NYU Data Science newsletter – May 8, 2015

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… [Jeff] Hawkins believes that the brain’s structure holds the keys for the next generation of computers that will interpret our world with far more insight than our eyes and ears ever could. I chatted with Hawkins recently about how the biggest opportunities in deep learning all circle back to the human brain.

A new solution for big data in form of open source technology titled Myriad, built by MapR and Mesosphere will make it easier to run Hadoop workloads, right on top of Mesos, a popular cluster management software. Myriad will allow the YARN resource scheduled to run on top of Mesos.

Today our very own José A. “jao” Ortega will be presenting on ‘The Past, Present, and Future of Machine Learning APIs’ at the APIDays Mediterranea & API Words event taking place in Barcelona, Spain. This event is part of an independent conference series dedicated to APIs, Natural Language Processing and Language Technology. During the two-day conference representatives from startups, corporations and those involved in the API industry will have a chance to discuss, learn and share about the future and business of APIs.

After sitting in on UC Irvine Professor Anima Anandkumar’s Strata + Hadoop World 2015 in San Jose presentation, I wrote a post urging the data community to build tensor decomposition libraries for data science. The feedback I’ve gotten from readers has been extremely positive. During the latest episode of the O’Reilly Data Show Podcast, I sat down with Anandkumar to talk about tensor decomposition, machine learning, and the data science program at UC Irvine. [audio, 31:14]

When any species goes extinct, there is a loss of information from the Earth’s evolutionary history. However, for extinctions caused by anthropogenic (human) impacts on the environment, there is some concern among scientists that more evolutionary history may be lost than in past extinction events.

This is a challenging comparison to make because past extinction events are tracked using the fossil record, whereas current extinction events are tracked using what are called “molecular phylogenies,” which are based on DNA sequencing.

Shazam’s VP of product Cait O’Riordan’s talks about the app’s 100 million active users.

“The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race,” Stephen Hawking warns. Elon Musk fears that the development of artificial intelligence, or AI, may be the biggest existential threat humanity faces. Bill Gates urges people to beware of it.

Dread that the abominations people create will become their masters, or their executioners, is hardly new. But voiced by a renowned cosmologist, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and the founder of Microsoft—hardly Luddites—and set against the vast investment in AI by big firms like Google and Microsoft, such fears have taken on new weight. With supercomputers in every pocket and robots looking down on every battlefield, just dismissing them as science fiction seems like self-deception. The question is how to worry wisely.

Most people use social media as a daily news source. That leads to concerns about a ‘filter bubble’ – if you source most of your news from friends, will you only see information skewed to a particular ideology?

According to Facebook’s newest research, conducted from July 2014 to January 2015, that may not be the case. The study, published in Science, found that most people have friends with opposing political views, and that the content in their feeds is in line with that diversity.

Taking place Friday, September 25, NYC Media Lab’s Annual Summit is a crash course in the best thinking, projects, and talent in digital media and communications across the City’s universities. The demo showcase will feature more than 100 digital media projects from students and faculty in NYC and beyond.

This is an opportunity to share your prototypes, research, and startups in a trade show-style environment to a gathering of 800+ executives, technologists, and venture capitalists from NYC Media Lab’s community.

Deadline for first round of submissions: mid-June