A picture is worth 1000 words, but how many emotions?

 

Log on to Twitter or other social media and you will find that much of the content shared with you comes in the form of images, not just words. Those images can convey a lot more than a sentence might, and will often provoke emotions in the viewer. Jiebo Luo, professor of computer science at the University of Rochester, in collaboration with researchers at Adobe Research has come up with a more accurate way than currently possible to train computers to be able to digest data that comes in the form of images. In a paper presented last week at the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) conference in Austin, Texas, they describe what they refer to as a progressive training deep convolutional neural network (CNN). The trained computer can then be used to determine what sentiments these images are likely to elicit. Luo says that this information could be useful for things as diverse as measuring economic indicators or predicting elections. Sentiment analysis of text by computers is itself a challenging task. And in social media, sentiment analysis is more complicated because many people express themselves using images and videos, which are more difficult for a computer to understand. For example, during a political campaign voters will often share their views through pictures. Two different pictures might show the same candidate, but they might be making very different political statements. A human could recognize one as being a positive portrait of the candidate (e.g. the candidate smiling and raising his arms) and the other one being negative (e.g. a picture of the candidate looking defeated). But no human could look at every picture shared on social media -- it is truly "big data." To be able to make informed guesses about a candidate's popularity, computers need to be trained to digest this data, which is what Luo and his collaborators' approach can do more accurately than was possible until now. The researchers treat the task of extracting sentiments from images as an image classification problem. This means that somehow each picture needs to be analyzed and labels applied to it. To begin the training process, Luo and his collaborators used a huge number of Flickr images that have been loosely labeled by a machine algorithm with specific sentiments, in an existing database known as SentiBank (developed by Professor Shih-Fu Chang's group at Columbia University). This gives the computer a starting point to begin understanding what some images can convey. But the machine-generated labels also include a likelihood of that label being true, that is, how sure is the computer that the label is correct? The key step of the training process comes next, when they discard any images for which the sentiment or sentiments with which they have been labeled might not be true. So they use only the "better" labeled images for further training in a progressively improving manner within the framework of the powerful convolutional neural network. They found that this extra step significantly improved the accuracy of the sentiments with which each picture is labeled. They also adapted this sentiment analysis engine with some images extracted from Twitter. In this case they employed "crowd intelligence," with multiple people helping to categorize the images via the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform. They used only a small number of images for fine-tuning the computer and yet, by applying this domain-adaptation process, they showed they could improve on current state of the art methods for sentiment analysis of Twitter images. One surprising finding is that the accuracy of image sentiment classification has exceeded that of the text sentiment classification on the same Twitter messages. Story Source: The above story is based on materials provided by University of Rochester. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Dez coisas que o seu smartphone pode fazer e você não sabia

 

