rovereto in northern Italy and Bangkok in Thailand, scientists are busy rearing silkworms in nurseries. They’re hoping that the caterpillars’ silk can regenerate human tissue. For such a delicate medical procedure, only thoroughbreds will do.

“By changing the silkworm, you can change the chemistry,” said Professor Antonella Motta, a researcher in bioengineering at the University of Trento in Italy. That could, in turn, affect clinical outcomes. “This means the quality control should be very strict.”

Silk has been used in surgical sutures for hundreds of years and is now emerging as a promising nature-based option for triggering human tissue to self-regenerate. Researchers are also studying crab, shrimp and mussel shells and squid skin and bone for methods of restoring skin, bone and cartilage. This is particularly relevant as populations age.

…

A July 23, 2024 article by Gareth Willmer for Horizon Magazine, the EU (European Union) research & innovation magazine, which originated the news item, provides more details,

‘Tissue engineering is a new strategy to solve problems caused by pathologies or trauma to the organs, as an alternative to transplants or artificial device implantations,’ said Motta, noting that these interventions can often fail or expire. ‘The idea is to use the natural ability of our bodies to rebuild the tissue.’

The research forms part of the five-year EU-funded SHIFT [Shaping Innovative Designs for Sustainable Tissue Engineering Products] project that Motta coordinates, which includes universities in Europe, as well as partners in Asia and Australia. Running until 2026, the research team aim to scale up methods for regenerating skin, bone and cartilage using bio-based polymers and to get them ready for clinical trials. The goal is to make them capable of repairing larger wounds and tissue damage.

The research builds on work carried out under the earlier REMIX [Regenerative Medicine Innovation Crossing – Research and Innovation Staff Exchange in Regenerative Medicine] project, also funded by the EU, which made important advances in understanding the different ways in which these biomaterials could be used. 

Building a scaffold

Silk, for instance, can be used to form a “scaffold” in damaged tissue that then activates cells to form new tissue and blood vessels. The process could be used to treat conditions such as diabetic ulcers and lower back pain caused by spinal disc degeneration. The SHIFT team have been exploring minimally invasive procedures for treatment, such as hydrogels that can be applied directly to the skin, or injected into bone or cartilage.

The approaches using both silkworms and some of the marine organisms have great potential, said Motta. 

‘We have three or four systems with different materials that are really promising,’ she said. By the end of SHIFT, the goal is to have two or three prototypes that can be developed together with start-up and spin-off companies created in collaboration with the project. 

One of the principles of the SHIFT team has been been exploring how best to harness the concept of a circular economy. For example, they are looking into how waste products from the textile and food industries can be reused in these treatments.

Yet with complicated interactions at a microscale, and the need to prevent the body from rejecting foreign materials, such tissue engineering is a big challenge. 

‘The complexity is high because the nature of biology is not easy,’ said Motta. ‘We cannot change the language of the cells, but instead have to learn to speak the same language as them.’

But she firmly believes the nature-based rather than synthetic approach is the way to go and thinks treatments harnessing SHIFT’s methods could become available in the early 2030s. 

‘I believe in this approach,’ said Motta. ‘Bone designed by nature is the best bone we can have.’

Skin care

Another EU-funded project known as SkinTERM [Skin Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine: From skin repair to regeneration], which runs for almost five years until mid-2025, is also looking at novel ways to get tissue to self-regenerate, focusing on skin. To treat burns and other surface wounds today, a thin layer of skin is sometimes grafted from another part of the body. This can cause the appearance of disfiguring scars and the patient’s mobility may be impacted when the tissue contracts as it heals. Current skin-grafting methods can also be painful.

The SkinTERM team are therefore investigating how inducing the healing process in the networks of cells surrounding a wound might enable skin to repair itself. 

‘We could do much better if we move towards regeneration,’ said Dr Willeke Daamen, who coordinates SkinTERM as a researcher in soft tissue regeneration at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. ‘The ultimate goal would be to get the same situation before and after being wounded.’

Researchers are studying a particular mammal – the spiny mouse – which has a remarkable ability to heal without scarring. It is able to self-repair damage to other tissues like the heart and spinal cord too. This is also true of early foetal skin.

The team are examining these systems to learn more about how they work and the processes occurring in the area around cells, known as the extracellular matrix. They hope to identify factors that might have a role in the regenerative process, and test how it might be induced in humans. 

Kick-start

‘We’ve been trying to learn from those systems on how to kick-start such processes,’ said Daamen. ‘We’ve made progress in what kinds of compounds seem at least in part to be responsible for a regenerative response.’

Many lines of research are being carried out among a new generation of multidisciplinary scientists being trained in this area, and a lot has already been achieved, said Daamen.

They have managed to create scaffolds using different components related to skin regeneration, such as the proteins collagen and elastin. They have also collected a vast amount of data on genes and proteins with potential roles in regeneration. Their role will be further tested by using them on scar-prone cells cultured on collagen scaffolds.

‘The mechanisms are complex,’ said Dr Bouke Boekema, a senior researcher at the Association of Dutch Burn Centres in Beverwijk, the Netherlands, and vice-coordinator of SkinTERM. 

‘If you find a mechanism, the idea is that maybe you can tune it so that you can stimulate it. But there’s not necessarily one magic bullet.’

By the end of the project next year, Boekema hopes the research could result in some medical biomaterial options to test for clinical use. ‘It would be nice if several prototypes were available for testing to see if they improve outcomes in patients.’

