Month: June 2023

June 13, 2023 /3BL Media/ – The Ray has implemented a regional staff strategy for accelerating net-zero transportation nationally. To better support net-zero projects at transportation agencies and accelerate project delivery by reducing the time required for planning and procurement, dedicated regional staff teams will work from satellite offices distributed among four U.S. regions: Northeast, Southeast, Midwest, and West. The strategy will be effective immediately, as The Ray currently works with more than 51 transportation agencies at the local, state, and regional levels across 29 states to scale infrastructure projects that will produce safer, cleaner and smarter outcomes in the transportation and energy sectors. The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation awarded The Ray a $250,000 grant to support the launch of the regional strategy and, more broadly, the innovative planning and solutions that The Ray deploys in the Southeast to make renewable energy and electrification accessible and more affordable.

“The Ray has pioneered technology applications and net-zero project concepts in transportation and energy for nearly a decade,” said Allie Kelly, Executive Director of The Ray, “and those ideas and our know-how have met the moment of tremendous opportunity.” She continued, “Across the country, state agencies and communities alike have an urgency for infrastructure that we can help them build, projects such as roadside solar; smart highway systems that are safer and less congested; longer-lasting, quieter roads paved with scrap tire rubber, and using empty transportation ‘right-of-way’ for expanding and securing the energy grid, instead of stringing new wires across neighborhoods.”

As an organization with a national reach, grouping partner activity by region and distributing the pipeline of projects and analyses between regional teams at The Ray creates process efficiencies that produce faster results for transportation agencies – helping the agencies themselves to go faster. Regional coordination of agency partner activity also facilitates the visibility and viability of opportunities for multi-state collaboration. The Ray provides:

Technology transferConnections to private sector 
technologists and expertsConnections to peer transportation 
agenciesAdvanced planning tools and softwareTechnical assistanceProcurement assistanceProject organization and facilitationPolicy analysisPublic awareness and promotion

National Presence 
These services directly address the gaps and challenges facing transportation agencies with expertise, tools, analysis, collaboration, and, indirectly, by building confidence in and enthusiasm for innovation. In both formal and informal collaborative partnerships, The Ray continues to promote and scale net-zero infrastructure that will support decarbonizing transportation and enable the safe operation of connected and autonomous vehicles.

Net-Zero Projects 
The Ray’s mission is to reimagine how advanced transportation infrastructure and technology connects communities, lives, and the world in a way that is safer, more responsive to the climate, more regenerative to the environment, and more capable of creating economic opportunity through innovative ideas and technologies that will transform transportation infrastructure. At The Ray C. Anderson Memorial Highway on Interstate 85 in West Georgia, The Ray is catalyzing net-zero transportation infrastructure on a real-world test bed – zero carbon, zero waste, zero deaths. Leading the way with some of the world’s boldest thinking, The Ray has built more than a dozen projects that are literally changing the facts on the ground in transportation, showing that the technologies to achieve net-zero in transportation already exist. The Ray has experienced phenomenal growth since its first project in 2015, the installation of a solar-powered electric vehicle (EV) charging station at the Georgia Department of Transportation rest area at the Georgia-Alabama state line.

Regional Strategy 
Led by the new Director of Regional Programs, Beverly West, The Ray has organized its partner agencies across the nation by four contiguous geographies to create a regional approach to service delivery, as opposed to centralizing all service delivery out of one office. The regional approach will be performed in collaboration with The Ray’s new GIS Manager, Jessie Hong-Dwyer, Ph.D., and the GIS team. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) play a crucial role in this regional work, by utilizing The Ray’s partnership with Esri and their powerful tools, the GIS team can identify, propose, and provide informed recommendations for suitable clean energy and connectivity projects within transportation infrastructure’s right-of-ways that effectively align with The Ray’s net-zero objectives.