A cada novidade que surge no ramo dos smartphones, só é confirmada a capacidade desses computadores de mão de efetuarem diversas funções irrestritas ao ato de ligar. Será que você conhece todas elas? Para dar uma força e ajudá-lo a aproveitar ao máximo o potencial do seu celular, o TechTudo destacou algumas delas, acompanhe. - Webcam Muitos smartphones, atualmente, oferecem duas câmeras, o que possibilita que uma delas possa funcionar com webcam, que pode ser conectada a seu desktop. Para isso, basta instalar uma versão do aplicativo Mobiola no seu PC e uma versão mobile no iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile Pocket PC, Windows Mobile Smartphones ou Symbian S6. O programa, infelizmente não tem uma versão para o Android, mas não faltam opções na loja Google Play. É possível levar a funcionalidade de webcam wireless para esse sistema operacional usando aplicativos como o DroidCam. Seu celular caiu na água? Veja como resgatá-lo no Fórum do TechTudo. - Scanner Há muito tempo escanear documentos deixou de ser uma funcionalidade exclusiva dos aparelhos de scanners, pois, atualmente, até as impressoras já trazem esse recurso. Para deixar o serviço mais completo e portátil, que tal usar o smartphone para essa função? O procedimento é simples: basta instalar alguns apps apropriados. Muitos deles, inclusive, permitem o reconhecimento de caracteres, copiar e colar textos para outros programas e ainda armazenar e organizar os documentos, além de fazer algum tipo de edição. Entre as opções disponíveis para essa funcionalidade destacam-se o TurboScan (iOS), Droid Scan Lite (Android), CamScanner (iOS, Android e Windows Phone), Handyscan (Windows Phone) e muitos outros. CamScanner é um dos apps que pode transformar seu smartphone em um scanner (Foto: Divulgação/CamScanner) - Ajudar a localizar seu carro (ou outro objeto) Em locais onde uma grande quantidade de carros são estacionados, encontrar o seu pode ser uma tarefa difícil. Com ajuda de um aplicativo como o Park Me Right (Android) e o Find My Car (iOS), entretanto, você receberá uma ajuda a mais. Ao usar o programa para marcar onde o deixou, ele te dará as coordenadas exatas na hora do retorno. Essa funcionalidade pode ser usada também para achar uma série de outros objetos fixos. Park Me Right mostra onde está seu carro (Foto: Divulgação/Park Me Right) - Hotspot Wi-Fi O Hotspot Wi-Fi é um dos recursos mais usados em smartphones. Com um app específico, ou até mesmo a própria funcionalidade nativa do sistema operacional (que é o caso dos principais sistemas atuais), você consegue compartilhar a conexão 3G de seu celular com outros dispositivos e outras pessoas poderão ter acesso à Internet. O recurso transforma o seu smartphone em um ponto de acesso Wi-Fi com opções de segurança para o acesso. Opções como o "Acesso Pessoal" do iOS faz do smartphone um hotspot Wi-Fi (Foto: Divulgação) - Identificar objetos e até obras de arte Fazer uma pesquisa sobre determinado assunto está cada vez mais à mão dos interessados em obter conhecimento. Com a função Google Goggles, é possível fazer uma busca apenas apontando a câmera para o objeto e capturando a sua imagem. A funcionalidade está embutida no app Google Search (iOS, Android e Windows Phone). Ela procura identificar o item apontado e, em seguida, exibe as informações encontradas na web. O recurso é muito útil e permite identificar desde objetos simples a obras de arte, o que amplia as diversas possibilidades de seu uso. Google Goggles identifica objetos apenas capturando uma foto (Foto: Divulgação/Google) - Traduzir conversas em tempo real A barreira das línguas também pode ser reduzida com o uso de um smartphone. Usando apps como o Google Translate (iOS e Android), basta ter uma conexão de de dados, falar e receber a tradução. Para completar, o aplicativo ainda oferece a pronúncia da tradução. Há outros apps com funcionalidades parecidas, mas boa parte deles utilizam internamente o serviço do Google e não são tão completos quanto o tradutor do Google. Google Translate permite fazer tradução em tempo real (Foto: Reprodução/The Next Web) - Ouvir rádios personalizadas e online Ao contrário do que alguns imaginavam que aconteceria, a Internet não acabou com as rádios. Contradizendo as previsões, agora, é possível ouvir rádios de qualquer lugar do mundo, e com apps como Rdio e TuneIn, você terá suas canções favoritas na palma da mão, por meio da conexão de dados do smartphone. Há diversas ofertas de apps que permitem a escolha do gênero musical, combinar estilos e até mesmo montar uma rádio com a programação que você quer. O TuneIn é um dos apps que leva várias rádios para o seu smartphone (Foto: Divulgação/Tuneln) - Conversar com pessoas que assistem ao mesmo programa de TV ao vivo Diante de um contexto de intenso compartilhamento de informações, uma conversa trivial sobre programas de TV tem se tornado um processo cada vez mais global. Apps como Sappos e Twitter colocam nas mãos dos usuários os recursos que eles precisam para acompanhar a programação de canais abertos e pagos, comunicarem-se e trocarem ideias ao vivo sobre a programação da telinha. Essa combinação de interação social com mobilidade garante que muitas pessoas possam participar do debate, independente de onde estejam. Sappos permite "discutir" sobre o que está passando na TV (Foto: Divulgação/Sappos) - Controlar vídeos do YouTube pela TV Apesar de o YouTube já estar presente na maioria das SmartTVs, agora, apps como Twonky Beam (iOS, Android) permitem interagir com a interface da rede social de vídeos por meio da tecnologia DLNA, tornando bem mais completo o uso dela na TV. O aplicativo vai além da simples interação com o YouTube e pode ser muito útil para quem deseja usá-lo como “controle remoto”. Twonky Beam é o controle remoto do YouTube para a SmarTV (Foto: Divulgação/Twonky Bea) - Monitorar frequência cardíaca O smartphone tem sido usado para acompanhar atividades físicas e agora serve até para monitorar a frequência cardíaca de uma pessoa. Isso é possível graças ao uso de apps como o Instant Heart Rate, que identifica seu ritmo cardíaco sem a necessidade de qualquer outro equipamento, apenas colocando o dedo na frente lente da câmera. Com isso, o programa detecta suaves mudanças na coloração da pele pelo fluxo de sangue entre cada batida do coração e, assim, consegue medir seus batimentos cardíacos. - Ensinar uma outra língua Com a aproximação de distâncias gerada pela Internet, para aprender outra língua não é mais preciso estar em uma sala de aula. Com os smartphones, isso ficou ainda mais fácil. Basta instalar um aplicativo, praticar todos os dias e evoluir aos poucos, em qualquer lugar que você esteja. O maior expoente dessa modalidade é o Duolingo, considerado o aplicativo do ano pela Apple. O uso de smartphones com apps específicos abre espaço para uma série de possibilidades que podem facilitar ainda mais a vida dos usuários. Tudo depende da sua necessidade, do hardware e da disponibilidade de aplicativos para a plataforma de seu smartphone.