Research in this article was funded by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA). The views of the interviewees don’t necessarily reflect those of the European Commission. If you liked this article, please consider sharing it on social media.

Interesting. Over these last few months, I’ve been stumbling across more than my usual number of regenerative medicine stories.

New approach to brain-inspired (neuromorphic) computing: measuring information transfer

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An April 8, 2024 news item on Nanowerk announces a new approach to neuromorphic computing that involves measurement, Note: Links have been removed,

The biological brain, especially the human brain, is a desirable computing system that consumes little energy and runs at high efficiency. To build a computing system just as good, many neuromorphic scientists focus on designing hardware components intended to mimic the elusive learning mechanism of the brain. Recently, a research team has approached the goal from a different angle, focusing on measuring information transfer instead.

Their method went through biological and simulation experiments and then proved effective in an electronic neuromorphic system. It was published in Intelligent Computing (“Information Transfer in Neuronal Circuits: From Biological Neurons to Neuromorphic Electronics”).

…

An April 8, 2024 Intelligent Computing news release on EurekAlert delves further into the topic,

Although electronic systems have not fully replicated the complex information transfer between synapses and neurons, the team has demonstrated that it is possible to transform biological circuits into electronic circuits while maintaining the amount of information transferred. “This represents a key step toward brain-inspired low-power artificial systems,” the authors note.

To evaluate the efficiency of information transfer, the team drew inspiration from information theory. They quantified the amount of information conveyed by synapses in single neurons, then measured the quantity using mutual information, the analysis of which reveals the relationship between input stimuli and neuron responses.

First, the team conducted experiments with biological neurons. They used brain slices from rats, recording and analyzing the biological circuits in cerebellar granule cells. Then they evaluated the information transmitted at the synapses from mossy fiber neurons to the cerebellar granule cells. The mossy fibers were periodically stimulated with electrical spikes to induce synaptic plasticity, a fundamental biological feature where the information transfer at the synapses is constantly strengthened or weakened with repeated neuronal activity.

The results show that the changes in mutual information values are largely consistent with the changes in biological information transfer induced by synaptic plasticity. The findings from simulation and electronic neuromorphic experiments mirrored the biological results.

Second, the team conducted experiments with simulated neurons. They applied a spiking neural network model, which was developed by the same research group. Spiking neural networks were inspired by the functioning of biological neurons and are considered a promising approach for achieving efficient neuromorphic computing.

In the model, four mossy fibers are connected to one cerebellar granule cell, and each connection is given a random weight, which affects the information transfer efficiency like synaptic plasticity does in biological circuits. In the experiments, the team applied eight stimulation patterns to all mossy fibers and recorded the responses to evaluate the information transfer in the artificial neural network.

Third, the team conducted experiments with electronic neurons. A setup similar to those in the biological and simulation experiments was used. A previously developed semiconductor device functioned as a neuron, and four specialized memristors functioned as synapses. The team applied 20 spike sequences to decrease resistance values, then applied another 20 to increase them. The changes in resistance values were investigated to assess the information transfer efficiency within the neuromorphic system.

In addition to verifying the quantity of information transferred in biological, simulated and electronic neurons, the team also highlighted the importance of spike timing, which as they observed is closely related to information transfer. This observation could influence the development of neuromorphic computing, given that most devices are designed with spike-frequency-based algorithms.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Information Transfer in Neuronal Circuits: From Biological Neurons to Neuromorphic Electronics by Daniela Gandolfi, Lorenzo Benatti, Tommaso Zanotti, Giulia M. Boiani, Albertino Bigiani, Francesco M. Puglisi, and Jonathan Mapell. Intelligent Computing 1 Feb 2024 Vol 3 Article ID: 0059 DOI: 10.34133/icomputing.0059

This paper is open access.

4th International Conference on Science Advice to Governments (INGSA2021) August 30 – September 2, 2021

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What I find most exciting about this conference is the range of countries being represented. At first glance, I’ve found Argentina, Thailand, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Costa Rica and more in a science meeting being held in Canada. Thank you to the organizers and to the organization International Network for Government Science Advice (INGSA)

As I’ve noted many times here in discussing the science advice we (Canadians) get through the Council of Canadian Academies (CCA), there’s far too much dependence on the same old, same old countries for international expertise. Let’s hope this meeting changes things.

The conference (with the theme Build Back Wiser: Knowledge, Policy and Publics in Dialogue) started on Monday, August 30, 2021 and is set to run for four days in Montréal, Québec. and as an online event The Premier of Québec, François Legault, and Mayor of Montréal, Valérie Plante (along with Peter Gluckman, Chair of INGSA and Rémi Quirion, Chief Scientist of Québec; this is the only province with a chief scientist) are there to welcome those who are present in person.

You can find a PDF of the four day programme here or go to the INGSA 2021 website for the programme and more. Here’s a sample from the programme of what excited me, from Day 1 (August 30, 2021),

8:45 | Plenary | Roundtable: Reflections from Covid-19: Where to from here?

Moderator:
Mona Nemer – Chief Science Advisor of Canada

Speakers:
Joanne Liu – Professor, School of Population and Global Health, McGill University, Quebec, Canada
Chor Pharn Lee – Principal Foresight Strategist at Centre for Strategic Futures, Prime Minister’s Office, Singapore
Andrea Ammon – Director of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, Sweden
Rafael Radi – President of the National Academy of Sciences; Coordinator of Scientific Honorary Advisory Group to the President on Covid-19, Uruguay

9:45 | Panel: Science advice during COVID-19: What factors made the difference?

