>>9979836

An interesting connection between Google's Russian founder and MITRE Corp. during the development of the search engine

Of Spies, Surveillance And The Rising Police State

https://www.technocracy.news/of-spies-surveillance-and-the-rising-police-state/

The NSA and CIA “research arms” funded “birds of a feather,” including Google, as part of an effort to track and trace individuals across the internet. Funding was provided in part by the National Science Foundation and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, also known as DARPA.

Human beings and like-minded groups who might pose a threat to national security can be uniquely identified online before they do harm. This explains why the intelligence community found [Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page’s] research efforts [into search engines] so appealing; prior to this time, the CIA largely used human intelligence efforts in the field to identify people and groups that might pose threats. The ability to track them virtually (in conjunction with efforts in the field) would change everything.

During the development of the Google search engine, Brin was in contract with an employee of the defense contractor MITRE Corp, a corporation “leading research and development efforts for the NSA, CIA, US Air Force Research Laboratory and US Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command [and] the CIA’s internal Research and Development department,” according to journalist Kit Klarenberg.

>>9980042

Suppressed History: How the CIA and NSA Helped Create Google to Spy on Citizens

https://sputniknews.com/analysis/201809271068358816-google-cia-nsa-creation/

In commemoration of Google's 20th birthday, many mainstream media organizations - and the company itself - have published condensed histories of the search engine giant, chronicling key moments in the firm's two-decade saga. Missing from each is the story of how the CIA and other US spying agencies helped fund its creation.

Throughout the development of the search engine, Brin regularly reported on his project's progress to Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham, and Dr. Rick Steinheiser. Neither were connected to Stanford — Thuraisingham was an employee of US defense contractor MITRE Corp, leading research and development efforts for the NSA, CIA, US Air Force Research Laboratory and US Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, while Steinheiser worked directly for the CIA's internal Research and Development department.

"Google founder Sergey Brin was partly-funded by this program while a PhD student at Stanford. He together with his advisor Prof. Jeffrey D. Ullman and my colleague at MITRE, Dr. Chris Clifton, developed the Query Flocks System which produced solutions for mining large amounts of data stored in databases. I remember visiting Stanford with Dr. Rick Steinheiser and Brin would rush in on roller blades, give his presentation and rush out. In fact the last time we met in September 1998, Brin demonstrated to us his search engine which became Google soon after," Thuraisingham has written.

>>9980068

Correction to my article posted on March 25, 2013

Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham

January 25, 2015

My article dated March 25, 2013 (Big Data: Have we seen it before?) posted on my web site has been

used by Dr. Nafeez Ahmed to promote his view that the CIA was behind Google.

https://medium.com/@NafeezAhmed/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e

In my article dated March 25, 2013, I made a statement that Mr. Sergey Brin (Google co-founder while at

Stanford), Prof. Jeffery Ullman (from Stanford) and Dr. Chris Clifton (then at MITRE) developed the

Query Flocks system. This is because at that time I believed that this was the case. However, in Dr.

Ahmed’s article posted on January 22, 2015, a Google Director of Communications has stated that Mr.

Sergey Brin never worked on Query Flocks. Based on this information, I would like to make a change to

my article dated March 25, 2013. Specifically, the second paragraph of my March 25, 2013 article should

read as follows:

So was the MDDS effort successful? Some say no because the program did not

solve the massive data problem. However I say yes as the program did contribute to

the understanding of what was involved in handling massive amounts of data and

produced solutions for some of the challenges including storage management and

indexing as well as query processing. In fact Prof. Jeffrey Ullman (at Stanford)

and my colleague at MITRE Dr. Chris Clifton together with some others developed

the Query Flocks System, as part of MDDS, which produced solutions for mining

large amounts of data stored in databases. Also, Mr. Sergey Brin, the cofounder of

Google, was part of Prof. Ullman’s research group at that time. I remember

visiting Stanford with Dr. Rick Steinheiser from the Intelligence Community

periodically and Mr. Brin would rush in on roller blades, give his presentation and

rush out. During our last visit to Stanford in September 1998, Mr. Brin

demonstrated to us his search engine which I believe became Google soon after.

There are also several inaccuracies in Dr. Ahmed’s article (dated January 22, 2015). For example, the

MDDS program was not a “sensitive” program as stated by Dr. Ahmed; it was an Unclassified program

that funded universities in the US. Furthermore, Sergey Brin never reported to me or to Dr. Rick

Steinheiser; he only gave presentations to us during our visits to the Department of Computer Science at

Stanford during the 1990s. Also, MDDS never funded Google; it funded Stanford University.

the full correction letter and article is attached as PDF

>>9979836

Hybrid curation of gene-mutation relations combining automated extraction and crowdsourcing

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25246425/

Abstract

Background: This article describes capture of biological information using a hybrid approach that combines natural language processing to extract biological entities and crowdsourcing with annotators recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk to judge correctness of candidate biological relations. These techniques were applied to extract gene- mutation relations from biomedical abstracts with the goal of supporting production scale capture of gene-mutation-disease findings as an open source resource for personalized medicine.

Results: The hybrid system could be configured to provide good performance for gene-mutation extraction (precision ∼82%; recall ∼70% against an expert-generated gold standard) at a cost of $0.76 per abstract. This demonstrates that crowd labor platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk can be used to recruit quality annotators, even in an application requiring subject matter expertise; aggregated Turker judgments for gene-mutation relations exceeded 90% accuracy. Over half of the precision errors were due to mismatches against the gold standard hidden from annotator view (e.g., incorrect EntrezGene identifier or incorrect mutation position extracted), or incomplete task instructions (e.g., the need to exclude nonhuman mutations).