Brain cells' role in navigating environment

 

A new Dartmouth College study sheds light on the brain cells that function in establishing one's location and direction. The findings contribute to our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying our abilities to successfully navigate our environment, which may be crucial to dealing with brain damage due to trauma or a stroke and the onset of diseases such as Alzheimer's. "Knowing what direction you are facing, where you are, how to navigate and your spatial orientation at a given moment are really fundamental to survival," says Professor Jeffrey Taube, the study's senior author. The study appears in the journal Science Express. The study's co-lead authors are Shawn Winter, a Dartmouth postdoctoral fellow in Psychological and Brain Sciences, and Benjamin Clark, an assistant professor at the University of New Mexico who received his PhD in Psychological and Brain Sciences from Dartmouth. The Dartmouth researchers study the neural mechanisms underlying our sense of location and directional heading, which forms the basis of our perceived spatial orientation in the environment. Knowing your spatial orientation is essential for being able to navigate to a goal. In the past few decades, researchers have discovered a number of cell types in the brain that respond in relation to where you are (so-called place cells) and your perceived directional heading (so-called head direction cells). More recently, a third cell type was discovered that is activated at multiple places in the environment: If you monitored the location of all these active places, you would find that they formed a repeating, grid-like pattern in a hexagonal array. These "grid cells" were identified in a different brain area, the entorhinal cortex. Researchers were excited about this discovery because theoretically these grid cells could account for how we can keep track of where we are at any given moment and how we update this perception as we move through our environment. Based on how these cells fire, they could also inform us of how far we have traveled and our precise path. The 2014 Nobel Prize in physiology/medicine was awarded to the two laboratories that discovered place cells and grid cells. Scientists have been investigating how the grid cell signal is generated. The Dartmouth experiments addressed what types of information go into forming this signal. They use microelectrodes to record the activity of cells in a rat's brain that make possible spatial navigation. They found that if they inactivate or turn off a key brain area that contains head direction cells, then the grid cell signal in the entorhinal cortex is disrupted, without affecting the place cell signal in the hippocampus. "These results indicate for the first time that although the grid cell signal is about places, the head direction cell information is critical for generating the grid signal," Taube says. "These findings contribute to our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying our abilities to successfully navigate our environment." Story Source: The above story is based on materials provided by Dartmouth College. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. Journal Reference: Shawn S. Winter, Benjamin J. Clark, and Jeffrey S. Taube. Disruption of the head direction cell network impairs the parahippocampal grid cell signal. Science, 5 February 2015 DOI: 10.1126/science.1259591

Novel method projects growth potential of new firms: Which tech businesses will thrive?