Moderator:

Romain Murenzi – Executive Director, The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS), Italy

Speakers:

Stephen Quest – Director-General, European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC), Belgium
Yuxi Zhang – Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, United Kingdom
Amadou Sall – Director, Pasteur Institute of Dakar, Senegal
Inaya Rakhmani – Director, Asia Research Centre, Universitas Indonesia

One last excerpt, from Day 2 (August 31, 2021),

Studio Session | Panel: Science advice for complex risk assessment: dealing with complex, new, and interacting threats

Moderator:
Eeva Hellström – Senior Lead, Strategy and Foresight, Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra, Finland

Speakers:
Albert van Jaarsveld – Director General and Chief Executive Officer, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Austria
Abdoulaye Gounou – Head, Benin’s Office for the Evaluation of Public Policies and Analysis of Government Action
Catherine Mei Ling Wong – Sociologist, LRF Institute for the Public Understanding of Risk, National University of Singapore
Andria Grosvenor – Deputy Executive Director (Ag), Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency, Barbados

…

Studio Session | Innovations in Science Advice – Science Diplomacy driving evidence for policymaking

Moderator:
Mehrdad Hariri – CEO and President of the Canadian Science Policy Centre, Canada

Speakers:
Primal Silva – Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s Chief Science Operating Officer, Canada
Zakri bin Abdul Hamid – Chair of the South-East Asia Science Advice Network (SEA SAN); Pro-Chancellor of Multimedia University in Malaysia
Christian Arnault Emini – Senior Economic Adviser to the Prime Minister’s Office in Cameroon
Florence Gauzy Krieger and Sebastian Goers – RLS-Sciences Network [See more about RLS-Sciences below]
Elke Dall and Angela Schindler-Daniels – European Union Science Diplomacy Alliance
Alexis Roig – CEO, SciTech DiploHub – Barcelona Science and Technology Diplomacy Hub, Spain

RLS-Sciences (RLS-Sciences Network) has this description for itself on the About/Background webpage,

RLS-Sciences works under the framework of the Regional Leaders Summit. The Regional Leaders Summit (RLS) is a forum comprising seven regional governments (state, federal state, or provincial), which together represent approximately one hundred eighty million people across five continents, and a collective GDP of three trillion USD. The regions are: Bavaria (Germany), Georgia (USA), Québec (Canada), São Paulo (Brazil), Shandong (China), Upper Austria (Austria), and Western Cape (South Africa). Since 2002, the heads of government for these regions have met every two years for a political summit. These summits offer the RLS regions an opportunity for political dialogue.

Getting back to the main topic of this post, INGSA has some satellite events on offer, including this on Open Science,

Open Science: Science for the 21st century |

Science ouverte : la science au XXIe siècle

Thursday September 9, 2021; 11am-2pm EST |
Jeudi 9 septembre 2021, 11 h à 14 h (HNE).

Places Limited – Registrations Required – Click to register now

This event will be in English and French (using simultaneous translation)  | 
Cet événement se déroulera en anglais et en français (traduction simultanée)

In the past 18 months we have seen an unprecedented level of sharing as medical scientists worked collaboratively and shared data to find solutions to the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has accelerated the ongoing cultural shift in research practices towards open science. 

This acceleration of the discovery/research process presents opportunities for institutions and governments to develop infrastructure, tools, funding, policies, and training to support, promote, and reward open science efforts. It also presents new opportunities to accelerate progress towards the UN Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals through international scientific cooperation.

At the same time, it presents new challenges: rapid developments in open science often outpace national open science policies, funding, and infrastructure frameworks. Moreover, the development of international standard setting instruments, such as the future UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, requires international harmonization of national policies, the establishment of frameworks to ensure equitable participation, and education, training, and professional development.

This 3-hour satellite event brings together international and national policy makers, funders, and experts in open science infrastructure to discuss these issues. 

…

The outcome of the satellite event will be a summary report with recommendations for open science policy alignment at institutional, national, and international levels.

The event will be hosted on an events platform, with simultaneous interpretation in English and French.  Participants will be able to choose which concurrent session they participate in upon registration. Registration is free but will be closed when capacity is reached.

This satellite event takes place in time for an interesting anniversary. The Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI), also known as Montreal Neuro, declared itself as Open Science in 2016, the first academic research institute (as far as we know) to do so in the world (see my January 22, 2016 posting for details about their open science initiative and my December 19, 2016 posting for more about their open science and their decision to not pursue patents for a five year period).

The Open Science satellite event is organized by:

The Canadian Commission for UNESCO [United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization],

The Neuro (Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital),

The Knowledge Equity Lab [Note: A University of Toronto initiative with Leslie Chan as director, this website is currently under maintenance]

That’s all folks (for now)!

Five country survey of reactions to food genome editing

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Weirdly and even though most of this paper’s authors are from the University of British Columbia (UBC; Canada), only one press release was issued and that was by the lead author’s (Gesa Busch) home institution, the University of Göttingen (Germany).

I’m glad Busch, the other authors, and the work are getting some attention (if not as much as I think they should).

From a July 9, 2021 University of Göttingen press release (also on EurekAlert but published on July 12, 2021),

A research team from the University of Göttingen and the University of British Columbia (Canada) has investigated how people in five different countries react to various usages of genome editing in agriculture. The researchers looked at which uses are accepted and how the risks and benefits of the new breeding technologies are rated by people. The results show only minor differences between the countries studied – Germany, Italy, Canada, Austria and the USA. In all countries, making changes to the genome is more likely to be deemed acceptable when used in crops rather than in livestock. The study was published in Agriculture and Human Values.