“This team of teams strategy will allow The Ray to leverage our partnerships and the know-how that we have cultivated over the last decade to deliver technology solutions to transportation agencies across the country in an efficient and effective way,” said Beverly West, Director of Regional Programs.

Four Regional Managers will report to the Director of Regional Programs. The Regional Managers will be responsible for delivering services to transportation agency partners in the following regions:

Northeast / Mid-Atlantic: Maine, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maryland

Southeast: Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, North Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana

Midwest: Texas, Oklahoma, Ohio, Indiana, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin

West: Montana, Colorado, Utah, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, California

About the Director of Regional Programs 
Beverly West is the Director of Regional Programs at The Ray. Prior to joining the team, she enjoyed a 23 year career with the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT). Most recently she served TxDOT as Section Director in the Strategic Planning Division with oversight of multiple programs including: Emerging Technologies Initiatives, Business Intelligence & Performance Management, Enterprise Policy Governance, Business Continuity of Operations, and Internal Risk Management and Prevention. Her teams created, led or facilitated enterprise initiatives such as the Connected & Autonomous Vehicle Task Force (CAV), Urban Air Advisory Committee (UAM), National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) plan, TxDOT’s Strategic Plan and COOP plans.

About the Western Regional Manager 
David Peters serves as the Western Regional Manager for The Ray. Prior to joining The Ray, he worked in various roles as the American Association for State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO). Most recently he served as the Associate Program Manager for Resilience and Sustainability as a member of the Policy & Government Relations team. Before his time with AASHTO, David was a member of the Energy, Infrastructure, and Environment Division at 
the National Governors Association (NGA), working closely with Governors’ staff on energy and infrastructure policy.

About the GIS Manager 
Jessie Hong-Dwyer, Ph.D. serves as the GIS Manager for The Ray. Before joining the team, she was a professor of geography, teaching introduction to advanced-level GIS courses and conducting numerous GIS research projects for more than ten years at the University of West Georgia. She has collaborated with the Georgia Department of Education, Cobb County School District, and the National Geographic Society as a GIS professional. Jessie is a published author of 35+ scientific articles and a presenter of 25+ papers at regional, national, and international professional conferences. She holds a Ph.D. in geography from the University of Colorado Boulder, an M.S. in geography from San Diego State University, and a B.S. in geography from Ohio State University.

About The Ray 
The Ray is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charity and net-zero highway testbed, located on 18 miles of Interstate 85 between Lagrange, Georgia and the Georgia-Alabama state line. This stretch of interstate is named in memory of Ray C. Anderson (1934-2011), a Georgia native recognized as a leader in green business when he challenged his company, Interface, Inc., to pursue a zero environmental footprint. Our mission is to reimagine how we connect our communities, our lives and the world in a way that is safer, more responsive to the climate, more regenerative to the environment, and more capable of creating economic opportunity through innovative ideas and technologies that will transform transportation infrastructure. The Ray Highway is paving the way for a zero carbon, zero waste, zero deaths highway system that will build a safer and more prosperous future for us all. Learn more at www.TheRay.org.

MEDIA CONTACT 
Sarah Grizzle, Director of Communications, The Ray 
310.699.2054 | sgrizzle@theray.org | @TheRayHighway

Originally published on Illumina News Center

Each person’s genetic code harbors millions of variants that differ from one individual to the next, and account for differences in health and disease risk. The more human genomes are sequenced, the more data researchers have to compare and predict which variants are most likely to cause disease. Despite the collective efforts of scientists and clinicians worldwide, the function of the vast majority of these variants remains unknown.

And genetic risk prediction has suffered from an ethnicity bias. Seventy-eight percent of the data in the Genome-Wide Association Study Catalog comes from people of European ancestry; when primarily European genomic data is used to train polygenic risk scores, it results in uneven performance when applied to other ethnic groups.

