French Acrobatics Convention: more to come in 2017

Last year has been very rich in acrobatic experiences: traveling to so many places in Europe and Middle East for workshops and conventions, learning from the best teachers and training with the most fun and dedicated people!

The brightest event for me personally, anyhow, was the one that we organized ourselves with two good friends: the French Acrobatics Convention 2016. The convention was initially created and run for several years by two german acrobats: Thorsten and Jasper. For personal reasons they decided to give it up at some point and the three of us (Alice, Jenny and myself) took over. Organization of an event for 160 people  acrobats, where one needs to think in advance of many facets of human existence from running water, amount of cheese to the number of bananas and chocolate bars per person was sometimes getting overwhelming. But at the end everyone, including the three of us, enjoyed the event and had time to practice.

No more words. Below is the video report from our official photographer and camera man Jared. See you same place same time in 2017! So much looking forward!!!

French Acrobatics Convention 2016 from Jared on Vimeo.

Tribute to Hack Zurich: do it because you can!

Couple of weeks ago Rasmus, the Director of HackZurich, suggested to join him at Zurich Girl Geek Dinner and share my experience at Hack Zurich 2015. Since Zurich Girl Geek is a gathering of women in technology, this was a perfect event to advertise the coming 2016 edition to potential female participants (in the past the percentage of ladies at Hack was at the level of ten per cent). 

There is a saying 'Sometimes you win, sometimes you learn'. At Hack you learn AND you win. Here is my personal story as an evidence. 

Do you remember the comic pictures from internet putting in a matrix 'how your mother sees you', 'how your friends see you', 'how your colleagues see you'? In my case all of those images were just the same - a girl in a lonely room scratching formulas on a sheet of paper and occasionally talking to the cosmic dust. 

Until last autumn I knew nothing about hackathons. In my perception, hackers were evil people in black who can guess any password, break into people's e-mails and start sending out cat pictures from earlier trustworthy addresses world-wide. But forty sleepless hours over a weekend in September 2015 altered these narrow ideas. Plus enriched my vocabulary with fancy tech-words and my laptop cover with bright stickers. 

There are several forms of participation in the hackthon: a). you come with a project and a team, b). you come with a project and you find a team, c). you come like me: without a project and without a team because you have no idea of what is it all about. In the last case you go to a workshop and get a challenge. I headed to the joint workshop of Ernst&Young and IBM. The task sounded hard but I dared to try. Plus I knew how to ask and how to Google. Later three brave musketeers (we never met before) expressed their intention to work on the same project and we joined forces. The journey started at 11pm Friday. 

At around 4am gender differences revealed themselves: I could barely keep my eyes open, while the three guys wanted to continue. Despite our strong teem spirit, I allowed myself a nap. Upon return it made me feel superior in terms of reality perception since all the three courageous young men looked somewhat dispersed and acted accordingly. 

At the end of the second night, around 5am, we agreed that our work was a failure and the three musketeers departed home. No one was waiting for my visit at 5am in Zurich. I stayed and mainly out of boredom submitted the project as raw as it was. After two presentations to juries, our team made it to the list of finalists. The three musketeers learnt about the success only on the next day after they woke up. 

Winning a game is always a positive experience. But Hack is not about winning. Even if you don't get far enough with your project, think about this: in which other setting would you feel comfortable working in slippers and pajama, grabbing a piece of free pizza, casually walking into a room where speakers from Google, Dropbox, Facebook are giving talks to one and a half listeners including yourself? 

For the finalists of Hack Zurich the event was followed by the WHU conference. Only on the train to Germany it hit me, that everyone there was bringing a startup with them. Since there was none in my pocket, I had to fake it to get maximum out of the trip: put a logo and a motto on a one-slide presentation, voilà! For the sake of experiment I went to a speed-dating event with investors and pitched the fake startup idea. This yielded a pile of collected visit cards with contacts of people who were ready to discuss further. 

By now the impressions of that colorful autumn have almost faded in my memory but Hack Zurich keeps opening doors such as the one of Zurich Girl Geek. 