Relatively new breeding technologies, such as CRISPR [clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) gene editing, have enabled a range of new opportunities for plant and animal breeding. In the EU, the technology falls under genetic engineering legislation and is therefore subject to rigorous restrictions. However, the use of gene technologies remains controversial. Between June and November 2019, the research team collected views on this topic via online surveys from around 3,700 people from five countries. Five different applications of gene editing were evaluated: three relate to disease resistance in people, plants, or animals; and two relate to achieving either better quality of produce or a larger quantity of product from cattle.

“We were able to observe that the purpose of the gene modification plays a major role in how it is rated,” says first author Dr Gesa Busch from the University of Göttingen. “If the technology is used to make animals resistant to disease, approval is greater than if the technology is used to increase the output from animals.” Overall, however, the respondents reacted very differently to the uses of the new breeding methods. Four different groups can be identified: strong supporters, supporters, neutrals, and opponents of the technology. The opponents (24 per cent) identify high risks and calls for a ban of the technology, regardless of possible benefits. The strong supporters (21 per cent) see few risks and many advantages. The supporters (26 per cent) see many advantages but also risks. Whereas those who were neutral (29 per cent) show no strong opinion on the subject.

This study was made possible through funding from the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano and Genome BC.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Citizen views on genome editing: effects of species and purpose by Gesa Busch, Erin Ryan, Marina A. G. von Keyserlingk & Daniel M. Weary. Agriculture and Human Values (2021) Published: DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-021-10235-9

This paper is open access.

Methodology

I have one quick comment about the methodology. It can be difficult to get a sample that breaks down along demographic lines that is close to or identical to national statistics. That said, it was striking to me that every country was under represented in the ’60 years+ ‘ category. In Canada, it was by 10 percentage points (roughly). For other countries the point spread was significantly wider. In Italy, it was a 30 percentage point spread (roughly).

I found the data in the Supplementary Materials yesterday (July 13, 2021). When I looked this morning, that information was no longer there but you will find what appears to be the questionnaire. I wonder if this removal is temporary or permanent and, if permanent, I wonder why it was removed.

Participants for the Canadian portion of the survey were supplied by Dynata, a US-based market research company. Here’s the company’s Wikipedia entry and its website.

Information about how participants were recruited was also missing this morning (July 14, 2021).

Genome British Columbia (Genome BC)

I was a little surprised when I couldn’t find any information about the program or the project on the Genome BC website as the organization is listed as a funder.

There is a ‘Genomics and Society’ tab (seems promising, eh?) on the homepage where you can find the answer to this question: What is GE³LS Research?,

GE3LS research is interdisciplinary, conducted by researchers across many disciplines within social science and humanities, including economics, environment, law, business, communications, and public policy.

There’s also a GE3LS Research in BC page titled Project Search; I had no luck there either.

It all seems a bit mysterious to me and, just in case anything else disappears off the web, here’s a July 13, 2021 news item about the research on phys.org as backup to what I have here.

Technical University of Munich: embedded ethics approach for AI (artificial intelligence) and storing a tv series in synthetic DNA

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I stumbled across two news bits of interest from the Technical University of Munich in one day (Sept. 1, 2020, I think). The topics: artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid).

Embedded ethics and artificial intelligence (AI)

An August 27, 2020 Technical University of Munich (TUM) press release (also on EurekAlert but published Sept. 1, 2020) features information about a proposal to embed ethicists in with AI development teams,

The increasing use of AI (artificial intelligence) in the development of new medical technologies demands greater attention to ethical aspects. An interdisciplinary team at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) advocates the integration of ethics from the very beginning of the development process of new technologies. Alena Buyx, Professor of Ethics in Medicine and Health Technologies, explains the embedded ethics approach.

Professor Buyx, the discussions surrounding a greater emphasis on ethics in AI research have greatly intensified in recent years, to the point where one might speak of “ethics hype” …

Prof. Buyx: … and many committees in Germany and around the world such as the German Ethics Council or the EU Commission High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence have responded. They are all in agreement: We need more ethics in the development of AI-based health technologies. But how do things look in practice for engineers and designers? Concrete solutions are still few and far between. In a joint pilot project with two Integrative Research Centers at TUM, the Munich School of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MSRM) with its director, Prof. Sami Haddadin, and the Munich Center for Technology in Society (MCTS), with Prof. Ruth Müller, we want to try out the embedded ethics approach. We published the proposal in Nature Machine Intelligence at the end of July [2020].

What exactly is meant by the “embedded ethics approach”?

Prof.Buyx: The idea is to make ethics an integral part of the research process by integrating ethicists into the AI development team from day one. For example, they attend team meetings on a regular basis and create a sort of “ethical awareness” for certain issues. They also raise and analyze specific ethical and social issues.

Is there an example of this concept in practice?

Prof. Buyx: The Geriatronics Research Center, a flagship project of the MSRM in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, is developing robot assistants to enable people to live independently in old age. The center’s initiatives will include the construction of model apartments designed to try out residential concepts where seniors share their living space with robots. At a joint meeting with the participating engineers, it was noted that the idea of using an open concept layout everywhere in the units – with few doors or individual rooms – would give the robots considerable range of motion. With the seniors, however, this living concept could prove upsetting because they are used to having private spaces. At the outset, the engineers had not given explicit consideration to this aspect.

