The Research

Machine learning computer systems, which get better with experience, are poised to transform the economy much as steam engines and electricity have in the past. They can outperform people in a number of tasks, though they are unlikely to replace people in all jobs. So say Carnegie Mellon University’s Tom Mitchell and MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson in a Policy Forum commentary to be published in the Dec. 22 edition of the journal  Science.  Mitchell, who founded the world’s first Machine Learning Department at CMU, and Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy in the Sloan School of Management, describe 21 criteria to evaluate whether a task or a job is amenable to machine learning (ML). “Although the economic effects of ML are relatively limited today, and we are not facing the imminent ‘end of work’ as is sometimes proclaimed, the implications for the economy and the workforce going forward are profound,” they write. The skills people choose to develo...

Investigations into cases of wrongdoing by professors are increasingly in the public eye. But are colleges and universities doing enough to deal with the problem? © ISTOCK.COM/SIRUP I n 2013, Dong-Pyou Han, then an assistant professor of biomedical sciences at Iowa State University, resigned after admitting to tampering with experiments. He had spiked animals’ blood samples with human antibodies to make it appear as if an HIV vaccine he was helping to develop could successfully protect rabbits. After being charged by a federal prosecutor the following year, Han pled guilty to two felony charges of making false statements on a National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant application and follow-up progress report. He was sentenced to 57 months in prison and had to repay $7.2 million of the NIH grant that had been awarded to him for the research. While other cases of fudging the data might result in a suspension of funds or mandatory supervision for some period of ti...

This year’s controversial news included unethical behavior among politicians, a murder, and multiple accusations of gender discrimination and sexual harassment, in addition to the usual spate of research misconduct. E ach year, amidst the technological breakthroughs and pioneering research studies that emerge from the scientific community, a few bad eggs warrant headlines of their own. Below is  The Scientist ’s roundup of some of the most scandalous happenings in the life science over the past 12 months. Political turmoil FLICKR,  MARK TAYLOR ,  ALEX HANSON  Among the developments were a few personnel kerfuffles. In February, President Donald Trump’s pick to head the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) was confirmed by the Senate. Ever since his nomination the previous November, Tom Price, an orthopedic surgeon and congressman (R-GA), was criticized for alleged conflicts of interest,  his vocal opposition...