A little food for thought: participation in any hackathon adds a catchy line to your resume and makes others curious. Doing a PhD, for instance, takes years, a lot of sweat and sometimes anti-depressants. Hack takes forty hours, brings new skills, connections, sometimes prizes. Both the academic degree and participation in a hackathon are just one-line records on a CV. Still, very few people I meet seem to be curious about my PhD topic, but nearly everyone asks what our Hack Zurich project was. 

Frankly speaking, as a girl I didn't feel as minority on the Hack: we were all just inspired passionate people. That is why, whatever gender you belong to, mark 16-18 September 2016 in your calendar and join Hack Zurich 2016. Do it because you can! 

P.S. Here is how I was presenting our project: wearing a pajama t-shirt saying "The sky is not the limit". Coincidentally?

'Dedication to The World Malaria Day 2016' or 'One-cell parasite outsmarts the humanity'.

 Malaria is a life-threatening but  preventable and curable disease. Despite the wide palette of global efforts, every minute a child dies from malaria. Mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa. Every fourteenth person on Earth carries the evidence of an evolutionary change due to malaria in their genes. Not only has the disease influenced our biology, but also the political map of the world: malaria was piling up colonialists and missioners when they were stepping on new lands without bringing along their immunity against malaria. An illustrative example of how the disease ruined the dreams of Scotts for becoming a strong independent country is given in the book of Sonia Shah "The Fever", which I highly recommend to curious minds.

Malaria is a parasitic vector-borne disease caused by the plasmodium parasite. It is transmitted to humans via the bites of infected female mosquitoes. One of the parasite’s human species, plasmodium falciparum, is listed among the most severe causes of morbidity and mortality in Africa.

At the beginning of the 20th century very few countries on the planet were malaria free. The burden of the disease has not been monotone through the last century world-wide, but particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa: after the Second World War it experienced a substantial decline, which continued for about four decades, until, in the late 1980s it returned to the pre-1940s level. Since 2000, due to multiple undertaken measures, malaria incidence shows declining trends in many areas again.

Anyhow, nowadays nearly half of the global population is at risk of malaria and the challenges are many. They include complexity of the parasite’s life cycle, its genetic diversity and acquisition of immunity, sensitivity of diagnostics methods, movements of the population including importation and displacement, leading, in some cases, to resurgence of the disease.

Here is a selection of facts that I recently learnt through books, courses and conversations, summarised in a naive but hopefully clear way.

1). Little but fierce: are we blaming the right killer?
According to the data of the Bill Gates Foundation, the deadiest animal in the World in terms of killing humans is not a scary crocodile or even a human himself. But a mosquito! Still, it is not the final truth. The truth is that mosquitos do not murder themselves, but only serve as transport to real killers - viruses and parasites such as malaria, yellow fever, dengue, zika, etc.

2). Up to a holiday romance with a parasite? It may last longer than you wish.
Dependence of the transmission on mosquitos makes malaria an environmental disease. Mosquitos like it in warm moist regions - precisely where people from the upper half of the northern hemisphere love going on vacation. Beware of the sneaky admirer - this one may take your sleep away for too long.

3). All cats are black at night: what may fever be a sign of?
Malaria becomes symptomatic with a delay: it takes from 10 to 15 days after a mosquito bite for the symptoms such as fever, headache, muscular aching, vomiting, cough and diarrhea, to appear. As an ensemble, they indicate a malaria case. But it is not rare, that an infected person only has fever and no other symptoms. High temperature may be caused by any other infection or inflammation. What a puzzle for a clinician!

4). Professional hide-and-seeker: losing the game may cost a life.
There are several malaria diagnostic tools available such as microscopy, rapid diagnostic test and PCR (polymerase chain reaction). These methods differ in sensitivity and cost and are also related to further obstacles for precise diagnosis. For instance,  the quality of microscopy highly depends on the experience of a person performing it. However, if the microscope is old and rusty, which is frequently the case in poor countries, no proficiency can compensate it. Another ill luck is that plasmodium is a professional hide-and-seeker: its concentration in human blood drastically varies over time having peaks around 15th, 25th, 50th days after infection and almost vanishes in-between. This means, that if a blood smear was taken in the low-concentration phase, results of the diagnostics may be false.