Prof.Buyx: The approach sounds promising. But how can we avoid “embedded ethics” from turning into an “ethics washing” exercise, offering companies a comforting sense of “being on the safe side” when developing new AI technologies?

That’s not something we can be certain of avoiding. The key is mutual openness and a willingness to listen, with the goal of finding a common language – and subsequently being prepared to effectively implement the ethical aspects. At TUM we are ideally positioned to achieve this. Prof. Sami Haddadin, the director of the MSRM, is also a member of the EU High-Level Group of Artificial Intelligence. In his research, he is guided by the concept of human centered engineering. Consequently, he has supported the idea of embedded ethics from the very beginning. But one thing is certain: Embedded ethics alone will not suddenly make AI “turn ethical”. Ultimately, that will require laws, codes of conduct and possibly state incentives.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper espousing the embedded ethics for AI development approach,

An embedded ethics approach for AI development by Stuart McLennan, Amelia Fiske, Leo Anthony Celi, Ruth Müller, Jan Harder, Konstantin Ritt, Sami Haddadin & Alena Buyx. Nature Machine Intelligence (2020) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-020-0214-1 Published 31 July 2020

This paper is behind a paywall.

Religion, ethics and and AI

For some reason embedded ethics and AI got me to thinking about Pope Francis and other religious leaders.

The Roman Catholic Church and AI

There was a recent announcement that the Roman Catholic Church will be working with MicroSoft and IBM on AI and ethics (from a February 28, 2020 article by Jen Copestake for British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) news online (Note: A link has been removed),

Leaders from the two tech giants met senior church officials in Rome, and agreed to collaborate on “human-centred” ways of designing AI.

Microsoft president Brad Smith admitted some people may “think of us as strange bedfellows” at the signing event.

“But I think the world needs people from different places to come together,” he said.

The call was supported by Pope Francis, in his first detailed remarks about the impact of artificial intelligence on humanity.

The Rome Call for Ethics [sic] was co-signed by Mr Smith, IBM executive vice-president John Kelly and president of the Pontifical Academy for Life Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia.

It puts humans at the centre of new technologies, asking for AI to be designed with a focus on the good of the environment and “our common and shared home and of its human inhabitants”.

Framing the current era as a “renAIssance”, the speakers said the invention of artificial intelligence would be as significant to human development as the invention of the printing press or combustion engine.

UN Food and Agricultural Organization director Qu Dongyu and Italy’s technology minister Paola Pisano were also co-signatories.

…

Hannah Brockhaus’s February 28, 2020 article for the Catholic News Agency provides some details missing from the BBC report and I found it quite helpful when trying to understand the various pieces that make up this initiative,

The Pontifical Academy for Life signed Friday [February 28, 2020], alongside presidents of IBM and Microsoft, a call for ethical and responsible use of artificial intelligence technologies.

According to the document, “the sponsors of the call express their desire to work together, in this context and at a national and international level, to promote ‘algor-ethics.’”

“Algor-ethics,” according to the text, is the ethical use of artificial intelligence according to the principles of transparency, inclusion, responsibility, impartiality, reliability, security, and privacy.

The signing of the “Rome Call for AI Ethics [PDF]” took place as part of the 2020 assembly of the Pontifical Academy for Life, which was held Feb. 26-28 [2020] on the theme of artificial intelligence.

One part of the assembly was dedicated to private meetings of the academics of the Pontifical Academy for Life. The second was a workshop on AI and ethics that drew 356 participants from 41 countries.

On the morning of Feb. 28 [2020], a public event took place called “renAIssance. For a Humanistic Artificial Intelligence” and included the signing of the AI document by Microsoft President Brad Smith, and IBM Executive Vice-president John Kelly III.

The Director General of FAO, Dongyu Qu, and politician Paola Pisano, representing the Italian government, also signed.

The president of the European Parliament, David Sassoli, was also present Feb. 28.

Pope Francis canceled his scheduled appearance at the event due to feeling unwell. His prepared remarks were read by Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, president of the Academy for Life.

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You can find Pope Francis’s comments about the document here (if you’re not comfortable reading Italian, hopefully, the English translation which follows directly afterward will be helpful). The Pope’s AI initiative has a dedicated website, Rome Call for AI ethics, and while most of the material dates from the February 2020 announcement, they are keeping up a blog. It has two entries, one dated in May 2020 and another in September 2020.

Buddhism and AI

The Dalai Lama is well known for having an interest in science and having hosted scientists for various dialogues. So, I was able to track down a November 10, 2016 article by Ariel Conn for the futureoflife.org website, which features his insights on the matter,

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The question of what it means and what it takes to feel needed is an important problem for ethicists and philosophers, but it may be just as important for AI researchers to consider. The Dalai Lama argues that lack of meaning and purpose in one’s work increases frustration and dissatisfaction among even those who are gainfully employed.

“The problem,” says the Dalai Lama, “is … the growing number of people who feel they are no longer useful, no longer needed, no longer one with their societies. … Feeling superfluous is a blow to the human spirit. It leads to social isolation and emotional pain, and creates the conditions for negative emotions to take root.”

If feeling needed and feeling useful are necessary for happiness, then AI researchers may face a conundrum. Many researchers hope that job loss due to artificial intelligence and automation could, in the end, provide people with more leisure time to pursue enjoyable activities. But if the key to happiness is feeling useful and needed, then a society without work could be just as emotionally challenging as today’s career-based societies, and possibly worse.