 

Mapping the entrepreneurial quality in the MIT ecosystem by addresses for ZIP codes 02139, 20141, and 02142. Each address with at least one startup is represented by a circle whose radius is proportional to the number of business registrants; the color is determined by the average level of entrepreneurial quality in that address. New businesses spring up all the time.  But which ones have the greatest ability to become big? A method developed by MIT researchers, based on an empirical study, projects the growth potential of high-tech firms with new precision -- and could help local or regional policymakers assess their growth prospects. "A central question in evaluating the impact of policies toward business creation, startups, and innovation, is simply how to measure the kinds of entrepreneurs who are likely to build growth businesses," says Scott Stern, the David Sarnoff Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, who led the study. For all the theorizing about the subject, he adds, "There has historically been a big gap, in terms of how to measure and do analytics in a systematic way." But now, based on a uniquely comprehensive analysis of businesses in California, Stern and his colleague Jorge Guzman, a doctoral candidate at MIT Sloan, have created a richly detailed picture of what characteristics high-growth tech firms have, and where they exist. The study is summarized in a new paper -- titled "Where is Silicon Valley?" -- being published today in Science. Among other factors, firms that formally register, seek capital investment, and make news early in their lives have higher growth potential. That much might seem intuitive -- but even a firm's name, Stern and Guzman found, offers a solid hint of its growth potential. For instance, a business whose name includes the name of a founder does not generally expand as much as other types of firms. "That combination [of factors] turns out to be a very useful diagnostic for separating out the types of businesses that have a reasonable chance of growing, versus those that are much less likely to grow," Stern says. By assessing what it calls the "quality" of startups, and not just their quantity, the study also highlights which towns are home to startups with higher growth potential. In California, the municipalities of Menlo Park, Mountain View, Palo Alto, and Sunnyvale top this list, in that order, with startups having characteristics that are associated with offering an IPO or being subject of a large acquisition, at about 10 times the state average. From Silicon Valley to Massachusetts Stern and Guzman are in the process of studying Massachusetts in similarly granular fashion; they are releasing a working paper, as well as initial data visualizations of Massachusetts, to complement the work on California. To conduct the study, Stern and Guzman used a comprehensive list of new firms from California's official business registry over the years 2001 to 2011. For 70 percent of the firms, they were able to correlate a series of features that characterized high-growth firms over the period from 2001 to 2006; they then used those findings to test their results against the outcomes of the other 30 percent of new firms in the same period. They also tested their model against new firms registered in the years 2007 to 2011. One thing Stern and Guzman observed is that even in tech epicenters, the majority of newly-registered businesses do not revolve around technology. "Even in a place like Palo Alto, or Cambridge, Massachusetts, most of the new businesses are retail-oriented small businesses that are not very likely to grow," Stern says. Stern emphasizes that the study is not meant to minimize the value of these smaller businesses, which are integral pieces of local economies -- pizzerias, dry cleaners, and many other types of firms. But in filling local niches, such businesses have an inherent ceiling on their growth. "All of those are very legitimate businesses and important for the local economy," Stern says. However, he adds, "The intention and potential of those businesses is different, and we can use analytics to evaluate that in roughly real time." Those local businesses, incidentally, are the ones most likely to bear the name of a founder, especially in areas like food and various services industries; the name implies a personal touch for regular customers. "That's almost declaring the intention of the founder," Stern says. By contrast, the study includes a list of hundreds of words commonly found in the names of high-growth, high-tech firms. Shaping policy While it might seem clear that a pizzeria will rarely grow the way an ambitious tech firm might, it is much harder to make aggregate assessments of the growth potential of a whole set of firms in a given place. But by using the methods Stern and Guzman have developed, local, state, and regional planners can make progress on that front, and evaluate whether they have a mix of business activity that offers tech-based growth potential. As such, other scholars say, the study can help inform economic policy design. Aaron Chatterji, a professor at Duke University who was not involved in the research, notes, "A lot of times in policymaking, we know how to count things. … It's much, much harder to delineate [in terms of] quality." Stern and Guzman, he adds, have "really tackled a question people care about. … I think it's going to go over well with the policy community." To be sure, many industries, not just technology firms, have growth potential. In another research paper Stern co-authored that was just published, he lays out findings that many cities and regions can achieve growth by establishing clusters of firms in a variety of industries. In both papers, Stern says, an important motivation is to provide policymakers with data tools to better craft new measures. "It is very difficult to manage the entrepreneurial ecosystem if we cannot measure the entrepreneurial ecosystem," Stern says. "While our work is a first step, we believe that policymakers and practitioners and researchers would benefit from being able to assess … the combined entrepreneurial quantity and quality in a given region. What we want is to really create new real-time economic statistics."