6). A one-cell parasite outsmarts the humanity: resistance detected.
There is a series of interventions that we invented to protect ourselves from the devastating disease. The strongest among them are ITNs (insecticide-treated mosquito nets), indoor residual spraying (IRS) with insecticide and antimalarial drugs. This natural-history-quest would be too easy if those measures solved the problem.

As a lyrical and personal remark I would like to say, that the more I learn about malaria, the more I think, that the mutual agreement on  what intelligence is, should be reconsidered. That is why: plasmodium is a single-celled eukaryotic parasite; it does not have limbs to move around by itself, but found a way to travel with mosquitos; it does not have a brain, but outsmarted the entire humanity and developed resistance against both insecticides and antimalarials.

7). Back to the future: genetically engineered mosquitos.
Modern history knows several success stories of defeating diseases by genetically modifying vectors. For dengue eradication, for instance, the genes of mosquitos were edited in such a way that the next generation would not have female progenies. Similarly, there has been created a mosquito that is incapable of transmitting malaria to humans with this trait being inherited by its offsprings. For the concept to work scientist also need to ensure, that wild female mosquitos will pick the genetically modified mates. Researchers from Perugia conjecture that the sound of the wings and the speed at which male mosquitos are moving defines female mosquitos' choices. This and other examples can be found in the book "The Deadly Air: Genetically modified mosquito" by Christian Jennings.

8). When networking becomes harmful: importation.
In the setting of low local transmission importation becomes the main threat.  Investigating local climatic conditions and focusing on vector control will not be fruitful. Instead, discovering social networks could be of great help. This can be done either through surveys or, as the world is becoming digitalized, through analysis of digital communication data.

There is much more to write and read and learn and question about malaria. But what is the conclusion so far? The war is far from over!

New global goals to achieve by 2030 have been recently determined and it is truly exciting to be working in a place with a lot of malaria research going on and espetially being part of it. On the 25th April, Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute, member of the Swiss Malaria Group, takes us on a short trip to Bern for the Malaria Day 2016. 

Traditionally I close the post with a TED-talk. Sonia Shah, mentioned above, names 3 reasons we still haven't got rid of malaria. How can this be changed within the coming 14 years?

Berlin: what the tea dragon said about the friendship-phobia

If you are one of those extroverts who never had issues with friends and friendships and never had a mythical creature as a buddy, there is not much more for you in this post than the pictures (all not matching styles). Otherwise, you may also want to meet the tea dragon.

You meet him through a cup of properly brewed Oolong. First comes the warmth, then the smell, then the taste. Before the tea is over, the steam takes the shape of a baby-dragon, then it grows fast to swallow the entire room. This is the time to unleash the heartware and talk. To the dragon, to your mates, to yourself.

"My home is where my heart is"

A photo posted by Elizaveta Semenova (@farbless) on Feb 16, 2016 at 2:53am PST

And so we did with my friends at their place in the German capital. We spoke with the tea dragon heart-to-heart. Coincidentally, that was St. Valentine's. There was so much love in the air, that even old political leaders were kissing (Captured on the picture below. Maybe they do so frequently, but I did not see them on any other day). Therefore, it was the perfect moment to theorize about friendships and other -ships.

#berlin #loveinberlin #valentinesday

A photo posted by Elizaveta Semenova (@farbless) on Feb 22, 2016 at 8:28am PST

The dragon said, it was natural for people in your life to come and go. He said, making friends sometimes required pushing oneself out of the comfort zone - stepping out of the corner, saying a 'hi' first and lifting the edges of your lips; keeping friends took effort - calls, messages, thoughts, any sort of connection; spending time with friends needed planning, negotiation and time itself. The dragon spelled out, that the reward was high because friends made your family of choice. If one didn't have capacity to support their -ships, this was a choice too.

