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While I've done a lot of little projects for Uber (company), some of which I make public over on their Uber Blog (#uberdata), for the purposes of this question I think my brainSCANr project probably fits best. Note that Uber, brainSCANr, and my actual experimental neuroscience research really inform one another in amazingly wonderful ways.brainSCANr websiteAutomated cognome construction and semi-automated hypothesis generation paperThe ProblemThe opening lines of the paper:The scientific method begins with a hypothesis about our reality that can be tested via experimental observation. Hypothesis formation is iterative, building off prior scientific knowledge. Before one can form a hypothesis, one must have a thorough understanding of previous research to ensure that the path of inquiry is founded upon a stable base of established facts. But how can a researcher perform a thorough, unbiased literature review when over one million scientific articles are published annually? The rate of scientific discovery has outpaced our ability to integrate knowledge in an unbiased, principled fashion. One solution may be via automated information aggregation. In this manuscript we show that, by calculating associations between concepts in the peer-reviewed literature, we can algorithmically synthesize scientific information and use that knowledge to help formulate plausible low-level hypotheses.Inception StageIn May 2010 I was invited to speak at Berkeley's Cognitive Science Student Association (CSSA) Conference. At that conference I sat on a Q&A panel with a hell of a group of scientists, including my friend and colleague George Lakoff and the (then) Chair of Stanford's Psychology department, James McClelland, who helped pioneer Parallel Distributed Processing.On that panel I A'd many Qs, one of which was a fairly high-level question about the challenge of integrating the wealth of data hidden in the neuroscientific literature. It was a variant on the classic line that neuroscience is "data rich but theory poor". This is a problem I've been struggling with for a long time and I'd had a few ideas.In my response I said that one of our problems as a field was that we had so many different people with different backgrounds speaking different jargons who aren't effectively communicating. I followed with an off-hand comment that "The Literature" was actually pretty smart when taken as a system, but that us individual puny brains just weren't bright enough to integrate it all.I went on to claim that, if there was some way to automatically integrate information from the peer-review literature, we could probably glean a lot of new insights. James McClelland really seemed to disagree with me, but the idea kept kicking around my brain for a while.CreationOne night, several months later (while watching Battlestar Galactica (2003–2009 series) with my wife Jessica Bolger Voytek), I turned to her and explained my idea. She asked me how I was planning on coding it up and, after I explained it, she challenged me by saying that she could definitely code that faster than I could.Fast-forward a couple of hours to around 2am and she had her results. I did not.Bah.The idea I discussed with her was very simple (and probably simplistic) and was based on the assumption that the more frequently two neuroscientific terms appear in the title or abstracts of peer-reviewed papers together, the more likely those terms are to be associated with one another.For example, if "learning" and all of its synonyms appears in 100 papers with "memory" and all of its synonyms while both of those terms appear in a total of 1000 papers without one another, then the probability of those two terms being associated is 100/1000, or 0.1.We calculated such probabilities for every pair of terms using a dictionary that we manually curated. It contained 124 brain regions, 291 cognitive functions, and 47 diseases. Brain region names and associated synonyms were selected from the NeuroNames database, cognitive functions were obtained from Russ Poldrack's Cognitive Atlas, and disease names are from the NIH. The initial population of the dictionary was meant to represent the broadest, most plausibly common search terms that were also relatively unique (and thus likely not to lead to spurious connections). Note that this process requires some expert knowledge, but it could also be relatively easily automated by rank-ordering n-grams (by frequency) from all those papers and including any that appear more than x times, for example.Tools UsedWe counted the number of published papers containing pairs of terms using the National Library of Medicine's ESearch utility (their API) and the count return type. Here's the example for "prefrontal cortex" and "striatum":Conjunction: Page on NihDisjunctions: Page on Nih & Page on NihThis process was repeated for every pair of terms using a quick Python script to populate an array with the resulting association weights.Here's what the method looks like:We note in our manuscript that this method is rife with caveats, but this wasn't meant to be an end-point, but rather a proof-of-concept beginning.In the end