Rod McCullom

The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) was proposed by President Biden and adopted by Congress in March 2022. The Biden Administration hopes ARPA-H and its billion-dollar budget can do for biomedical innovation what the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has done for GPS, speech recognition, messenger RNA, and the internet—push high-risk, high-reward projects that catalyze change.
It’s no accident that Biden named Renee Wegrzyn director of ARPA-H on Septem...

Racism’s impact on health outcomes is a relatively recent focus of public health research. Using the word “racism” itself is still challenging for some public health scholars, despite recent data clearly showing poorer health outcomes for Black people in the United States as a group compared to white people. A growing body of research is pinpointing how structural racism—the ongoing impact of discriminatory practices—affects the health of people of color, especially Black people, from infancy...

Researchers seeking to answer this question face a key challenge: incomplete government data on police use of force.

Chicago-based pilot program is testing a body sensor that monitors covid patients remotely.

https://undark.org/2021/05/05/convictions-data-taser-use-teens/

One study in June linked 16 percent of Covid-19 cases in Chicago and across Illinois to Cook County Jail.

Artificial intelligence has transformed health care, using large datasets to improve diagnostics and treatment. But some AI-powered medical tools replicate racial bias — raising questions about whether these new technologies contributed to Covid-19’s disproportionate toll on Black Americans.

In recent years, a steadily increasing volume of data has demonstrated that peer victimization — the clinical term for bullying — impacts hundreds of millions of children and adolescents, with the effects sometimes lasting years and, possibly, decades. The problem is even recognized as a global health challenge by the World Health Organization and the United Nations. And yet, researchers maintain there is still a limited understanding of how the behavior may physically shape the developing br...

In recent years, a steadily increasing volume of data has demonstrated that peer victimization — the clinical term for bullying — impacts hundreds of millions of children and adolescents, with the effects sometimes lasting years and, possibly, decades. The problem is even recognized as a global health challenge by the World Health Organization and the United Nations. And yet, researchers maintain there is still a limited understanding of how the behavior may physically shape the developing br...

An estimated 5.7 million people in the U.S. have Alzheimer’s disease—the most common type of dementia—and that number is expected to more than double by 2050. Early diagnosis is crucial for patients to benefit from the few therapies available. But no single assay or scan can deliver a conclusive diagnosis while a person is alive; instead doctors have to conduct numerous clinical and neuropsychological tests. So there is growing interest in developing artificial intelligence to identify Alzhei...

While more data is needed, researchers hope that these kinds of algorithms will eventually make their way to the clinic, providing speedier diagnoses — and better care — for the millions of people who live with this progressive and irreversible degenerative disease.

About 115 people nationwide die every day from opioid overdoses, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A lack of timely, granular data exacerbates the crisis; one study showed opioid deaths were undercounted by as many as 70,000 between 1999 and 2015, making it difficult for governments to respond. But now Internet searches have emerged as a data source to predict overdose clusters in cities or even specific neighborhoods—information that could aid local interventi...

In the middle of the day on 11 April 2014, a hooded gunman ambushed Gakirah Barnes on the streets of Chicago’s South Side. A volley of bullets struck her in the chest, jaw and neck. The 17-year-old died in a hospital bed two hours later.
To many, her death was just another grim statistic from a city that has been struggling with gun violence. Last year, around 3,500 people were shot in Chicago, Illinois, of which 246 were aged 16 or younger; 38 of those children never celebrated another birth...

Tech and social media giants, along with video streaming services everywhere, are scrambling to develop and deploy automated content moderation systems capable of flagging, reviewing, and removing offensive posts with more speed and precision — and they are leaning on machine learning and other forms of artificial intelligence, or AI, to do it.