I have a theory about friendship-phobia. Individuals with this condition
1. intentionally do not behave friendly,
2. avoid contacts with old friends,
3. do not respond messages for years even if they sometimes dream of how nice it could be to re-connect,
4. do not talk when they meet someone, only listen and walk by their side,
5. can only spend time together in a structured way when the roles are clear.

While making my experiences in Berlin outside of the house I couldn't stop contemplating -ships and -phobias. The peculiar slicing of places, atmospheres and folks within a very short time were bizarre but very comforting and representative of my social preferences.

Berlin for a minute #acrotravel #standingh2h

A photo posted by Elizaveta Semenova (@farbless) on Feb 16, 2016 at 2:43am PST

I touch a warm clay tea cup and hear the dragon (yes, they also know how to count):

1. make friends,
2. keep friends,
3. spend time together,

or chose not to.

Sincerely yours frienship-phob,
enjoy the pictures!

The leaking pipeline of the faultless gender

Once a year our university offers female PhD candidates and postdocs the opportunity to participate in a mentorship program called Antelope. It has two branches - Antelope at university and Antelope at Novartis, addressed to those willing to pursue academic and industrial paths respectively. The objective is to support young lady-scientists obtain a better picture of  their future career possibilities and help them shape a strategy towards the desired role through a series of workshops and mentor-mentee activities. Over-arched, this is the university's and corporation's infusion into the ongoing fight for gender equality.

The echo of this program reached me several times through female friends who took part in it in the past years. From their feedback I understood, that many of them could benefit from being mentored to different degrees while almost everyone was praising workshops where they met and mingled with other co-antelopes. Thinking of myself as someone with reduced social potential, never would I think of that second part as something attractive. My goal of joining the program was to use its means to learn more about the role of statistics and machine learning in the pharma industry, to ask to which extent they are able to use artificial intelligence and what is the prospective, how much impact can one have working in that field and whether some freedom is permitted or one becomes a prisoner of the golden cage... How big was the surprise, when after having applied and being accepted, I found myself on the first event engaged into the group work and attentively listening to other people's life stories!

After a formal introduction, we jumped directly into the career planning workshop. Since we had to present ourselves by outlining our backgrounds and previous paths, the conversation slipped into the personal plane pretty soon. The ambient created in the circle of humans with highly similar life situations was comforting: female, permeating scientific thinking, feeling being financially undervalued by society, experiencing obstacles in their programs - through mobbing, unsuccessful experiments, lack of materials or funding, difficult advisers, lack of future perspectives - all of that boiled up into the state where nearly everyone was upset about their projects for one or another reason and an overwhelming feeling of insecurity. Both in professional and personal lives. 

Still, at this point I kept questioning whether there was something special about the audience of the room compared to the rest of the PhD and postdoc population. The obvious answer was gender. But what does this unfold into?

For a long period in the past I stayed very skeptical towards all gender specific issues in the 'first world'. 'How are we going to achieve equality by keeping the frontier so sharp? How can we unite by underlying the separation?', - I was wondering. Somehow, over time this attitude ceased as I informed myself better about the so called 'leaking pipeline'.

'The leaking pipeline' is a phenomenon when high number of women leave academic careers after the PhD stage making the counts of male and female scientists on further levels uneven. The same applies to industrial leadership positions. At a first glance one may think that there are simply more women who prefer staying in the work force or being housewives compared to roles with power, social and business involvement. But we will never know the answer until the mentality of our society is such, that it allows us to run that experiment collectively. And count the numbers a posteriori. 