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I also found a talk on the topic by The Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi, first here’s a description from his bio at the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values webspace on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) website,

… an innovative thinker, philosopher, educator and a polymath monk. He is Director of the Ethics Initiative at the MIT Media Lab and President & CEO of The Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Venerable Tenzin’s unusual background encompasses entering a Buddhist monastery at the age of ten and receiving graduate education at Harvard University with degrees ranging from Philosophy to Physics to International Relations. He is a Tribeca Disruptive Fellow and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Venerable Tenzin serves on the boards of a number of academic, humanitarian, and religious organizations. He is the recipient of several recognitions and awards and received Harvard’s Distinguished Alumni Honors for his visionary contributions to humanity.

He gave the 2018 Roger W. Heyns Lecture in Religion and Society at Stanford University on the topic, “Religious and Ethical Dimensions of Artificial Intelligence.” The video runs over one hour but he is a sprightly speaker (in comparison to other Buddhist speakers I’ve listened to over the years).

Judaism, Islam, and other Abrahamic faiths examine AI and ethics

I was delighted to find this January 30, 2020 Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Ethics and Religion event as it brought together a range of thinkers from various faiths and disciplines,

New technologies are transforming our world every day, and the pace of change is only accelerating.  In coming years, human beings will create machines capable of out-thinking us and potentially taking on such uniquely-human traits as empathy, ethical reasoning, perhaps even consciousness.  This will have profound implications for virtually every human activity, as well as the meaning we impart to life and creation themselves.  This conference will provide an introduction for non-specialists to Artificial Intelligence (AI):

What is it?  What can it do and be used for?  And what will be its implications for choice and free will; economics and worklife; surveillance economies and surveillance states; the changing nature of facts and truth; and the comparative intelligence and capabilities of humans and machines in the future? 

Leading practitioners, ethicists and theologians will provide cross-disciplinary and cross-denominational perspectives on such challenges as technology addiction, inherent biases and resulting inequalities, the ethics of creating destructive technologies and of turning decision-making over to machines from self-driving cars to “autonomous weapons” systems in warfare, and how we should treat the suffering of “feeling” machines.  The conference ultimately will address how we think about our place in the universe and what this means for both religious thought and theological institutions themselves.

UTS [Union Theological Seminary] is the oldest independent seminary in the United States and has long been known as a bastion of progressive Christian scholarship.  JTS [Jewish Theological Seminary] is one of the academic and spiritual centers of Conservative Judaism and a major center for academic scholarship in Jewish studies. The Riverside Church is an interdenominational, interracial, international, open, welcoming, and affirming church and congregation that has served as a focal point of global and national activism for peace and social justice since its inception and continues to serve God through word and public witness. The annual Greater Good Gathering, the following week at Columbia University’s School of International & Public Affairs, focuses on how technology is changing society, politics and the economy – part of a growing nationwide effort to advance conversations promoting the “greater good.”

They have embedded a video of the event (it runs a little over seven hours) on the January 30, 2020 Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Ethics and Religion event page. For anyone who finds that a daunting amount of information, you may want to check out the speaker list for ideas about who might be writing and thinking on this topic.

As for Islam, I did track down this November 29, 2018 article by Shahino Mah Abdullah, a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Islamic Studies (IAIS) Malaysia,

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As the global community continues to work together on the ethics of AI, there are still vast opportunities to offer ethical inputs, including the ethical principles based on Islamic teachings.

This is in line with Islam’s encouragement for its believers to convey beneficial messages, including to share its ethical principles with society.

In Islam, ethics or akhlak (virtuous character traits) in Arabic, is sometimes employed interchangeably in the Arabic language with adab, which means the manner, attitude, behaviour, and etiquette of putting things in their proper places. Islamic ethics cover all the legal concepts ranging from syariah (Islamic law), fiqh ( jurisprudence), qanun (ordinance), and ‘urf (customary practices).

Adopting and applying moral values based on the Islamic ethical concept or applied Islamic ethics could be a way to address various issues in today’s societies.

At the same time, this approach is in line with the higher objectives of syariah (maqasid alsyariah) that is aimed at conserving human benefit by the protection of human values, including faith (hifz al-din), life (hifz alnafs), lineage (hifz al-nasl), intellect (hifz al-‘aql), and property (hifz al-mal). This approach could be very helpful to address contemporary issues, including those related to the rise of AI and intelligent robots.

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Part of the difficulty with tracking down more about AI, ethics, and various religions is linguistic. I simply don’t have the language skills to search for the commentaries and, even in English, I may not have the best or most appropriate search terms.

Television (TV) episodes stored on DNA?

According to a Sept. 1, 2020 news item on Nanowerk, the first episode of a tv series, ‘Biohackers’ has been stored on synthetic DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) by a researcher at TUM and colleagues at another institution,

The first episode of the newly released series “Biohackers” was stored in the form of synthetic DNA. This was made possible by the research of Prof. Reinhard Heckel of the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and his colleague Prof. Robert Grass of ETH Zürich.

They have developed a method that permits the stable storage of large quantities of data on DNA for over 1000 years.

A Sept. 1, 2020 TUM press release, which originated the news item, proceeds with more detail in an interview format,

Prof. Heckel, Biohackers is about a medical student seeking revenge on a professor with a dark past – and the manipulation of DNA with biotechnology tools. You were commissioned to store the series on DNA. How does that work?