Conclusions: The hybrid curation model provides a readily scalable cost-effective approach to curation, particularly if coupled with expert human review to filter precision errors. We plan to generalize the framework and make it available as open source software.

Database url: http://www.mitre.org/publications/technical-papers/hybrid-curation-of-gene-mutation-relations-combining-automated.

The URL has changed to the following

https://www.mitre.org/publications/technical-papers/hybrid-curation-of-gene-mutation-relations-combining-automated

And the author list reveals many MITRE people

John D. Burger, The MITRE Corporation

Emily Doughty, Stanford University School of Medicine

Ritu Khare, National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health

Chih-Hsuan Wei, National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health

Rajashree Mishra, The University of Maryland Baltimore County

John Aberdeen, The MITRE Corporation

David Tresner-Kirsch, The MITRE Corporation

Ben Wellner, The MITRE Corporation

Maricel G. Kann, The University of Maryland Baltimore County

Zhiyong Lu, National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health

Dr. Lynette Hirschman, The MITRE Corporation

>>9980161

Pubmed has 687 papers that MITRE was involved in.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=mitre

>>9979710

Democrats Driving Agenda 21/Smart Growth Legislation

https://www.technocracy.news/democrats-driving-agenda-21-smart-growth-legislation/

U.S. Sen. Edward Markey, D-MA, and Rep. Steve Cohen, D-TN, introduced the Complete Streets Act Wednesday in Congress, a federal law to promote safer street design. The bill would require states to set aside 5% of federal highway funding for a grant program that would fund Complete Streets projects.

The legislation would allow eligible local and regional entities to apply for technical assistance and capital funding to build projects, such as sidewalks, bike lanes, crosswalks and bus stops. It has already received statements of support from ride-hailing companies Lyft, Uber and Via, as well as the National Complete Streets Coalition (NCSC), a Smart Growth America program that advocates for Complete Streets.

To push for Congress’ approval, NCSC separately released an addendum to its “Dangerous by Design 2019” report, which ranks states and cities on the dangers faced by pedestrians. The addendum segments pedestrian fatalities by Congressional district in both absolute numbers and by rate per 100,000 people. Arizona’s 7th Congressional District, represented by Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego, topped that ranking. Gallego is a co-sponsor of the bill in the House.

This bicameral legislation comes at a critical time for street safety, with pedestrian deaths and vehicle crashes ticking upwards. According to a report from the Governors Highway Safety Administration (GHSA) earlier this year, the number of pedestrian fatalities in 2018 is projected to be the highest since 1990: at 6,227, a 4% increase over 2017. GHSA has blamed that uptick on a series of factors, including increased smartphone use and alcohol impairment of drivers and pedestrians.

==Russia to mass produce experimental COVID-19 vaccine: wealth fund head–

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-russia-vaccine/russia-to-mass-produce-experimental-covid-19-vaccine-wealth-fund-head-idUSKCN24H1AD

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia plans to produce 30 million doses of an experimental COVID-19 vaccine domestically this year, with the potential to manufacture a further 170 million abroad, the head of the country’s sovereign wealth fund told Reuters.

The first human trial of the vaccine, a month-long test on 38 people, ended this week. Researchers concluded that it is safe for use and induces an immune response, though the strength of that response is as yet unclear.

A larger Phase III trial involving several thousand people is expected to begin in August, said Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) head Kirill Dmitriev.

“We believe that based on the current results it will be approved in Russia in August and in some other countries in September…, making it possibly the first vaccine to be approved in the world,” he said in an interview.

More than 100 possible vaccines are being developed to try to stop the pandemic. At least two are in final Phase III human trials, according to World Health Organization data - one being developed by China’s Sinopharm and the other by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford.

Producers are also grappling with the question of how to massively scale up production to meet global needs.

HERD IMMUNITY

Dmitriev said the Russian Phase III trial will be conducted at home and in two Middle Eastern countries, and will begin after a 100-person Phase II trial wraps up on Aug. 3.

Russia was in talks with Saudi Arabia on being a trial site as well as a manufacturing partner, he told a separate news conference.

Moscow’s Gamaleya Institute, which developed the Russian candidate vaccine, is producing doses for clinical trials, while private pharmaceutical firms Alium - part of the Sistema conglomerate- R-Pharm and are handling bottling.

Both are updating their lab setup to be able to take over production within the next couple of months, Dmitriev said.

“There’s a general sense that for so-called herd immunity in Russia you need to vaccinate between 40 million and 50 million people,” he told Reuters.

“So we believe we will be in good shape producing around 30 million (doses domestically) this year and then we can finalise vaccination next year.”

Russia had also struck manufacturing deals with five other countries and could be producing up to 170 million doses abroad this year, Dmitriev said.

He declined to say where or give any details on pricing, but said countries in Latin America, the Middle East and elsewhere had expressed interest in importing the vaccine.

Russia has also reached a deal with drugmaker AstraZeneca on its potential COVID-19 vaccine, called AZD1222. “We expect one of our portfolio companies to also be working …on producing the AstraZeneca vaccine in Russia,” Dmitriev said.

Russia chose to partner with the UK rather than China