Forever young: Meditation might slow the age-related loss of gray matter in the brain

 

Areas of the brain affected by aging (in red) are fewer and less widespread in people who meditate, bottom row, than in people who don't meditate. Since 1970, life expectancy around the world has risen dramatically, with people living more than 10 years longer. That's the good news. The bad news is that starting when people are in their mid-to-late-20s, the brain begins to wither -- its volume and weight begin to decrease. As this occurs, the brain can begin to lose some of its functional abilities. So although people might be living longer, the years they gain often come with increased risks for mental illness and neurodegenerative disease. Fortunately, a new study shows meditation could be one way to minimize those risks. Building on their earlier work that suggested people who meditate have less age-related atrophy in the brain's white matter, a new study by UCLA researchers found that meditation appeared to help preserve the brain's gray matter, the tissue that contains neurons. The scientists looked specifically at the association between age and gray matter. They compared 50 people who had mediated for years and 50 who didn't. People in both groups showed a loss of gray matter as they aged. But the researchers found among those who meditated, the volume of gray matter did not decline as much as it did among those who didn't. The article appears in the current online edition of the journal Frontiers in Psychology. Dr. Florian Kurth, a co-author of the study and postdoctoral fellow at the UCLA Brain Mapping Center, said the researchers were surprised by the magnitude of the difference. "We expected rather small and distinct effects located in some of the regions that had previously been associated with meditating," he said. "Instead, what we actually observed was a widespread effect of meditation that encompassed regions throughout the entire brain." As baby boomers have aged and the elderly population has grown, the incidence of cognitive decline and dementia has increased substantially as the brain ages. "In that light, it seems essential that longer life expectancies do not come at the cost of a reduced quality of life," said Dr. Eileen Luders, first author and assistant professor of neurology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. "While much research has focused on identifying factors that increase the risk of mental illness and neurodegenerative decline, relatively less attention has been turned to approaches aimed at enhancing cerebral health." Each group in the study was made up of 28 men and 22 women ranging in age from 24 to 77. Those who meditated had been doing so for four to 46 years, with an average of 20 years. The participants' brains were scanned using high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging. Although the researchers found a negative correlation between gray matter and age in both groups of people -- suggesting a loss of brain tissue with increasing age -- they also found that large parts of the gray matter in the brains of those who meditated seemed to be better preserved, Kurth said. The researchers cautioned that they cannot draw a direct, causal connection between meditation and preserving gray matter in the brain. Too many other factors may come into play, including lifestyle choices, personality traits, and genetic brain differences. "Still, our results are promising," Luders said. "Hopefully they will stimulate other studies exploring the potential of meditation to better preserve our aging brains and minds. Accumulating scientific evidence that meditation has brain-altering capabilities might ultimately allow for an effective translation from research to practice, not only in the framework of healthy aging but also pathological aging."