we get a full matrix of 175528 term pairs. Once we got this database we (okay, my wife) hacked together the brainSCANr website to allow people to play around with terms and their relationships. We wanted to create a tool for researchers and the public alike to use to help simplify the complexities of neuroscience.You enter a search term, it shows the relationships and gives you links to the relevant peer-reviewed papers. As an example, here's Alzheimer's:The website was created using Google App Engine. Graph connectivity plotting was performed using the JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit.My wife and I threw the first version together (with help from my Uber (company) buddy Curtis Chambers) over about a week. We actually did this during our New Years vacation where we used it as a way to hide from our friends the fact that my wife was pregnant with our first child (we'd just found out the day before we were supposed to leave).Data analyses were ultimately done in MATLAB and Python (programming language). Clustering of weights was performed using k-means clustering and hierarchical clustering.ResultsI like to joke that this took us a week and about $11.75 to put together compared to the $8.5M, 3-year Human Connectome Project.We first wanted to see if the resulting clusters made any sense. I taught neuroanatomy at Berkeley for 3 semesters so you'll have to trust me somewhat when I say that the relationships between brain regions that we algorithmically extract purely from textual relationships in the peer-review literature very closely map onto the known connections between these brain regions.Honestly I was so ridiculously excited when I first saw the results. When we performed some simple clustering on these terms it was amazing what was associated. None of the results were terribly surprising, but it's really cool that things like the visual system just fall out of the literature: LGN, V1, pulvinar, superior colliculus, and visual extrastriate, for example, all get placed into one cluster together.But still, so what?I spent a long time struggling to come up with something we could do with these data. In the end I settled on an algorithm to try and find missing relationships. Imagine you've got two really close friends. Chances are--statistically speaking--that those two people know one another. In fact, it would be surprising if they didn't. Furthermore, if they did end up meeting they would probably get along pretty well because you're such good friends with each of them.That's the analogy for the algorithm I use to discover possible relationships between ideas that should exist in neuroscience, but don't.A friend-of-a-friend should be a friend. Basically Facebook (product) or LinkedIn (product)'s recommendation algorithm, super simplified.Here's that analogy, visualized:I call this "semi-automated hypothesis generation". In this example you can see in panel D that the term "serotonin" appears in 4782 papers with the brain region "striatum". Serotonin also appears in 2943 papers with "migraine". It turns out, we know a lot about the neurochemistry, physiology, and distribution of serotonin in the brain.That's on the neuroscience side.Apparently--and I did not know this prior to running this algorithm--there is a very rich medical literature on the serotonin hypothesis for migraines. Given these two pieces of information it is statistically surprising that there are only 16 publications that discuss the striatum--a brain region that strongly expresses serotonin--and migraines, which is strongly associated with serotonin.Maybe we're missing a connection here. Maybe medical doctors who study migraines aren't talking with the neuroscientists. This isn't necessarily a correct association, just one that may be worth exploring. And now we have an algorithmic way of doing something that many researchers do anyway.For example, when I have what I think is a new idea the first thing I do is turn to PubMed and start searching to see if it really is novel.But what if I could occasionally skip that step where I need to have the idea in the first place?I'm not saying that creativity and organic idea generation doesn't have a place, but that we can now augment that process. We took a few steps to try and verify the validity of the data. For example, we looked at how the associations between neurotransmitter terms and brain regions in our database related to actual gene expression values for the genes associated with those neurotransmitters. To do this we integrated our results with the Allen Brain Atlas (who graciously makes their data freely available online!)We also used the ABA to find brain regions that strongly express a neurotransmitter-related gene but are statistically understudied. This is another way to find gaps in the literature. In the example above, you can see in panel C that there are an over-abundance of papers that look at serotonin and the nucleus accumbens (nAcc), but the region that most strongly expresses serotonin-related genes--the zona incerta--is woefully understudied (probably because it's such a difficult region to examine).We also observed that our presumed relationships significantly