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charset=utf-8"></head><body><div dir="ltr"><p>Dear Plamen and
Colleagues,</p><p>If it can be feasible, I would very much welcome
what you propose. Yes, it would be great developing a general
articulation amongst all our exchanges. Roughly, I feel that a
fundamental nucleous of neatly conceptualized information is still
evading us, but outside that nucleous, and somehow emanating from it,
there are different branches and sub-branches in quite different
elaboration degrees and massively crisscrossing and intermingling
their contents. A six-pointed star, for instance, radiating from its
inner fusion the computational, physical, biological, neuronal,
social, and economic. The six big branches in perfect periferic
colussion and confusion. Could a blockchain, along its full develpment
in time, represent a fundamental cartography of the originating fusion
nucleous? </p><p>About dataism enchantment, well, too many times
we have been said "look, finally this is the great, definitive
scientific approach"--behaviorism, artificial intelleigence,
artifficial catastrophe & complexity theory, and so on. Let us
wait and see. Welcome in the extent to which it really responds to
unanswered questions. And let us be aware of the technocratic lore it
seems to drag.</p><p>This was my second cent for the week.</p><p>
best--Pedro</p><p> </p><p>On Fri, 9 Mar 2018 10:30:01 +0100
"Dr.
Plamen L. Simeonov" wrote:</p><blockquote><p dir="ltr">These are wise
words, Pedro.</p><div>What I was meaning with my previous posting
on FIS was that there is a foundational emerging technology -
blockchain - that could give us, scientists organized in fora like
FIS, IB, IS4IS etc. to become a valuable currency of the future. I am
speaking not about finances or resources like petrol, gold, water,
etc. What we are doing all the time with the exchange of ideas online
are in fact transactions, often with huge potential. Why do not try to
elevate them to the level that they deserve? <p> </p><p
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<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div>I am
not sure if the FIS forum members can follow me. Can you?<p> </p>
<p> </p><p>All the best.</p><p> </p><p>Plamen</p><p> </p>
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class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Mar 8, 2018 at 6:15 PM, PEDRO CLEMENTE
MARIJUAN FERNANDEZ <span dir="ltr"><<a
href="https://mailto:pcmarijuan.iacs@aragon.es" target="_blank">
pcmarijuan.iacs@aragon.es</a>></span> wrote:</p><blockquote><u></u>
<p> </p>head><div><div dir="ltr"><p>Dear Alberto,</p><p>
</p><p>Many thanks for the kickoff text. I will try to produce
a
couple of direct comments.</p><p>You have reminded me of the
early
70's, when I first approached science. A few computers had made
their
entrance in the university halls. During those years, and for
some
decades to come, a new mantra was to be ensconced:
modeling,
simulations. Thanks to computers, we had a fascinating new
tool; a
mathematical machine that was opening a new window to the
world of
science, equivalent to the telescope or the microscope in
the
scientific revolution. Now, almost 50 years later, after
having
provoked their own "information revolution" it seems that
computers
are more than a new tool. Dataism coupled with
artificial
intelligence, deep learning and the other techniques, have
taken them
to the command post, so that they are becoming direct
"agents" of the
scientific progress. And this is strange. They have
already defeated
masters of chess, of go and of other contests... are
they going to
defeat scientists too? Are they the "necessary" new
lords of all
quarters of techno-social complexity?</p><p>You have
depicted very
cogently the new panorama of biomedical research,
probably the
mainstream, and I wonder whether this is the most
interesting
direction of advancement. In some sense, yes (or no!), as
it is where
big biomed companies, technological firms, and
management
establishment are pointing at. It is easy to complain that
they are
leaving aside the integrative vision, the meaningful
synthesis that
facilitate our comprehension, the "soul" in the
machine... But we have
been complaining in this way at least during
the last two decades. So
I really do not know. Fashions in science
come and go: maybe all of
this is a temporary illusion. Or a taste of
the science of the future.</p><p>In any case, it was nice hearing from
a biomedical researcher in
the wet lab.</p><p>Best wishes--Pedro</p>
<p> </p><p>On Tue, 06
Mar 2018 21:23:01 +0100
"Alberto J.