First, I should mention that what we’re talking about is artificially generated – in other words, synthetic – DNA. DNA consists of four building blocks: the nucleotides adenine (A), thymine (T), guanine (G) and cytosine (C). Computer data, meanwhile, are coded as zeros and ones. The first episode of Biohackers consists of a sequence of around 600 million zeros and ones. To code the sequence 01 01 11 00 in DNA, for example, we decide which number combinations will correspond to which letters. For example: 00 is A, 01 is C, 10 is G and 11 is T. Our example then produces the DNA sequence CCTA. Using this principle of DNA data storage, we have stored the first episode of the series on DNA.

And to view the series – is it just a matter of “reverse translation” of the letters?

In a very simplified sense, you can visualize it like that. When writing, storing and reading the DNA, however, errors occur. If these errors are not corrected, the data stored on the DNA will be lost. To solve the problem, I have developed an algorithm based on channel coding. This method involves correcting errors that take place during information transfers. The underlying idea is to add redundancy to the data. Think of language: When we read or hear a word with missing or incorrect letters, the computing power of our brain is still capable of understanding the word. The algorithm follows the same principle: It encodes the data with sufficient redundancy to ensure that even highly inaccurate data can be restored later.

Channel coding is used in many fields, including in telecommunications. What challenges did you face when developing your solution?

The first challenge was to create an algorithm specifically geared to the errors that occur in DNA. The second one was to make the algorithm so efficient that the largest possible quantities of data can be stored on the smallest possible quantity of DNA, so that only the absolutely necessary amount of redundancy is added. We demonstrated that our algorithm is optimized in that sense.

DNA data storage is very expensive because of the complexity of DNA production as well as the reading process. What makes DNA an attractive storage medium despite these challenges?

First, DNA has a very high information density. This permits the storage of enormous data volumes in a minimal space. In the case of the TV series, we stored “only” 100 megabytes on a picogram – or a billionth of a gram of DNA. Theoretically, however, it would be possible to store up to 200 exabytes on one gram of DNA. And DNA lasts a long time. By comparison: If you never turned on your PC or wrote data to the hard disk it contains, the data would disappear after a couple of years. By contrast, DNA can remain stable for many thousands of years if it is packed right.

And the method you have developed also makes the DNA strands durable – practically indestructible.

My colleague Robert Grass was the first to develop a process for the “stable packing” of DNA strands by encapsulating them in nanometer-scale spheres made of silica glass. This ensures that the DNA is protected against mechanical influences. In a joint paper in 2015, we presented the first robust DNA data storage concept with our algorithm and the encapsulation process developed by Prof. Grass. Since then we have continuously improved our method. In our most recent publication in Nature Protocols of January 2020, we passed on what we have learned.

What are your next steps? Does data storage on DNA have a future?

We’re working on a way to make DNA data storage cheaper and faster. “Biohackers” was a milestone en route to commercialization. But we still have a long way to go. If this technology proves successful, big things will be possible. Entire libraries, all movies, photos, music and knowledge of every kind – provided it can be represented in the form of data – could be stored on DNA and would thus be available to humanity for eternity.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Reading and writing digital data in DNA by Linda C. Meiser, Philipp L. Antkowiak, Julian Koch, Weida D. Chen, A. Xavier Kohll, Wendelin J. Stark, Reinhard Heckel & Robert N. Grass. Nature Protocols volume 15, pages86–101(2020) Issue Date: January 2020 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41596-019-0244-5 Published [online] 29 November 2019

This paper is behind a paywall.

As for ‘Biohackers’, it’s a German science fiction television series and you can find out more about it here on the Internet Movie Database.

“Eat up your ceramic nanoparticles” says the European Space Agency

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A Sept. 4, 2020 news item on phys.org showcases some intriguing research from the European Space Agency (ESA),

“Eat your vitamins” might be replaced with “ingest your ceramic nano-particles” in the future as space research is giving more weight to the idea that nanoscopic particles could help protect cells from common causes of damage.

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A Sept, 4, 2020 ESA press release, which originated the news item, fills in some of the details and raises a question,

Oxidative stress occurs in our bodies when cells lose the natural balance of electrons in the molecules that we are made of. This is a common and constant occurrence that is part of our metabolism but also plays a role in the aging process and several pathological conditions, such as heart failure, muscle atrophy and Parkinson’s disease.

The best advice for keeping your body in balance and avoiding oxidative stress is still to have a healthy diet and eat enough vitamins, but nanoparticles are showing promising results in keeping cells in shape.

When in space, astronauts have been shown to suffer from more oxidative stress due to the extra radiation they receive and as a by-product of floating in weightlessness, so researchers in Italy were keen to see if nanoparticles would have the same protective effect on cells on the International Space Station as on Earth.

They prepared muscle cells that flew to the International Space Station and were cultured in ESA’s Kubik incubator before being frozen for storage.

“A year ago [emphasis mine] our frozen samples splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on the Dragon spacecraft, and after comparing the samples we saw a marked effect in the cells treated with ceramic nanoparticles,” says Gianni Ciofani from the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia in Italy. “The effect we observed seems to imply that nanoparticles work better and longer than traditional antioxidants such as vitamins.”

“The experiment setup resulted in excellent samples to analyze using state-of-the art RNA sequencing,” continues Gianni. “Conducting space research is nothing like traditional lab work, as we have less samples, we cannot do the work ourselves and we have to work around deadlines such as launch days, landing and storing the samples, it is challenging but thrilling research!” The team even found ways to improve and simplify the process for future studies.

Baby astronauts hypothesis

The research adds weight to the baby-astronaut hypothesis of weightlessness. The changes in muscle tissue observed are similar to how babies’ tissues develop in the womb.