correlate with real gene expression values. Although the association was weak, it supports our argument that textual relationships reflect real-world knowledge to at least some degree.Future DirectionsThis project was put on hold for two years while my wife and I adjusted to parenthood and I focused on my work with Uber (company) and finishing up my post-doctoral research. But now that I'll soon be starting my own lab at University of California, San Diego, my wife and I are hoping to put in a grant to try and take this stuff to the next level.I'll close out with the final paragraph of the paper itself:We can leverage the power of millions of publications to bootstrap informative relationships and uncover scientific "metaknowledge"... By mining these relationships, we show that it is possible to add a layer of intelligent automation to the scientific method as has been demonstrated for the data modeling stage (Schmidt and Lipson, 2009). By implementing a connection-finding algorithm, we believe we can speed the process of discovering new relationships. So while the future of scientific research does not rely on these tools, we believe it will be greatly aided by them. This is a small step toward a future of semi-automated, algorithmic scientific research.See also:What discoveries or insights have come out of brainSCANr?How are brainSCANr and the Allen Brain Atlas similar; how are they different?What data analysis and visualization technologies underlie brainSCANr?

In the Siberian Yupik village of Gambell on Alaska's St. Lawrence Island, where black walrus meat dries on racks outside homes and ancient, ivory is so plentiful pieces lie on gravel roads, Native culture thrives.Some of Alaska’s best carvers live in the village of 677, honing images of birds, whales and seals from bone and ivory. The work is so valuable it can sell for thousands of dollars at East Coast auction houses like Sotheby’s and has captured the interest of art experts at the Smithsonian Institute.For those who cannot venture to the village 200 miles across the sea from Nome, they can easily experience the strength and beauty of that and other Alaska Native cultures in a growing network of cultural centers and museums in both the state's well-traveled cities and in more rural communities.No other state in America holds such a broad range of Native cultures as Alaska. From the Iñupiat (In-OOPY-at) of Utqiaġvik (formerly Barrow), just above the Arctic Circle, to the Tlingit (CLINK-it) of Ketchikan on the tip of Southeast Alaska, Native cultural diversity is a hallmark of the state.Alaska Native and American Indian population makes up about 15 percent of Alaska’s population (from 2010 US Census). Many Alaska Native people live in villages scattered along the coastline and rivers of Alaska, where they still practice traditional hunting and fishing lifestyles.In larger communities such as Anchorage, Fairbanks and Juneau, Native dress, language and social customs blend with modern city life. The blend is part of why Alaska is well-known for its cultural and historic attractions throughout the state.For thousands of years, Alaska Native people have preserved their rich traditions, and passed this cultural heritage from generation to generation. While the languages and philosophies vary from region to region, many common goals, values and spiritual beliefs weave these Native societies together in the past as well as today.The variety of these groups can be traced back to Alaska’s first Native descendants, who came by way of a northern land bridge that once connected Siberia and Alaska. As the Ice Age ended and the seas claimed the land, the nomads moved to higher ground. As the continents drifted apart, that land would become Alaska.Some groups settled in the Arctic. Others crossed mountain passes to various regions of the state, or migrated through Alaska, continuing on to distant lands, in some cases as far as South America.Alaska Native cultural centers and museums across Alaska are a good way to get an overview of Native culture. Live demonstrations, performances, arts, crafts and one-of-a-kind collectible pieces are commonly found at the cultural centers.The 26-acre Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage showcases all 11 of the state’s major Alaska Native cultures. Local residents and visitors alike are able to learn about Alaska Native traditions from the past and present through the interactive displays, exhibits, events, films and even six authentic Native housing sites situated around a scenic lake.For the traveler who wants to explore Alaska Native villages independently, contact a regional or statewide tourism organization to find out which communities are the easiest to get to from the state’s population centers.In the larger communities, several collections of artifacts and fine art owned by businesses and Native corporations are displayed in their buildings and are open to the public. Combined with visits to the top-drawer museums and performance centers in hubs like Anchorage, Fairbanks or Juneau, slipping inside Alaska’s Native culture is available on any size budget.SOUTHCENTRALThe Southcentral and Interior regions of Alaska are