Schuhmacher" wrote:</p>
blockquote><span class=""><p>Dear FIS
Colleagues,</p><p>I very much appreciate this
opportunity to discuss
with all of you.</p><p>My mentors and science
teachers taught me that
Science had a method, rules and procedures
that should be followed
and pursued rigorously and with perseverance.
The scientific research
needed to be preceded by one or several
hypotheses that should be
subjected to validation or refutation
through experiments designed
and carried out in a laboratory. The
Oxford Dictionaries Online
defines the scientific method as "a method
or procedure that has
characterized natural science since the 17th
century, consisting in
systematic observation, measurement, and
experiment, and the
formulation, testing, and modification of
hypotheses". Experiments
are a procedure designed to test hypotheses.
Experiments are an
important tool of the scientific method.</p><p>In
our case,
molecular, personalized and precision medicine aims to
anticipate the
future development of diseases in a specific individual
through
molecular markers registered in the genome, variome,
metagenome,
metabolome or in any of the multiple "omes" that make up
the present
"omics" language of current Biology.</p><p>The
possibilities of
applying these methodologies to the prevention and
treatment of
diseases have increased exponentially with the rise of a
new
religion, <em>Dataism</em>, whose foundations are inspired
by
scientific agnosticism, a way of thinking that seems classical
but
applied to research, it hides a profound revolution.</p><p>
Dataism
arises from the recent human desire to collect and analyze
data, data
and more data, data of everything and data for
everything-from the
most banal social issues to those that decide the
rhythms of life and
death. “Information flow” is one the “supreme
values” of this
religion. The next floods will be of data as we can
see just looking
at any electronic window.</p><p>The recent
development of gigantic
clinical and biological databases, and the
concomitant progress of the
computational capacity to handle and
analyze these growing tides of
information represent the best
substrate for the progress of Dataism,
which in turn has managed to
provide a solid content material to an
always-evanescent scientific
agnosticism.</p><p>On many occasions the
establishment of correlative
observations seems to be sufficient to
infer about the relevance of a
certain factor in the development of
some human pathologies. It seems
that we are heading towards a path in
which research, instead of
being driven by hypotheses confirmed
experimentally, in the near
future experimental hypotheses themselves
will arise from the
observation of data of previously performed
experiments. Are we
facing the end of the wet lab? Is Dataism the end
of classical
hypothesis-driven research (and the beginning
of
data-correlation-driven research)?</p><p>Deep learning is based
on
learning data representations, as opposed to task-specific
algorithms.
Learning can be supervised, semi-supervised or
unsupervised. Deep
learning models are loosely related to information
processing and
communication patterns in a biological nervous system,
such as neural
coding that attempts to define a relationship between
various stimuli
and associated neuronal responses in the brain. Deep
learning
architectures such as deep neural networks, deep belief
networks and
recurrent neural networks have been applied to fields
including
computer vision, audio recognition, speech recognition,
machine
translation, natural language processing, social network
filtering,
bioinformatics and drug design, where they have produced
results
comparable to and in some cases superior to human experts.
Will be
data-correlation-driven research the new scientific method
for
unsupervised deep learning machines<em>? </em>Will computers
became
fundamentalists of <em>Dataism</em>?</p><p>Best regards,</p><p>
AJ</p></span>
p> <p>---</p><div
class="m_-643630356559670077pre"
style="margin:0;padding:0;font-family:monospace"><span class=""><span
style="color:#000000;font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10pt">
Alberto J. Schuhmacher,
PhD.</span><br><span
style="color:#000000;font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10pt">
Head, Molecular
Oncology Group</span><br> <br><span
style="color:#000000;font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10pt">
Aragon
Health Research Institute (IIS Aragón)</span><br><span
style="color:#000000;font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10pt">
Biomedical Research Center of Aragon (CIBA)</span><br></span><span
style="color:#000000;font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10pt">
Avda. Juan Bosco 13, 50009 Zaragoza (Spain)</span>
br><span
style="color:#000000;font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10pt">
email: <a style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"
href="https://mailto:ajimenez@iisaragon.es" target="_blank">
ajimenez@iisaragon.es</a></span><br><span
style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10pt"> Phone:
<a href="unknown://tel:+34%20637%2093%2099%2001" value="+34637939901"
target="_blank">(+34) 637939901</a></span><p> </p><p> </p><p>
</p></div></div><p><br>
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