Ben Heck’s Hackmanji board game, part 2

Ben, Karen and Felix continue to work on the Hackmanji board game puzzle. In particular, they’ve attempted to make it educational, with electronic logic gates ranging from AND, OR to XOR. Ben breaks down the solutions to the logic puzzles while Felix solders the logic chips. Get in touch with The Ben Heck Show team to be involved in the build of logic puzzles for the game, and create an account with element14 to join one of the largest online communities for makers and engineers.

AI is nearly as good as humans in detecting breast cancer

Someday, computers could help doctors diagnose diseases much faster than they can today. Researchers from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Harvard Medical School (HMS) have developed a way to train artificial intelligence to read and interpret pathology images. Andrew Beck from BIDMC explains that their “method is based on deep learning,” which is commonly used to train AI to recognize speech, images and objects. They recently got the chance to prove just how effective their technique is during a competition at the annual International Symposium of Biomedical Imaging, where the AI was tasked to look for breast cancer in images of lymph nodes.

The team started training their machine by feeding it hundreds of slides marked to indicate which parts have cancerous cells and which have normal ones. They then identified which types of slides it was having the most trouble with and fed it more difficult samples. Using that method, the AI improved enough to be accurate 92 percent of the time and to win in two separate categories during the contest. It’s still no match for human pathologists who are accurate 96 percent of the time, but it’s clearly shown great promise.

Beck said what’s truly exciting is that when they combined pathologists’ analysis with their creation’s, the results showed 99.5 percent accuracy. He added: “Our results in the ISBI competition show that what the computer is doing is genuinely intelligent and that the combination of human and computer interpretations will result in more precise and more clinically valuable diagnoses to guide treatment decisions.” If you want to read more about this breast cancer-detecting AI, the team published a paper detailing their experience.

Source: Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center

New York votes to ban ads for whole apartments on Airbnb

New York already makes it illegal to offer your whole apartment for short-term rentals through services like Airbnb, but it’s giving that legislation some added bite. As part of a flurry of end-of-term approvals, the state’s assembly and senate have voted for a bill that would make it illegal just to advertise your entire place for a short (under 30 days) rental. You’ll face a $1,000 fine the first time you’re caught, $5,000 the second time and $7,500 the third. Governor Cuomo still has to sign the bill into law, but that’s likely to be a mere formality.

Assuming the measure becomes law, it’ll please some local residents as well as the hotel and real estate businesses. They’ve complained that services like Airbnb enable illegal hotels that both take away apartments for honest-to-goodness residents and drive up rental rates at the units that are left. In theory, this makes it too costly to even consider the tactic — unless the offending hosts lie about the nature of their rentals, it could be too costly to run these makeshift accommodations.

Not surprisingly, Airbnb isn’t happy. It portrays the bill’s approval as a conspiracy between the government and the hotel industry, and argues that it’ll increase the odds of “bankruptcy, eviction, or foreclosure” for 30,000 state residents who might otherwise struggle to make ends meet. Of course, the truth is mixed. While some of those people were earnestly trying to make money while away from home, it’s no secret that many others were snapping up properties solely to profit from Airbnb stays. The would-be law should limit short-term rentals to people who actually live in their homes.

Via: Gothamist

Source: New York State Senate