HEALTHCARE

Dr. Google Scores High on Cancer Screening

Google Health and Alphabet subsidiary DeepMind published research Wednesday showing impressive advances in AI-based breast cancer screening. 

Let's unpack the findings

Working with U.K. and U.S. clinical researchers, Google's team claims its AI system outperformed expert radiologists in most screening mammograms. 

To train the AI system, the research team used over 90,000 de-identified mammograms, then evaluated its performance on mammograms from 25,856 British women and 3,097 American women. They compared the AI model's predictions against the actual cases of biopsy-proven breast cancer. 

The AI system reduced false positives by 5.7% and false negatives by 9.4% for U.S. patients.

• False positives: When results show you have a disease, but you don't actually have it. 
• False negatives: When the test does not detect the presence of a disease you actually have. 

The patient POV

The American Cancer Society says one in five screening mammograms do not find breast cancer (false negative). And roughly half of all women receiving annual mammograms will encounter a false positive finding over a 10-year period. 

If AI screening models can increase the accuracy of breast cancer detection, it could improve healthcare outcomes and save lives. Pundits often argue that radiologists and diagnosticians could be automated out of a job, but Google's researchers say AI screening systems would complement professionals and provide a second opinion...not replace them. 

So does Dr. Google have its license to practice? 

Not so fast. While promising, these results aren't necessarily reproducible across a wider population or applicable to mammography techniques not included in Google's research. The team needs regulatory approval and more time to refine the AI model before any clinical deployments. 

Plus, Google's healthcare push could be haunted by the ghosts of prior privacy and data protection indiscretions. Judging by the reaction to Project Nightingale, Google's partnership with the the U.S.' second largest health systems provider, the information-gathering company may want to be exceedingly transparent about healthcare projects upfront. 

Healthcare is a heavily regulated, no-nonsense industry. By comparison, Google's fortés (ad targeting and search engines) are the Wild West. 

DRONES

The Holiday Gift the Sheriffs Didn't Want

"Some have asked whether the government or the military is behind them or whether they're the work of drug cartels or are even connected to aliens." You don't expect to start 2020 reading that sentence from NBC News about mystery drone sightings in rural Colorado and Nebraska, but here we are.  

Residents of both states have spotted incognito drones with blinking lights and wingspans up to six feet, sometimes in swarms of 30. Sheriffs and federal authorities can't figure out who's flying the drones and why, but I'm guessing it's not aliens trying to make first contact. 

The FAA knows drone tracking is a problem

Over the holidays, the Federal Aviation Administration (finally) proposed a rule that will require drone owners to implement remote ID and tracking. This would help clear the way for fleets of commercial delivery drones, while allowing the government and third parties to better monitor aircraft. 

Looking ahead...the FAA rule might take three years to become fully implemented. In the meantime, keep your eyes peeled.

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HARDWARE

For Startups, Hardware's Hard

As we gear up for the big CES conference next week, let's check the health of young device-making companies. 

VC funding of North American consumer electronics startups dropped to $1.7 billion last year from $2.5 billion in 2018, Crunchbase News reported this week. It appears VCs were less excited to fund consumer device upstarts with expensive operations and steep competition. 

• When they've tried to crowdsource funding, many projects have sputtered or failed to ship their products.  

Vocab time: Consumer device startups are often operating in a "kill zone," where they compete head-to-head with the device Goliaths (Apple, Samsung, Google, and Amazon). Two kill zone scenarios: 

1. The bigger company acquires the startup (i.e. Google/Fitbit or Facebook/CTRL-labs) and integrates, repurposes, or kills off the original product.
2. Big Tech copies the startup's product (this happens a lot with software). 

A third scenario? The startup competes successfully in the kill zone and wins against all odds. It's possible, just not likely. 

BITS & BYTES

Stat: A new study found that when eBay put machine learning translation on its platform, international commerce rose 10.9% between countries where the feature was available. If you want to nerd out, read the full paper here. 

Quote: "Now the salmon business has become entangled in the fight over the 5G wireless network"—The NYT writes about how the far-flung Faroe Islands (a self-governing archipelago in the North Atlantic) found themselves in the middle of U.S.-China Huawei tensions. 

Read: VC Fred Wilson looks back at the 2010s...and gives predictions for the 2020s.

WHAT ELSE IS BREWING

• Xiaomi, a Chinese smartphone maker, will invest $7 billion in 5G, AI, and smart devices over the next five years. 
• He Jiankui, the scientist who presented the world's first genetically edited babies in 2018, was sentenced to three years in prison. China also confirmed a third gene-edited baby was born in the country.
• Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet, the world's four most valuable tech companies, started 2020 with a combined valuation of $4 trillion.
• The U.S. Army banned soldiers from using TikTok on government-issued phones, weeks after a similar decision from the Navy. 
• Imagination Technologies, a chip designer that produced graphics processors for the iPhone and iPad until 2017, is restarting its relationship with Apple.
• France will allow authorities to track social media to sniff out tax evasion. In New York, life insurers can already use social media data to help set rates. 

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GOING PHISHING

One of the joys of a short workweek is that it's already Going Phishing Friday. Three of the following news stories are real; one is deepfaked. Can you spot the odd one out?

1. Chinese criminal gangs are spreading swine fever to pigs via drones. 
2. A computer made from DNA calculated the square root of 900. 
3. Stanford PhD students developed a driverless, drifting DeLorean. 
4. An inventive YouTuber made a flying massage chair. 

HUMAN OR MACHINE?

A Harvard student trained a bot using human comments submitted to government agencies during federal comment periods. The bot then submitted 1,001 "deepfake comments" to Medicaid's website. 

Look at 20 examples and decide whether a human or bot wrote the comment. It's hard. 

Tomorrow, I'm off to Vegas for CES; let me know if you'll also be there. See you IRL or in the inbox next week, with dispatches from the show—Ryan.

GOING PHISHING ANSWER

No flying massage chair...but someone did make a flying Roomba.