A Taiwanese research team won a global science competition seeking to improve prognosis prediction of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) in Tainan said.
This is the first time a team from Taiwan has won one of the challenges created by the Dialogue on Reverse Engineering Assessment and Methods (DREAM) to develop new methods of using data to improve biological sciences and human health, the university said.
Two members of the team — post-doctoral researcher Fang Wen-chieh (方文杰) and graduate student Chang Huan-jui (張桓瑞) — were presented with the prize by the organizers of DREAM Challenges in the US city of Philadelphia on Tuesday for their model, which was built on patient data to predict the progression of ALS.
Photo: Ho Tsung-han, Taipei Times
Other members of the team are NCKU professors Yang Hsih-te (楊士德) and Chiang Jung-hsien (蔣榮先), and graduate student Yang Chen (楊震).
The team was announced on Nov. 3 as the winner of one of the four sub-challenges in the DREAM Challenge, which was held from June through last month, focusing on predicting the progression and survival of ALS patients.
The winning teams shared a US$28,000 cash prize and presented their models at a DREAM conference.
DREAM was established in 2006 by IBM Research scientist Gustavo Stolovitzky and Columbia University’s Andrea Califano and holds three to five challenges each year.
In other news, a student from Taichung’s Mingdao Junior High School won a gold medal at the British Invention Show and Awards for his invention of an LED system for pedestrian intersection crossings that could enhance safety.
The signaling and illumination system was devised by second-year student Teng Li-wei (鄧立維), incorporating crosswalk safety lights with flashing LED crossing signs to achieve the highest levels of safety for pedestrians, particularly elderly or visually impaired people.
Teng has filed a patent application for the invention in the hope of seeing worldwide use of his invention.
Teng is also a contestant in a reality television show, Junior Edison, in China, a show similar to the US programs Everyday Edisons and American Inventor, but designed for school students.
He has reached the final round of a competition in the show to be held tomorrow.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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