Satellite science improves storm surge forecasting around the world

 

The freely-accessible database of storm surge data has been compiled through the multi-partner, international eSurge project, which was launched in 2011 with the aim of making available observational data to improve the modelling and forecasting of storm surges around the world using advanced techniques and instruments. Coastal altimetry, which provides detailed wave and sea level data in the coastal zone captured by specialist instruments called radar altimeters on board satellites, is at the heart of the project and scientists from NOC have been at the cutting-edge of this technique. Raw data collected from altimeters have been re-processed and collated with wind speed data from scatterometers and sea level measurements from tide gauges, to show the spatial structure of each storm. With eSurge, forecasters and scientists can now download these enhanced data and use them for validating their storm surge models and for mapping future storms more accurately. Dr Paolo Cipollini from NOC explained: "When a satellite altimeter overpasses the area affected by a surge, it gives us a unique profile of the water surface level from offshore to the coast, as well as concurrent measurements of wave height. This information is extremely useful to validate the surge models used for forecasts. Even when there doesn't happen to be an overpass at surge time, the statistics of sea level that we got from more than 20 years of repeated altimetric observations in the area can still be combined with data from nearby tide gauges to improve the forecasts of the expected surge." This is the first time that such a detailed level of storm information has been collated and demonstrated as one comprehensive online resource. Data from around 200 storms spanning more than 10 years is now accessible, including major events such as Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in the USA in 2005, Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines -- one of the strongest tropical cyclones ever recorded -- and the major winter storm that caused widespread flooding in the UK in December 2013. The eSurge project, which is funded by the European Space Agency, has also demonstrated the feasibility of offering near-real time data about recent and predicted storms, which can be viewed on the new eSurgeLive web page. Findings of the three year project were presented at a symposium hosted in the Netherlands in January 2015. The partners are now looking at the possibility of extending the project and further developing the eSurge resource into a fully-operational, permanent service in the future. As well as providing and analysing data for the eSurge project, NOC has also played a key role in opening up the findings to a wider global audience. In addition to providing data, scientists at NOC have also helped to build an online storm surge community, which enables scientists, storm modellers and users around the world to be better connected. Head of Marine Physics and Ocean Climate (MPOC) at NOC, Professor Kevin Horsburgh, added: "Storm surges are a global hazard that pose a threat to thousands of lives, and coastal flood forecasting systems can save lives and protect property. Satellite altimetry methods developed at NOC play a crucial role in helping improve storm surge models and map out regional changes in mean sea level." NOC is one of five international organisations involved in the eSurge project, which also includes CGI (UK), the Danish Meteorological Institute (DK), the Coastal and Marine Research Centre (IRL) and the Royal Dutch Meteorological Institute (NL).

Microbiome linked to type 1 diabetes: Shift in microbiome species diversity prior to disease onset

 

