CORRECTION: A previous version of this story, which ran in the April 18 issue of Health Pulse, misstated that the report measured outcomes for newborns through 18-year-olds and included data from transgender and gender nonconforming young people. It measured outcomes only for young people ages 12-17 and only included data from people who identify as lesbian, gay and bisexual.
NEW CONTRACT: The city Department of Homeless Services has awarded Bhrags Home Care, a Canarsie-based home health care and skilled nursing provider, a nearly $45 million contract to provide 400 units for adults at 130 Third St. in Gowanus. According to the notice published in the City Record Thursday, the contract is an emergency purchase.
COMMUNITY GRANT: The Downtown Brooklyn-based nonprofit Housing Works held a ribbon cutting for its new community health center in East Harlem on Thursday, which will provide primary care, psychiatry and psychotherapy services. In addition to opening the center, Housing Works also received a $300,000 grant from Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield Foundation, the philanthropy arm of Anthem, and physician network EngageWell IPA to expand digital technologies that address social determinants of health.
ICYMI: Twenty-four New Yorkers were diagnosed with an infectious disease borne from rat urine in 2023, more than in any other year on record, the city Health Department said in a health advisory last week. People infected with the disease, known as Leptospirosis, typically present with acute kidney or renal failure and sometimes severe pulmonary complications.
The World Health Organization is wading into the world of AI to provide basic health information through a human-like avatar. But while the bot responds sympathetically to users’ facial expressions, it doesn’t always know what it’s talking about.
SARAH, short for Smart AI Resource Assistant for Health, is a virtual health worker that’s available to talk 24/7 in eight different languages to explain topics like mental health, tobacco use and healthy eating. It’s part of the WHO’s campaign to find technology that can both educate people and fill staffing gaps with the world facing a healthcare worker shortage.
WHO warns on its website that this early prototype, introduced on April 2, provides responses that “may not always be accurate.” Some of SARAH’s AI training is years behind the latest data. And the bot occasionally provides bizarre answers, known as hallucinations in AI models, that can spread misinformation about public health.
SARAH doesn’t have a diagnostic feature like WebMD or Google. In fact, the bot is programmed to not talk about anything outside of the WHO’s purview, including questions on specific drugs. So SARAH often sends people to a WHO website or says that users should “consult with your healthcare provider.”
“It lacks depth,” Ramin Javan, radiologist and researcher at George Washington University, said. “But I think it’s because they just don’t want to overstep their boundaries and this is just the first step.”
WHO says SARAH is meant to work in partnership with researchers and governments to provide accurate public health. The agency is asking them for advice on how to improve the bot and use it in emergency health situations. But it emphasizes its AI assistant is still a work in progress.
“These technologies are not at the point where they are substitutes for interacting with a professional or getting medical advice from an actual trained clinician or health provider,” Alain Labrique, the director of digital health and innovation at WHO, said.
SARAH was trained on OpenAI’s ChatGPT 3.5, which used data through September 2021, so the bot doesn’t have up-to-date information on medical advisories or news events. When asked whether the US Food & Drug Administration has approved the Alzheimer’s drug Lecanemab, for example, SARAH said the drug is still in clinical trials when in fact it was approved for early disease treatment in January 2023.
Even the WHO’s own data can trip SARAH up. When asked whether hepatitis deaths are increasing, it could not immediately provide details from a recent WHO report until promoted a second time to check the agency’s website for updated statistics. The agency said it’s checking on whether there’s a lag in updates.
And sometimes the AI bot draws a blank. Javan asked SARAH where one could get a mammogram in Washington, DC, and it could not provide a response.
None of this is unusual in these early days of AI development. In a study last year looking at how ChatGPT responded to 284 medical questions, researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center found that while it provided correct answers most of the time, there were multiple instances where the chatbot was “spectacularly and surprisingly wrong.”
Safety and privacy concerns
To be able to mimic empathy for question sessions, SARAH accesses computer cameras to store users’ facial expressions for 30 seconds, then deletes the recordings, WHO communications director Jaimie Guerra said. Each visit is anonymous, but users can elect to share their questions with WHO in a survey to improve the experience, though Guerra said any data collected is randomized and not tied to an IP address or person to protect users.