“Some researchers see similarities to how human bodies adapt to living in space with pre-natal conditions: there are similarities with floating in a warm environment with different oxygen intake and we consider it a possibility of return to the state,” says Giada Genchi, also of the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia’s Smart Bio-Interfaces department.

The team’s high-quality muscle tissue samples are being further analyzed and compared to samples from similar experiments that flew earlier. There is still much more to learn, such as what is the best way to administer nano-ceramics and how long do their protective effects last as well as possible unwanted side effects.

I highlighted a “A year ago” because that should mean 2019 but the research the ESA press release linked to was published in 2018. I cannot find anything more recent. So, for the curious, here’s a link to and a citation for the 2018 research paper,

Modulation of gene expression in rat muscle cells following treatment with nanoceria in different gravity regimes by Giada Graziana Genchi, Andrea Degl’Innocenti, Alice Rita Salgarella, Ilaria Pezzini, Attilio Marino, Arianna Menciassi, Sara Piccirillo, Michele Balsamo & Gianni Ciofani. Nanomedicine Vol. 13, No. 22 Preliminary Communication DOI: https://doi.org/10.2217/nnm-2018-0316 Published Online: 18 Oct 2018 Print Version: 2018 Nov;13 (22): 2821-2833. DOI: 10.2217/nnm-2018-0316.

The paper is behind a paywall.

This image was used to illustrate the work,

Courtesy Nanomedicine (journal)

Regardless of when the research was published, it’s still pretty interesting work and I hope to hear more about it in the future.

A biohybrid artificial synapse that can communicate with living cells

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As I noted in my June 16, 2020 posting, we may have more than one kind of artificial brain in our future. This latest work features a biohybrid. From a June 15, 2020 news item on ScienceDaily,

In 2017, Stanford University researchers presented a new device that mimics the brain’s efficient and low-energy neural learning process [see my March 8, 2017 posting for more]. It was an artificial version of a synapse — the gap across which neurotransmitters travel to communicate between neurons — made from organic materials. In 2019, the researchers assembled nine of their artificial synapses together in an array, showing that they could be simultaneously programmed to mimic the parallel operation of the brain [see my Sept. 17, 2019 posting].

Now, in a paper published June 15 [2020] in Nature Materials, they have tested the first biohybrid version of their artificial synapse and demonstrated that it can communicate with living cells. Future technologies stemming from this device could function by responding directly to chemical signals from the brain. The research was conducted in collaboration with researchers at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology — IIT) in Italy and at Eindhoven University of Technology (Netherlands).

“This paper really highlights the unique strength of the materials that we use in being able to interact with living matter,” said Alberto Salleo, professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford and co-senior author of the paper. “The cells are happy sitting on the soft polymer. But the compatibility goes deeper: These materials work with the same molecules neurons use naturally.”

While other brain-integrated devices require an electrical signal to detect and process the brain’s messages, the communications between this device and living cells occur through electrochemistry — as though the material were just another neuron receiving messages from its neighbor.

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A June 15, 2020 Stanford University news release (also on EurekAlert) by Taylor Kubota, which originated the news item, delves further into this recent work,

How neurons learn

The biohybrid artificial synapse consists of two soft polymer electrodes, separated by a trench filled with electrolyte solution – which plays the part of the synaptic cleft that separates communicating neurons in the brain. When living cells are placed on top of one electrode, neurotransmitters that those cells release can react with that electrode to produce ions. Those ions travel across the trench to the second electrode and modulate the conductive state of this electrode. Some of that change is preserved, simulating the learning process occurring in nature.

“In a biological synapse, essentially everything is controlled by chemical interactions at the synaptic junction. Whenever the cells communicate with one another, they’re using chemistry,” said Scott Keene, a graduate student at Stanford and co-lead author of the paper. “Being able to interact with the brain’s natural chemistry gives the device added utility.”

This process mimics the same kind of learning seen in biological synapses, which is highly efficient in terms of energy because computing and memory storage happen in one action. In more traditional computer systems, the data is processed first and then later moved to storage.

To test their device, the researchers used rat neuroendocrine cells that release the neurotransmitter dopamine. Before they ran their experiment, they were unsure how the dopamine would interact with their material – but they saw a permanent change in the state of their device upon the first reaction.

“We knew the reaction is irreversible, so it makes sense that it would cause a permanent change in the device’s conductive state,” said Keene. “But, it was hard to know whether we’d achieve the outcome we predicted on paper until we saw it happen in the lab. That was when we realized the potential this has for emulating the long-term learning process of a synapse.”

A first step

This biohybrid design is in such early stages that the main focus of the current research was simply to make it work.

“It’s a demonstration that this communication melding chemistry and electricity is possible,” said Salleo. “You could say it’s a first step toward a brain-machine interface, but it’s a tiny, tiny very first step.”

Now that the researchers have successfully tested their design, they are figuring out the best paths for future research, which could include work on brain-inspired computers, brain-machine interfaces, medical devices or new research tools for neuroscience. Already, they are working on how to make the device function better in more complex biological settings that contain different kinds of cells and neurotransmitters.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

A biohybrid synapse with neurotransmitter-mediated plasticity by Scott T. Keene, Claudia Lubrano, Setareh Kazemzadeh, Armantas Melianas, Yaakov Tuchman, Giuseppina Polino, Paola Scognamiglio, Lucio Cinà, Alberto Salleo, Yoeri van de Burgt & Francesca Santoro. Nature Materials (2020) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-020-0703-y Published: 15 June 2020

This paper is behind a paywall.