Phillips Fox

Data science has made great strides in harnessing the power of big data to improve human life across a broad spectrum of disciplines. Unfortunately this informational richesse is not equitably spread across human populations. Vulnerable populations remain both under-studied and under-consulted on the use of data derived from their communities. This lack of inclusion of vulnerable populations as data collectors, data analyzers and data beneficiaries significantly restrains the utility of big data applications that contribute to human well-ness. Here we present three case studies: (1) Describing a novel genomic dataset being developed with clinical and ethnographic insights in African Americans, (2) Demonstrating how a tutorial that enables data scientists from vulnerable populations to better understand criminal justice bias using the COMPAS dataset, and (3) investigating how Indigenous genomic diversity contributes to future biomedical interventions. These cases represent some of the outstanding challenges that big data science presents when addressing vulnerable populations as well as the innovative solutions that expanding science participation brings.

The first International AI Safety Report comprehensively synthesizes the current evidence on the capabilities, risks, and safety of advanced AI systems. The report was mandated by the nations attending the AI Safety Summit in Bletchley, UK. Thirty nations, the UN, the OECD, and the EU each nominated a representative to the report's Expert Advisory Panel. A total of 100 AI experts contributed, representing diverse perspectives and disciplines. Led by the report's Chair, these independent experts collectively had full discretion over the report's content.

1 Abstract Variation at the ABO locus was one of the earliest sources of data in the study of human population identity and history, and to this day remains widely genotyped due to its importance in blood and tissue transfusions. Here, we look at ABO blood type variants in our archaic relatives: Neanderthals and Denisovans. Our goal is to understand the genetic landscape of the ABO gene in archaic humans, and how it relates to modern human ABO variation. We found two derived Neanderthal variants of the O allele in the Siberian Neanderthals (O1 and O2), one of these variants is shared with an European Neanderthal, who is a heterozygote for this O1 variant and a rare cis-AB variant. The Denisovan individual is heterozygous for two ancestral variant of the O1 allele, similar to variants found widely in modern humans. Perhaps more surprisingly, the O2 allele variant found in Siberian Neanderthals can be found at low frequencies in modern Europeans and Southeast Asians, and the O1 allele variant found in Siberian and European Neanderthal is also found at very low frequency in modern East Asians. Our genetic distance analyses suggest both alleles survive in modern humans due to inbreeding with Neanderthals. We find that the sequence backgrounds of the surviving Neanderthal-like O alleles in modern humans retain a higher sequence divergence than other surviving Neanderthal genome fragments, supporting a view of balancing selection operating in the Neanderthal ABO alleles by retaining highly diverse haplotypes compared to portions of the genome evolving neutrally.