For my next trick. . .

And for MOFs’ Next Trick: Pulling Water out of Thin Air

For the next trick: new discoveries in radiobiology applied to glioblastoma.

Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most common malignant brain tumor. Radiotherapy post surgical resection remained the mainstay of the management of GBM for decades until the addition of temozolomide was shown to prolong the median overall survival (OS) by 2.5 months to 14.6 months in 2005. Infiltrative growth to surrounding normal brain tissue and cooption of vascular niches, peripheral microvasuclar ...

Reparameterization trick for discrete variables

Low-variance gradient estimation is crucial for learning directed graphical models parameterized by neural networks, where the reparameterization trick is widely used for those with continuous variables. While this technique gives low-variance gradient estimates, it has not been directly applicable to discrete variables, the sampling of which inherently requires discontinuous operations. We arg...

The Kernel Trick for Distances

A method is described which, like the kernel trick in support vector machines (SVMs), lets us generalize distance-based algorithms to operate in feature spaces, usually nonlinearly related to the input space. This is done by identifying a class of kernels which can be represented as norm-based distances in Hilbert spaces. It turns out that common kernel algorithms, such as SVMs and kernel PCA, ...

Are Stem Cells the next Therapeutic Tool for Heart Repair?

Cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of morbidity and mortality in the United States and Europe. In recent years, the understanding that regenerative processes exist at the level of the myocardium, has placed stem cell research at center stage in cardiology. A stem cell is a cell that has the ability to divide (self replicate) for indefinite periods often throughout the life of the ...