Sequencing a greater diversity of people is part of the solution, but even that can only tell us so much. “The main issue is that humans are pretty bottlenecked,” explains Kyle Farh, vice president of Artificial Intelligence at Illumina. “Even though there are 8 billion of us, our genetic diversity still looks like the original population of 10,000 common ancestors we’re all descended from. There just isn’t enough information to glean from the human species. It became clear several years ago that, to really understand the human genome, the data contained in human genome sequencing was not enough.”

Homo sapien DNA records the evolutionary history of a few hundred thousand years. But to avoid bias and learn even more about ourselves, scientists are broadening the search by tens of millions of years to study our more distant family, the primates.

DNA as living history

Evolution is the world’s longest-running experiment. Generation by generation, nature has been testing genes through random mutation—variants that harm an animal’s fitness are quickly removed from the gene pool, and ones that are neutral or beneficial survive to be passed on. “The results of these experiments are documented in every species’ genome,” Farh says. “They’re right there. It’s a living document.”

The taxonomic order “Primates” comprises over 500 species, encompassing apes, monkeys, prosimians like lemurs and loris—and us. We’re all descended from the same ancestors, and despite our wildly varied forms, living primates share more than 90% of our DNA with one another. Mutations that occur in chimpanzees or bonobos also occur in humans, and work from Illumina scientists shows that if a variant is tolerated by natural selection in another primate, it’s 99% likely not to cause disease in us. This isn’t true for more distantly related mammals—a variation that’s harmless in mice or dogs, for instance, may be pathogenic in gorillas or humans.

For the millions of years that primate species have been evolving in parallel, mutations that cause disease have been eliminated by natural selection. So by sequencing modern primates, we can improve our knowledge of which variants don’t cause disease.

Scientists at Illumina, in collaboration with those from 24 countries, just published the results of a vast study of primate genomes in four papers in the journal Science. The study sequenced over 800 individuals from 233 species of nonhuman primates, representing all 16 families and over 86% of living genera. But the sequencing was just the first step: Once they had all this data, they needed a way to interpret it. So they developed PrimateAI-3D.

An algorithm trained by evolution

The large language model ChatGPT has garnered much attention for its ability to generate humanlike responses to any prompt. Its artificial intelligence is trained on a massive data set of existing writing, so it can accurately predict the next sentences that would sound most natural based on the conversation up to that point.

PrimateAI-3D is an algorithm built on deep-learning language architectures analogous to those used in ChatGPT, but designed to model genomic rather than linguistic sequences. By presenting it with variants that are ruled out for disease in our macaque and orangutan cousins, its developers have effectively leveraged natural selection to train its parameters. The neural network learns where benign variants are represented in a gene and, by process of elimination, which regions are likely to cause disease if mutated. In this way, it learned how to accurately predict pathogenic variants in humans better than any human could.

The study published in Science compared PrimateAI-3D against 15 other machine-learning methods on four patient cohorts—one for neurodevelopmental disorders, one for autism spectrum disorders, one for congenital heart disease, and the UK Biobank. The first three cohorts are some of the largest studies to date that sequenced both an affected child as well as their unaffected parents; by contrast, the half a million genomes in the UK Biobank are mostly from healthy members of the general population. The study also evaluated the algorithm in the National Institutes of Health’s ClinVar database and other datasets.

Across six different clinical benchmarks, PrimateAI-3D outperformed all other existing methods by a wide margin. These findings will help researchers prioritize a small handful of variants that are most likely to affect a person’s health.

Furthermore, PrimateAI-3D demonstrated impressive improvements in predicting people at increased risk for common diseases in the UK Biobank cohort, especially across non-European ethnic groups. “What we find is that 97% of otherwise healthy people in the general population carried highly actionable variants for clinically relevant conditions,” says Farh, one of the study’s principal authors. “Up to now we’ve learned that you need genome sequencing if you have a rare disease or cancer—but actually it looks like every healthy person in the population has highly impactful variants in our genomes that are clinically relevant and are important to be informed about.”