home to the state’s largest populations of Athabascan people, known for their innovative survival instincts in one of the earth's harshest environments. The Athabascan people who have lived here since time immemorial thrive on moose, caribou, plants, berries and river fish. Athabascan art features superb skin sewing skills using pelts from big game in the region. Athabascan beadwork and embroidery is recognized as being among the finest in the world.HIGHLIGHTS:Eklutna Historical Park, 30 minutes north of Anchorage, provides a glimpse into Native Athabascan culture and the influences of Russian Orthodox missionaries. The park includes a sacred burial ground of the Dena'ina Athabascans, with over 80 spirit houses, the historic St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church, and the Village Heritage House. Open daily May-September. Phone: (907) 688-6026.The Alaska Heritage Library and Museum, located in the Wells Fargo lobby in Anchorage, has displays of Native baskets and artifacts, plus photos, rare books, and paintings by world-renown artists Sydney Laurence, Fred Machetanz, Eustace Ziegler. Free admission. Open year-round, M-F, noon-4 p.m. (907) 265-2834.Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center’s permanent collection depicts 10,000 years of Alaska history. The Alaska Gallery includes displays that highlight 20th century historical events such as the 1964 Earthquake and extensive collection of ethnographic and archaeological materials, artifacts, and fine arts and crafts Open daily May–Sept; Tues-Sun, Oct-April. Phone: (907) 929-9200.The Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center at the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center showcases over 600 rare Alaska Native artifacts from the Smithsonian Institute. The 10,000 square-foot center allows access for hands-on study by Alaska Natives, scholars and artists. The collection includes an 1893 Tlingit war helmet from Taku, a southeast Alaska village. Call (907) 929-2900.The Alaska Native Heritage Center is a 26-acre center just 12 minutes from downtown Anchorage. The facility has five main galleries. The Hall of Cultures houses 3-D wall displays that introduce each culture and its region. The Gathering Place Hall hosts Native dancing and drumming, special performances, and special events. Cultural events similar to traditional celebrations in Alaskan villages also take place at the Center. Phone: (907) 333-8000 or Home | Alaska Native.SOUTHEASTSoutheast Alaska’s history was shaped by the Northwest Coast cultures including the Eyak, Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian. They were fishermen, hunters, artists and carvers whose intricate totem poles, some 90-feet tall, amazed Europeans when they first landed on these shores. Today, the craftsmen of the region are also known for their handmade dance masks, decorative paddles, button blankets and finely-woven cedar bark and spruce root baskets.HIGHLIGHTS:The Stikine River is as much a part of Southeast Alaska’s history as the Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshians who have been a part of this land for thousands of years. In Wrangell, a walking tour includes the ancient Native carvings of Petroglyph Beach, Totem Park, and the Tlingit House on Chief Shakes Island. From there, a jet boat heads into the wilderness of the Tongass National Forest, passing an old homestead where Natives gathered for potlatches, a tent city from the Klondike gold rush, an icefield and glaciers. Daily tours available April–October.Juneau is Alaska’s capital city and has been home to Tlingit and Haida tribes for thousands of years. Tours and attractions focus on Juneau’s history as seen through the eyes of an Alaska Native, and include stories of how the Raven made the first people, the first white settlers’ meeting with the Auke Kwaan and Taku tribes, the traditions of Indian villages along the way, and a stop at Mendenhall Glacier, the famous ice river reported in John Muir's 1879 journal entry. Daily tours May-September. The Alaska State Museum, accessible from most downtown hotels has a spectacular collection of Alaska artifacts.Saxman Native Village, located two miles south of Ketchikan, has more than two- dozen cedar totem poles, comprising one of the world's largest collections of totemic art in the world. This award-winning tour includes a look inside the carving center with live demonstrations by master carvers. Other highlights: a brief introduction to the Tlingit language, Native culture of Alaska and Southeast, life-ways of a clan house, a play presented in the Native storytelling fashion, arts and crafts demonstrations and a performance by the Cape Fox Dance Group. Daily tours May-September.Icy Straight Point, located in Hoonah, Alaska, 35 miles from Juneau, offers visitors a chance to experience true Alaska Native culture and the natural beauty of Alaska. Originally built as a salmon cannery, the buildings have been restored and is a port for major cruise lines and also available to independent travelers. Visitors get a chance to dive into Tlingit history through storytelling, song and dance. At the Heritage Center Theater, visitors can view