Now back to the workshop room where we, confused girls, are putting bits and pieces together to understand how a perfect career for each of us looks like. One of the exercises we have to do is to select the values, that we prioritize at the moment. We are given a list of pairs like 'Influence-Justice' and from each pair we have to select just one. These preferences build new pairs, and so on until only three values are left. We write them on colorful cards and put them on the floor to have an overlook. Most frequent outcomes are Meaning, Challenge, Independence, Fun - very representative for our social group. 'No trace of power, status or relative features, like it often occurs in male and/or industrial groups. No harmony and aesthetics, that so many females would seek.' - our coach notices. I couldn't fully relate to the last assertion since I sometimes physically suffer when colors in a space or on a person opposing me don't feel harmonious. But overall, this is a very precise portrait of the material that is about to 'leak', including myself at some point in the future. It doesn't really sound that we carve for high positions, power and respect. Who cares for the outlook when it is only the content that matters - what do you really know? what are you able to do? how do you leverage hard tasks? If you perform well at those, all rewards are yours - one may think naively. Anyhow, there is one hidden obstacle in this story. It is called resources. Any task is performed better, or has potential to be performed better, when better resources are available. And most of those resources are concentrated in the hands of men, who, not because they are bad, but because they are different, may be overlooking some issues, crucial to the lives of women.

The day was closed by a talk of a female professor. She communicated a clear message about the currently existing inequality between genders at work. Her style, though, was witty but provoking. Some of her arguments sounded sexist. She proudly told us stories of how she made some men, whose ego she considered over-pumped, feel bad.

My eyes became big: oh really? Is this how we are approaching the problem? Putting someone else down won't help us rise! The saddest thing was that most of the girls kept knocking their heads in agreement or giggling. What an evil strategy she picked - playing on other people's insecurities and presenting women almost faultless compared to men. Trying to understand my feelings and reactions while listening to her, in defence of integrity, I hurried up to formulate my own position: 'Don't be faultless. Be conscious and proactive'.

At the end of the speech she mentioned a book, that was advised to me recently by Odette, whom I accidentally met through a friend and found very pleasant. That friend, Jenn, who is an amazing woman herself, dares to be all in one: passionate about her job, a caring mother and wife, a wise open person. Having those examples in front of my eyes substitutes all the talks of the world about how it may and should be... in theory.

The aforementioned book is 'Lean In' by Sheryl Sandberg - a curious reading-matter supported with facts and stories. The content of the book is summarized by Sheryl herself in the TED-talk posted below (even, the book is dated later than the video).

These were my reflections after just the first Antelope 2016 event. Looking forward for more.

How cursed is the curse of dimensionality? Simply explained.

Why does an alien look for neighbours longer than an earthling? This post explains!.

"The curse of dimensionality" is a jargon expression originating from statistical and machine learning. It refers to the issue of a drastic increase of the volume of the boundary layer as compared to the volume of the interior of a unit cube or a sphere as dimension grows.

An example: imagine, you are a climate data scientist and want to track the ice coverage of a remote mountain over time. The mountain is not just very far, but also very steep. Traveling would exhaust your budget, not to mention that you would have to be a professional climber to be able to get to the top to perform a measurement. Repeatedly.

Compared to that hard way, you could find a lot of ease in simply downloading satellite data with an image of the region of your interest. But also here pitfalls await: even if you consider yourself a lucky person, it is almost unavoidable, that some of the pixels contain no information. This may happen, for instance, due to the clouds hovering over the 'blind' point at the time when the image was captured.

What to do? Common sense is prompting, that if most of the points around the 'blind' point are covered with snow, it is likely that this point will lie under snow too. And vice versa: if most of the points around (k closest representatives) display a naked rock, we would believe, that the 'blind' point is a rocky surface as well.

At this stage we would instruct our data-imputing algorithm to go and find k nearest points and 'interview' them for their values. The value that they collectively vote for should be accepted. This procedure is called the k-nearest neighbours (KNN) classification.

How far would the algorithm need to wander until it discovers all the k interviewees? Our hope is that the space exploration would not take it too far, i.e. it will not have to reach the boundary... otherwise it may fall of the cliff :) By the boundary we mean 10% of the most extreme values on each axis.

If our entire space was a unit cube, in dimension 1 the main exploration space (the interior) would be a segment (0.05, 0.95) with volume 0.9, and the boundary would have volume 1-0.9 = 0.1. In dimension 2 the boundary would look as the space enclosed in-between two concentric squares. The volume of the interior is now (0.9)^2. Hence, the volume of the boundary is 1-(0.9)^2 = 0.19. The boundary now is almost twice as large as in dimension 1.