Giving back to the gibbon and baboon

On top of the benefit to human health, these efforts could also be instrumental for primate conservation. “We’re in a hurry to collect this data because the majority of these species are on a fast track to extinction,” Farh says. The genetic diversity recorded in an animal’s DNA tells us not only how many individuals remain in that species’ population, it also tells the story of that population’s size over time, back through the generations. “That tells us how quickly the species is declining, and how much time they have left. That’s in their genomes.”

PrimateAI-3D’s developers found that its performance scales directly with the size of the dataset used to train it, so the more primate species they can sequence, the better the tool can become. The monkeys and apes can help us, and we can help them. “I think we’re only at the beginning,” Farh says. “There’s a tremendous amount that can be learned here. And the idea that you can learn more about our own species from other species is, I think, deeply romantic.”

PrimateAI-3D will be made broadly available to the genomics community in an upcoming release of Illumina Connected Software products.

On Monday, June 12 at Tapestry HQ in Hudson Yards on the west side of Manhattan, multi-platinum artist, singer, songwriter and Coach global brand ambassador Lil Nas X made a surprise appearance at the Coach Foundation’s annual “Dream Day,” the signature conference of the Coach Foundation’s Dream It Real initiative. Launched in 2018, Dream It Real creates opportunities, removes barriers and supports the next generation of young people to achieve their dreams with a focus on under-represented communities.

Lil Nas X joined Dream It Real scholars from the Coach Foundation’s partner organizations Opportunity Network, Bottom Line, Point Foundation, the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA), and the Hetrick-Martin Institute at Coach’s headquarters in Hudson Yards for a day of mentorship, networking and professional development. He surprised several students with a styling session with stylist, Matthew Mazur, where they collaborated to put together confident, career-ready looks with Coach pieces from its Dream It Real Closets.

As part of Dream It Real’s mission to support students holistically as they pursue their dreams through scholarships, mentorship and professional opportunities, Dream Day’s activities featured intimate “Dream It Real ‘Real Talks’” led by executives where they discussed their career journeys and topics like branding and digital marketing, and the “Dream It Real Portrait Studio,” where Lil Nas X coached students as they took headshots for their resumes. The day ended with a party for the students where they met with the Coach teams and their Dream It Real mentors, a cohort of Coach employees who have offered their support and guidance to students over the past academic year.

“Always stand beside yourself,” Lil Nas X told the students. “You are going to be the main person you can count on when you’re chasing your dream. The main person that you have to believe in. Always move forward and stand on your own path.”

Coach also announces today that the Coach Foundation’s Dream It Real initiative has exceeded its commitment of providing 5,000 scholarships to students by 2025. Since the initiative’s launch, Dream It Real has provided resources to more than 150,000 young people from historically underrepresented and marginalized communities globally through its programs including:

Dream It Real Mentor Program has enrolled 250 Coach/ Tapestry employees from stores, corporate, and distribution centers to mentor 250 first-generation college students receiving 4-year scholarships from the Coach Foundation.Dream It Real Closets, a program that provides product donations to inspire young people in the Dream It Real network as they prepare for their future. To date Coach has donated over $25 million (retail value) to Dream It Real Closets and nonprofit partners.Dream It Real Teacher Appreciation has supported over 1,500 educators and teachers in low-income school districts with Coach gifts.

“Our goal is to create a more impactful future for this generation and those to come,” said Coach CEO and Brand President, Todd Kahn. “It is wonderful to have a brand ambassador, Lil Nas X, that embodies our purpose and breaks down barriers, helping us to encourage everyone to have the courage to be themselves through self-expression. I am consistently amazed by students and young professionals who have the courage to Dream It Real every day and the drive to make those dreams a reality, and that is what Dream Day is all about.”

Established in 2008, to help create a better future for all, the Coach Foundation has donated over $65 million to hundreds of worthy causes across the globe. The Coach Foundation equips historically underrepresented and marginalized students around the world with the resources needed to achieve their dreams. For more information, please visit https://www.coach.com/coachfoundation.