a tribal dance performance and immerse themselves in some of the cultural legends of the Tlingit. Other activities and excursions, from fishing and kayaking, shopping and the world’s longest ZipRider zipline are also available.SOUTHWEST These maritime people depend on fish, sea otters, seals, and whales for subsistence. The largest single population of Aleuts lives on the Pribilof Islands—St. Paul and St. George—in the Bering Sea. Others remain in the Aleutian Islands, on Kodiak Island and throughout the Alaska Peninsula.HIGHLIGHTS:The Alutiiq Museum and Archaeological Repository in Kodiak provides a general overview on pre-historic Alutiiq life and includes an exhibit gallery, traveling displays, repository and museum store. Call (907) 486-7004 for museum information.The Kodiak Native Tourism Association is a cooperative marketing organization that provides information on a network of Alaska Native attractions, including Native-owned hunting and fishing lodges, bed and breakfasts, cultural tours, archaeological digs. Call (907) 486-9800 or (800) 478-5721.The Kodiak Island Convention & Visitors Bureau provides information on member businesses including the six Native villages on the island, and bear viewing activities on the Katmai Coast. Call (907) 486-4782 or (800) 789-4782.St. Paul Island in the Pribilofs is 300 miles from Alaska's mainland located in the middle of the Bering Sea. This Aleut community is known for having the largest fur seal and bird rookeries in the world. The Aleut Natives here are descendants of Aleutian Islanders who came here with Russian merchants and explorers in the late 1700s to harvest fur seals. Eventually the Russians left, but the Aleuts stayed and today continue their traditional subsistence lifestyle, as well as commercial enterprises such as tourism and fishing. Tours range from 3 days/2 nights to 8 days/7 nights and are available May-August.Unalaska, in the Aleutian Chain, was attacked by Japanese bombers and fighter planes on June 3, 1942, forcing most Aleuts into relocation camps over 1,000 miles away in Southeast Alaska. Only half of them ever returned to Unalaska. Tour highlights might include the Holy Ascension Russian Orthodox Cathedral, World War II history and landmarks and a visit to Dutch Harbor, the adjacent deep-water port that has some of the richest fishing waters in the world. For information on the Southwest region, call the Southwest Alaska Municipal Conference at (907) 562-7380 or visit southwestalaska.com - Resources and Information..FAR NORTHStretching north of the Arctic Circle to the Bering Sea Coast, the Arctic region of Alaska is the state’s most remote and romanticized. Though population centers are spread out across the region, small towns like Barrow and a smattering of even smaller villages are home to strong communities of people. Many rely on marine mammals including walrus and whale for food, and carving the bone and tusks of the mammals is an exacting art form here.Some Athabascans and both Gwitch’in and Kutch’in also live here, using the caribou herds of the region for food and cultural expression.HIGHLIGHTS:Barrow, “The Top of the World,” is located on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, and lies 350 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Attractions include a traditional Eskimo culture program with Eskimo dances by men and women in traditional parkas. These story dances relate tales of hunts and adventures on tundra and ice. Tours also include demonstrations on mask making, skin sewing, fur parkas and games. Native artists show their craftsmanship in ivory, baleen and skins. Daily tours May-September. Call the Barrow city offices at (907) 852-5211.Barrow’s Inupiat Heritage Center offers an environment where the knowledge and expertise of the Inupiat elders is recognized and valued. The library has historical, research, and language materials, as well as rare books. The cultural arts exhibit room has exhibits that show the development of the Inupiat from 20,000 years ago to present. Open daily. Call (907) 852-4594. - Gambell Village on Saint Lawrence Island is just within sight of Russia. Mountains 40 miles to the west lie in Russian Siberia, not North America. The Native Alaskans of Gambell are Siberian Yupik and are more closely related to the Native peoples of Siberia than to those of North America. Known for its abundant seabird populations, Gambell has become a well-known spot for bird-watchers with tour operators offering multi-day excursions for the ultimate bird watching experience. At the local ivory co-op, pieces of ivory are transformed into intricate artwork available for purchase. From Kotzebue or Nome, Gambell is an easy one-day, add-on tour. Call City of Gambell at (907) 985-5927.Kotzebue is one of Alaska’s largest and oldest Inupiat Eskimo villages. Devoted to Inupiat culture, the Northwest Arctic Heritage Center offers an exhibit hall of traditional tools and animals from the region, a gift shop and three audio “storytelling stations” where visitors can listen to different recordings from the area. The center also includes the National Park Service offices. Open daily. Call 907-442-3760.INTERIORThe