Still, using open source data like GPT’s has its own dangers because it is a frequent target of cybercriminals, Jingquan Li, a public health and IT researcher at Hofstra University, said. Some people accessing SARAH through Wi-Fi are vulnerable to malware attacks or video camera hacking. Guerra said attacks trying to access data shouldn’t be a problem because of the anonymous sessions.
Government partners and researchers also do not have regular access to the data, including questions that might help track health patterns, unless they ask for the voluntary survey data. Guerra said this means SARAH would not be the most accurate tool to predict the next flu outbreak, for example.
SARAH is a continuation of a 2021 WHO virtual health worker project called Florence that provided basic information on Covid-19 and tobacco, and New Zealand-based Soul Machines Ltd. built the avatars for both projects. Soul Machines cannot access the SARAH data, but Chief Executive Officer Greg Cross said in a statement the company is using the GPT data to improve results and experience. Earlier this year, WHO released ethics guidance to its government partners for health-related AI models including promoting data transparency and protecting safety.
While Florence appeared to be a young, nonwhite woman, SARAH appears White. Changing the appearance and updating the avatar isn’t out of the question, Labrique said, and users may be able to choose an avatar preference in future versions.
As for SARAH’s gender, when asked it said “I am a chatbot digital health promoter, so I do not have a gender or use personal pronouns. My purpose is to assist you in living a healthy lifestyle. Do you have any questions about quitting tobacco, reducing alcohol consumption, or improving your overall well-being?”
There is a lot of noise surrounding the fate of New York's tech sector. While venture capital investment remains slow, IPOs are starting to return. On Wall Street, the artificial-intelligence craze jolted equities to all-time highs, but money managers continue to hedge their bets.
As Crain's has reported, industry analysts remain bullish on New York. Deals may be down, they say, but the city is overflowing with available tech talent. C-suite executives are confident in their companies’ growth in New York, and more tech firms are choosing to do business here than ever before.
Is that optimism warranted? Just ask the tech workers who are flocking to New York. Roughly 14.3% of all U.S. tech employees who relocated to a new city last year landed in the Big Apple.
That's according to an analysis from venture capital firm SignalFire, released April 15 and first reported on by the Wall Street Journal. SignalFire mapped the cities where tech workers are leaving and identified the most popular destinations where they are going.
The report found that New York was by far the most popular destination for relocating talent in 2023. The 14.3% influx figure was nearly double that of the next most targeted city, which was Austin, Texas.
Roughly 10.7% of New York's existing tech workforce left the city, SignalFire found, but the strong inflow of workers outpaced the outflow. "NYC is in the midst of a tech talent boom," the report said.
Other cities that saw year-over-year increases in tech talent include Los Angeles, Denver, San Diego, Miami, Dallas, Nashville and Tampa.
The largest source for relocating tech talent to New York was San Francisco, with Bay Area transplants making up roughly 37% of the city's tech talent intake. New York also attracted talent from Seattle and Boston.
San Francisco continued to attract new talent, the report said, but employees left at a faster rate. For every tech worker who moved from New York to San Francisco, 1.4 workers made the opposite move, according to SignalFire.
SignalFire noted that "overall population trends in the post-pandemic period were largely driven by people entering and leaving the tech workforce as the 2021 boom was followed by years of layoffs." Their analysis looked specifically at existing tech workers who relocated in 2023. The sample size, according to WSJ, was roughly 57,000 tech employees on the move.
Walter Noel, who ran the the largest fund to invest with Bernie Madoff and made more than $1 billion in resulting client fees for his firm, has died. He was 93.
He died on Dec. 15 at Yemanja, his family’s property on Mustique, a private Caribbean island, according to his death certificate. The cause was complications due to Alzheimer’s disease. His family has made no public announcement of his death.
Noel founded what would become Fairfield Greenwich Group in 1983 to help foreign investors put money into U.S. hedge funds. He was introduced to Madoff by the father-in-law of his partner, Jeffrey Tucker, in 1989 and made his first $1.5 million investment later that year.