Following this logic, one concludes, that in dimension 100 the volume of the boundary constitutes 1-(0.9)^100 = 0.9999734, i.e. the boundary takes almost all of the space. Which means, if you forbid your algorithms to wander too close to the 'cliff', there will be almost nowhere to go.

Fortunately, your satellite image is two dimensional and, you might think, it is nice to be aware of the dimensionality issues in oder to feel empathic towards an alien living on a 100-dimensional planet with its 100-dimensional mountains.

Yes and no. The trap is that even on Earth we run into high-dimensionality troubles sooner than we expect...

This time imagine, you are a Big Data analyst with Zetabites of data in your pocket. In an urge of explaining an outcome by all possible factors that are available to you, you still would like to forbid the outliers - extreme values in the boundary layer... Do you see where it is going?...

Now a bit of play-around: to better train your empathy to the 100-dimensional alien, here is a code in R programming language that computes the volume of the boundary in dimensionality d using the Monte Carlo method. The plot below the code displays the dependency between dimensionality and the boundary volume.

#this function return approximate volume of a 
#d-dimensional boundary of a unit cube
#n-number of throws for the Monte Carlo method
boundary_volume <- function(n,d){
  #generate n d-dimensional random vectors
  throws <- data.frame(matrix(runif(n*d), nrow = n, ncol = d))
  count <-0
  for (i in 1:n){ 
    #test all generated points on belonging to the boundary
    if (min(throws[i,])<0.05 || max(throws[i,])>0.95) 
      count <- count+1
  }
  #compare numerical and theoretical values
  print(paste('d=',d,': Numerical = ', format(count/n*100, digits=3), '%, Theoretical=', format((1-(0.9)^d)*100, digits=3), '%;',sep=''))
  #return the answer as percentage
  return (count/n*100)
}

n <- 10000
volume <- rep(NA,20)
for (d in 1:20){
  print(paste('d=',d,': Elapsed time = ', format(system.time(volume[d] <- boundary_volume(n,d))[3], digits=4),sep=''))
}

plot(volume, type = 'b',col = "red", xlab = 'Dimension', ylab= 'Boundary volume,%')

Google maps JavaScript API on Blogger

As promised in the previous post, here is a walk-through that will help you add a Google Map to your Blogger page.

Since we are going to use Google Maps JavaScript API, you will probably feel more comfortable if you are somehow familiar with HTML and/or JavaScript. But if not, there will be no stress either - just perform all the copy-pastes at your best and it should work.

Step Uno). In the 'Design' mode opt for 'Template'

Step Due). Choose 'Edit HTML':

Step Tre). Find the </head> - tag and insert the following code right above it (actually, inserting it at any location in the head-section, i.e. between <head> and </head> is fine)

 
<!--GOOGLE MAPS START-->
<script src='http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/js'>
</script>

<script>
var basel=new google.maps.LatLng(47.558596, 7.585952);
function initialize()
{
var mapProp = {
  center:basel,
  zoom:12,
  mapTypeId:google.maps.MapTypeId.ROADMAP
  };
  
var map = new google.maps.Map(document.getElementById("googleMap"),mapProp);

var myCity = new google.maps.Circle({
  center:basel,
  radius:500,
  strokeColor:"#0F915B",
  strokeOpacity:0.8,
  strokeWeight:2,
  fillColor:"#13CA7E",
  fillOpacity:0.4
  });

myCity.setMap(map);
}

google.maps.event.addDomListener(window, 'load', initialize);
</script>
<!--GOOGLE MAPS END-->

Step Quatro). Press the 'Save Template' button


Step Cinque). Navigate to 'Layout'


Step Sei). Chose, in which section you would like to add the map. And insert the following code there:

 
<div id="googleMap" style="height:200px;border-width:5px;border-style:outset;">
</div>

This is it. Enjoy!

P.S. The most straightforward link to check the details of Google Maps Javascript API is here.