low, rolling country between the southern slope of the Alaska Range and the northern face of the Brooks Range is Alaska’s version of the outback. Wide-open and wild, the region has few roads. Rather, communities are tucked in along rivers, which Alaska Natives for centuries have used as thoroughfares both in summer and winter. Of the estimated 112,170 people who live here, about 12.5 percent are Eskimo or Athabascan Indian. Fishing the rivers and hunting for caribou remain a way of life.HIGHLIGHTS:The University of Alaska Museum of the North in Fairbanks, the state’s primary repository of natural and cultural history, is internationally recognized for its comprehensive northern collections. The main gallery exhibits provide an overview of Alaska's people, natural resources, and events that have guided the development of the state. Five galleries representing the major ecological regions of Alaska highlight each region's distinct natural and cultural history. Dynamic Aurora is a multi-media presentation at the museum that tells about the mysterious aurora borealis, or northern lights, through lectures, slides and videos, including Native stories and mythology that attempted to explain this incredible natural phenomenon. Open daily year round.Source:https://www.travelalaska.com/Media-Center/Featured-Copy/Alaskan-Native-Culture.aspx

Sure, our neighbors to the east…1) The Sumgait pogrom was a pogrom that targeted the Armenian population of the seaside town of Sumgait in Azerbaijan in late February 1988. The pogrom took place during the early stages of the Karabakh movement. On February 27, 1988, mobs made up of ethnic Azerbaijanis formed into groups and attacked and killed Armenians on the streets and in their apartments; widespread looting and a general lack of concern from police officers allowed the situation to continue for three days.Violence broke on the evening of February 27. The attacking groups were of varying age groups. While the main participants were adult males and even some women, there were also youth students who took part in vandalizing and looting appliances, shoes, and clothing from the Armenians' homes. The mobs entered the apartment buildings and sought out Armenians where they lived. Some took shelter among their Azerbaijani and Russian neighbors, who also risked being attacked by the mobs.Others turned on the television to watch Azerbaijani music concerts and raised the volume to give the effect that they were in fact Azerbaijanis.The pogrom was marked by atrocities and savagery. As Waal describes it, "The roving gangs committed acts of horrific savagery. Several victims were so badly mutilated by axes that their bodies could not be identified." Numerous acts of gang rape and sexual abuse were committed, taking place in both the apartments and publicly on the city streets. An account of one such act that was also corroborated by witnesses described how a crowd stripped naked an Armenian woman and dragged her through the streets. Rumors circulating that Armenian women in hospital maternity wards were having their fetuses disemboweled were later said to be false.Death toll: 32 (official data)200+ (Armenian sources)The lives of many Armenians were protected and saved by their Azerbaijani friends, neighbors or even strangers, who, at the risk of their own lives, let the Armenians hide in their houses or be escorted in their cars out of the city. According to the Armenian witnesses, when the Soviet troops went door-to-door searching for survivors, they managed to collect thousands of Armenians who had been hiding in Azeri households.The BackGroundOn February 20, 1988, tens of thousands of Armenians gathered to demonstrate in Stepanakert's Lenin (now Renaissance) Square to demand that the region be joined to Armenia. On the same day, the Supreme Soviet of Nagorno-Karabakh voted to join the Armenian SSR, a move staunchly opposed by the Soviet Azerbaijani authorities. Gorbachev rejected these claims, invoking Article 78 of the Soviet Constitution, which stated that republics' borders could not be altered without their prior consent.The rallies in Armenia were countered by demonstrations in Baku, during which time strong anti-Armenian sentiments were voiced by citizens and officials alike. One such statement came on February 14, 1988, when the head of the department of Central Committee of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan Asadov, declared "a hundred thousand Azerbaijanis are ready to storm Artsakh (Karabakh) at any time and organize a slaughter there." In the days leading up to the massacre, a leader of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan, Hidayat Orujov, warned Armenians in Sumgait: "If you do not stop campaigning for the unification of Nagorno Karabakh with Armenia, if you don't sober up, 100,000 Azeris from neighboring districts will break into your houses, torch your apartments, rape your women, and kill your children."On February 26 several minor rallies were held at Lenin Square in Sumgait. Explicit calls for violence against Armenians and for their expulsion from Azerbaijan were heard and the crowds were agitated by news of Azerbaijani refugees who had fled Armenia (from the towns Kapan and Masis). Certain individuals told stories of murders and violence purportedly carried out by Armenians against the Azerbaijanis. Soviet authorities would later cast these individuals as agents provocateur. One individual, according to the Soviet press, was later revealed not to be a resident of Kapan, as he had claimed, but a criminal with a prior arrest record.In July 1988, within months of the Sumgait massacre, the United States Senate unanimously passed Amendment 2690 to the Fiscal Year 1989 Foreign Operations Appropriations bill (H.R. 4782), concerning the Karabakh conflict, which called on the Soviet government to "respect the legitimate aspirations of the Armenian people …" and noted that "dozens of Armenians have been killed and hundreds injured during the recent unrests…"On July 7, 1988, the European Parliament passed a resolution condemning the violence against Armenians in Azerbaijan.On July 27, 1990, 130 leading academics and human rights advocates wrote "An Open Letter to International Public Opinion on Anti-Armenian Pogroms in the Soviet Union" published in the New York Times. The letter, which was signed by professors from Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Berkeley, UCLA, Wesleyan University, University of Paris IV Sorbonne and other universities, urged the international community to take action to protect the Armenian community in Azerbaijan.2) The Kirovabad pogrom or the pogrom of Kirovabad was an Azeri-led pogrom that targeted Armenians living in the city of Kirovabad (today called Ganja) in Soviet Azerbaijan during November 1988.An unidentified Armenian press editor said the commander of the Soviet troops asked the Interior Ministry in Moscow for permission to evacuate some of the city's Armenian population of 100,000. The conflict intensified in the fall of 1988, as the Armenians of Kirovabad and the surrounding countryside were driven from their homes and forced to seek safe haven in Armenia. According to Los Angeles Times, an article published on November 27, 1988, "Soviet soldiers have blocked dozens of Azerbaijani attempts to massacre Armenians in their homes in the continuing communal violence in the southern Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, a senior military commander there said Saturday."On November 23, martial law was declared in Kirovabad, meaning that troops could now respond with rifle fire. That same day, an attempt of pogrom against the building of the city's Executive committee took place. During the clashes between the aggressive crowd and the armed forces who tried to keep the order and to defend the Armenian citizens three soldiers were killed, and 67 people were wounded. Hooligans burned down and damaged the military machines.The Soviet authorities confirmed the death of 7 people at the time of the events. This figure included 3 Soviet soldiers, 3 Azerbaijanis and 1 Armenian. Angus Roxburgh during the violence reported that at least six more Armenians were killed due to ethnic rioting in Kirovabad.3) The Maraga massacre was the mass murder of Armenian civilians in the village of Maraga (Maragha) by Azerbaijani troops, which had captured the village on April 10, 1992, in the course of the Nagorno-Karabakh War. The villagers, including men, women, children and elderly, were killed indiscriminately and deliberately, their houses were pillaged and burnt; the village was destroyed. Although estimates of the actual number of people murdered ranges from 50 to 100, according to most sources more than 50 people were killed and a further 53 were taken hostage, 19 of whom were never returned.4) The Baku pogrom was a pogrom directed against the ethnic Armenian inhabitants of Baku, Azerbaijan SSR. From January 12, 1990, a seven-day pogrom broke out against the Armenians civilian population in Baku during which Armenians were beaten, murdered, and expelled from the city. There were also many raids on apartments, robberies and arsons. According to the Human Rights Watch reporter Robert Kushen, "the action was not entirely (or perhaps not at all) spontaneous, as the attackers had lists of Armenians and their addresses". The pogrom of Armenians in Baku was one of the acts of ethnic violence in the context of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, directed against the demands of the Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians to secede from Azerbaijan and unify with Armenia. 90 Armenian civilians were killed and Injured 700.Non-official sources estimate that the number Armenians living on Azerbaijani territory outside Nagorno-Karabakh is around 2,000 to 3,000, and almost exclusively comprises persons married to Azeris or of mixed Armenian-Azeri descent.The number of Armenians who are likely not married to Azeris and are not of mixed Armenian-Azeri descent are estimated at 645 (36 men and 609 women) and more than half (378 or 59 per cent of Armenians in Azerbaijan outside Nagorno-Karabakh) live in Baku and the rest in rural areas. They are likely to be the elderly and sick, and probably have no other family members.Kirovabad pogrom - WikipediaSumgait pogrom - WikipediaMaraga massacre - WikipediaBaku pogrom - Wikipedia