The human microbiome, which consists of the trillions of microorganisms (bacteria, viruses, and other assorted "bugs") that reside in our bodies, has become an area of growing interest to the medical community as researchers have begun to probe the role it plays in human health and disease. While most bugs in our microbiome are harmless, and even beneficial, changes in the microbiome (and in the interactions microbial species share with their human hosts) have been linked to various disease states, including diabetes and Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). To explore the possible connection between changes in the microbiome and type 1 diabetes, a team led by Ramnik Xavier, an Institute Member of the Broad and Chief of Gastroenterology at MGH, followed 33 infants (out of a much larger cohort of Finnish and Estonian children) who were genetically predisposed to T1D. From birth to age 3, the team regularly analyzed the subjects' stool samples, collecting data on the composition of their gut microbiome. In the handful that developed T1D during this period, the team observed a 25% drop in community diversity (in other words, in the number of distinct species present in the microbiome) one year prior to the onset of the disease. They also noted that this population shift included a decrease in bacteria known to help regulate health in the gut, along with an increase in potentially harmful bacteria that are known to promote inflammation. The findings are further evidence of a previously identified link between inflammation of the gut and type 1 diabetes. "We know from previous human studies that changes in gut bacterial composition correlate with the early development of type 1 diabetes, and that the interactions between bacterial networks may be a contributing factor in why some people at risk for the disease develop type 1 diabetes and others don't," said Jessica Dunne, Director of Discovery Research at JDRF, which funded the study. "This is the first study to show how specific changes in the microbiome are affecting the progression to symptomatic T1D." Previous studies have shown that transferring microbiota from mice that were predisposed to autoimmune diabetes (the mouse equivalent of T1D) to mice that were not predisposed increased the prevalence of autoimmune diabetes in mice that were otherwise unlikely to develop the disease. Studies in humans have also shown an association between T1D and the bacterial composition of the gut. However, those studies were retrospective, meaning they were conducted after the patients developed the disease, making causality difficult to prove. "This study is unique because we have taken a cohort of children at high risk of developing type 1 diabetes and then followed what changes in the microbiome tip the balance toward progression to the disease," Xavier said. Aleksandar Kostic, a postdoctoral fellow in Xavier's lab and first author of the study, agreed, calling the study "a compelling piece of evidence pointing toward a direct role of the microbiome in type 1 diabetes." Since the study also followed infants who did not ultimately develop type 1 diabetes, the researchers were also able to gain insights into the normal development of the microbiome during infancy. They found that, while the species of bacteria present in the gut microbiome vary greatly between individuals, the composition of the microbiome is generally stable within the individual over time. Moreover, using metabolomic analysis (looking at the metabolites -- the tiny molecules produced during metabolism -- in subject stool samples), the researchers were also able to see that, while bacterial species varied between individuals, the biological functions served by the various species in the microbiome remained consistent over time, and from person to person. "Whether the bacterial community is very small, as it is in early infancy, or if it's larger as it is later in life, the community is always serving the same major functions regardless of its composition. No matter which species are present, they encode the same major metabolic pathways, indicating that they're doing the same jobs," Kostic said. By revealing patterns in the development of the microbiome in healthy individuals, and in those progressing toward T1D onset, the findings may ultimately have diagnostic or therapeutic implications. In terms of diagnostics, understanding how the microbiome shifts prior to the onset of disease could ultimately help clinicians spot early microbial features of T1D. As for therapeutics, Xavier, who is also the Kurt Isselbacher Chair in Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Co-Director of the Center for Microbiome Informatics and Therapeutics at MIT, says that knowing which species are absent and which are flourishing in the gastrointestinal tract of children with T1D may help make it possible to slow progression of the disease after onset by revealing ways to manipulate the microbiome and, in turn, microbiome-induced immunoregulation. The next step, he says, is to broaden the sample pool to determine what factors in the environment and in the microbiome might be making Finns -- who are at exceptionally high risk of T1D -- more predisposed to the disease than other populations. That includes revisiting the hygiene hypothesis, which holds that a lack of childhood exposure to microbiota and other potentially infectious agents may hinder the development of the immune system and increase susceptibility to immunological disorders. The researchers are also examining the metagenomic data gathered in the study to determine what biological pathways the microbiota are acting upon -- or what metabolites they may be producing -- that could be contributing to disease. The study was funded by JDRF and supported by the European Union Seventh Framework Programme and The Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in Molecular Systems Immunology and Physiology Research. Other researchers who worked on the study include: Dirk Gevers, Heli Siljander, Tommi Vatanen, Tuulia Hyötyläinen, Anu-Maaria Hämäläinen, Aleksandr Peet, Vallo Tillmann, Päivi Pöhö, Ismo Mattila, Harri Lähdesmäki, Eric A. Franzosa, Outi Vaarala, Marcus de Goffau, Hermie Harmsen, Jorma Ilonen, Suvi M. Virtanen, Clary Clish, Matej Orešič, Curtis Huttenhower, and the DIABIMMUNE Study Group under the leadership of Mikael Knip.