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Immune homeostasis requires constant collaboration between a diverse and dynamic set of cell types. Within our immune tissues, distinct cellular subsets must work together to defend against pathogenic threats, maintain tolerance, and establish memory. While surveying multiple healthy individuals enables exploration of potential ensemble immune solutions, contrasts against outliers of health and disease can reveal deviations that underscore diagnostic, therapeutic, and prophylactic features of enhanced function or dysfunction. Here, I will discuss how we can leverage single-cell genomic approaches – and, in particular, single-cell RNA-Seq – to explore the extensive functional diversity among immune cells within and across individuals, and uncover, from the bottom-up, distinct cell types and states associated with improved immunity. Moreover, I will discuss emerging experimental and computational strategies for altering ensemble cellular responses through targeted intra- or extracellular induction of these preferred types and states.
Want some good news about the environment? In America, we have finally learned to grow our economy while taking less from the Earth year after year: less water, timber, and metal; fewer minerals and resources; even less energy. This talk is a show and tell about this profound change. Andy McAfee will show the evidence that we've started getting more from less and tell how it happened. The unlikely heroes of the tale are the cost pressures that come from intense competition and powerful digital tools that reduce the need for resources. In short, prices and processors are now letting us tread more lightly on the Earth. The story is full of surprises and also insights. In particular, it gives us a playbook for dealing with the major challenges still ahead of us: global warming, pollution, and species loss.
Risk, Innovation and the New Manufacturing Pioneers
Ben Armstrong Executive Director, MIT Industrial Performance Center
SMEs are the backbone of most economies and employ approximately 60 percent of the working population in OECD countries. However, these businesses often struggle the most to access financing, oftentimes, relying on friends and family to help them flourish and thrive by lending money when others do not. We have created Trust·u to offer a solution to this. Trust·u is an internal venturing effort from BBVA, positioned to address innovation opportunities in an agile manner by mimicking startups. We utilize a digital platform to enable rapid on-boarding and underwriting, combining social elements with financial data, to grant small businesses access to financing based on a new risk assessment model, which takes full advantage of ML techniques and new data sources.
Redefining Small Business Lending through ML and Social Physics.