By the time Madoff was arrested in December 2008 for running history’s biggest Ponzi scheme, the firm had about $7 billion invested with him or roughly half the firm’s total assets.
Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison after pleading guilty to his crimes. He died in prison in 2021 at age 82.
Madoff charged no fees to Fairfield Greenwich and other so-called feeder funds, meaning that those firms kept all the money they charged clients on what would eventually be proven to be fictitious returns. In Fairfield Greenwich’s case, that was 20% of any profit, and in later years a 1% management fee on assets.
With the Madoff investment spinning off a return of at least 10% annually, Fairfield Greenwich made more than $1 billion in fees, according to a July 2010 complaint filed against Fairfield Greenwich’s entities and executives by Irving Picard, the trustee assigned to recoup money for investors. Noel personally received $114 million in partnership distributions between 2002 and 2008, the court document said, a sum that did not include salary or bonuses.
Picard alleged that the executives of Fairfield Greenwich knew or should have known that Madoff was operating a Ponzi scheme and said their relationship was a “de facto partnership.” Picard’s litigation is ongoing. No criminal charges have ever been brought against these parties.
Fairfield Greenwich has said it was a victim of Madoff’s duplicity, and at the time of his arrest, the firm and its partners had more than $60 million invested with Madoff.
Noel, his Brazilian-born wife, Monica, and their five daughters led an increasingly lavish lifestyle from their base in leafy Greenwich, Connecticut. As Fairfield Greenwich assets ballooned, so did the number of vacation homes. In addition to the estate in Mustique and their mansion in Greenwich, they had places in New York City, Palm Beach and Southampton.
Four of his five daughters wed men who later worked for Fairfield Greenwich. The daughters and their children were photographed by Bruce Weber for a 2002 Vanity Fair piece entitled "Golden in Greenwich" that described Noel’s offspring as the anti-Hiltons.
Corina, the eldest, married Colombian-born Andres Piedrahita, who led the European and Latin American businesses, working out of London and Madrid. Lisina, the second oldest, wed Yanko Della Schiava, based in Lugano, Switzerland. He was responsible for selling Fairfield’s offshore funds in Southern Europe.
The fourth oldest, Alix, married Philip Toub, son of Swiss shipping magnate Said Toub. He marketed the group’s funds in Brazil and the Middle East. Marisa, the youngest, married Matthew Brown, who worked for the firm in New York. Ariane, the middle daughter, married a private equity investor who was not involved in the family business.
Executive recruiter Russell S. Reynolds, a longtime friend of the Noels, told Vanity Fair that he saw Walter and Monica at the Round Hill Club in Greenwich the day after Madoff’s arrest. “Walter was shaking he was so upset,” Reynolds told the magazine.
Walter Miller Noel, Jr. was born on June 19, 1930, to Walter Sr. and Corinne Travis Noel and grew up in Nashville, Tennessee. He graduated from Vanderbilt University and got a master’s degree in economics and a law degree from Harvard University.
He spent his early career as a consultant with Arthur D. Little in Boston and Lagos, Nigeria.
He married the former Monica Haegler in 1962 in Rio de Janeiro, according to the couple’s wedding announcement in the Tennessean.
Noel worked in private banking at Bahag Banking in Lausanne, Switzerland, and Citibank before joining Chemical Bank, where he headed the international private banking group. When he was in his early 50s, he left the bank to set up what would become Fairfield Greenwich.
Noel is survived by his wife, his five daughters, 20 grandchildren and two great-granchildren.
Restored with the architect’s signature style in mind, the Marcel Breuer-designed Marshad House in Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., was brought into modern times by owners who wanted to preserve the Bauhaus-trained architect’s signature style. The pair gave the 1950 home 21st-century livability while enjoying the uniqueness of the modernist residence. Asking $1,800,000, the 2,292-square-foot, three-bedroom home at [...]
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Celebrate the start of spring beneath hundreds of vibrant kites in Brooklyn Bridge Park. The Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy is hosting its annual Sound & Color! Spring Festival on May 18 from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., a free family-friendly event that celebrates the beginning of the season with kite flying, live music, food vendors, [...]
The post Soar into spring with free kite flying and live music at Brooklyn Bridge Park first appeared on 6sqft.