"I know CDC has the ability to do this and has done it numerous occasions in the past," says Dr. This was not the case early in the pandemic. 1, NPR ceased updating the page, recognizing that Americans can find the information they need on the CDC's COVID website. It was viewed over 52 million times over the last three years as readers sought to stay updated on COVID metrics. NPR launched its own tracker in March, 2020, drawing data from Johns Hopkins. So journalists and academic researchers at places like Johns Hopkins jumped in to fill the void. Neither the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention nor the World Health Organization were providing enough useful numbers in real time. Should mayors close schools? Should governors mandate masks? Should CEOs shut down factories? Should heads of state seal borders?īut there was no good data available to make those decisions. Those decisions included where to impose dramatic but crucial public health measures. "And when we started to see the cases move out of China and in through Europe and headed toward our shores, we knew that there were going to be a series of public policy decisions that would have to be made," Blauer says. "As everyone can remember, there was very little information, particularly at the beginning of the pandemic," says Beth Blauer, an associate vice provost at Johns Hopkins who has helped run the center. Was it safe to go grocery shopping? How easily could someone get infected on a bus or train? Could runners get sick just by passing another jogger in the park? When the pandemic erupted, no one knew much of anything about the virus and how to respond. "But it's an appropriate time to move on." "It's bittersweet," says Lauren Gardner, an engineering professor who launched the project with one of her students on March 3, 2020. The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center plans to cease operations March 10, officials told NPR. In another sign of the changing state of the pandemic, an invaluable source of information about the virus over the last three years is shutting down, NPR has learned. The researchers are also concerned about protecting stem cell donors’ privacy.The COVID-19 dashboard created by the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering is displayed during a briefing on Capitol Hill in early March 2020, when only 245 confirmed cases had been reported in the U.S. In their paper, they write about monitoring the development of OI for exhibitions of consciousness, pain, and suffering-phenomena that would require their own consensus-based definitions to be confirmed in the first place. Using human brain cells to power computers has obvious ethical implications, which the researchers openly acknowledge. The world’s fastest supercomputer contains 58 billion transistors, each storing 4 bits. Once they’ve reached that point, they’ll contain approximately 125 trillion synapses, each of which can store 4.7 bits of information. The current organoids hold about 50,000 cells, and they’d need to hold closer to 10 million to facilitate OI. Johns Hopkins’ OI “brains” are too small to produce researchers’ desired outcomes. Johns Hopkins' brain-computer interface device. The device’s flexible shell uses tiny electrodes to pick up signals from the organoid and send signals back. The team needs a way to communicate with the organoids or send them information and, in turn, see what they’re “thinking.” To this end, they’re experimenting with a brain-computer interface device they developed (Opens in a new window) in 2022. Thanks to brain organoids’ bulkier shape, they contain more synapses between neurons than flat tissues would. In a paper (Opens in a new window) published in the journal Frontiers in Science, researchers describe a biocomputer built around a brain organoid, which they grew in the lab. The hope-over at Johns Hopkins, at least-is that it’ll facilitate more advanced learning than a conventional computer can, resulting in richer feedback and better decision-making than AI can provide. It’s called organoid intelligence, or OI, and it uses actual human brain cells to make computing “more brain-like.” OI revolves around using organoids, or clusters of living tissue grown from stem cells that behave similarly to organs, as biological hardware that powers algorithmic systems. Right now, it feels as though AI is an unstoppable force-but scientists at Johns Hopkins University believe one thing might overpower it. It’s in your productivity apps and your video games it’s writing blog posts and software it’s conducting conversations and designing computer chips. (Credit: dia/iStock/Getty Images)Īrtificial intelligence is everywhere.
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