NYU Data Science newsletter – June 5, 2015

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In February, computer scientist Mark Howison was preparing to analyse RNA extracted from two dozen siphonophores — marine animals closely related to jellyfish and coral. But the local high-performance computer at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, was not back up to full reliability after maintenance. So Howison fired up Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud and bid on a few ‘spot instances’ — vacant computing capacity that Amazon offers to bidders at a discounted price. After about two hours of fiddling, he had configured a virtual machine to run his software, and had uploaded the siphonophore sequences. Fourteen hours and US$61 later, the analysis was done.

Which parts of your daily routine have the greatest impact on your mood? Do you wake up happier when you sleep more, or exercise more? What can you do to improve your mood?

At Jawbone, we strive to improve the overall wellness of our users by helping them track, analyze, and improve their health. We also provide a platform for our users to track another aspect of their wellness – their mood. In our UP app, users can log when they’re feeling “Amazing”, “Totally Done”, or anything in-between. Hundreds of thousands of UP users have used the app to keep a log of their mood through the past year.

A great idea, a fantastic initial team, and a round coming together?—?what next? How do you find office space? How do you run payroll? In this post, I’ll go over the “stack” for getting your company up and running.

The sport of training software to act intelligently just got its first cheating scandal. Last month Chinese search company Baidu announced that its image recognition software had inched ahead of Google’s on a standardized test of accuracy. On Tuesday the company admitted that it achieved those results by breaking the rules of that test.

Chinese hackers are suspected of carrying out a “massive breach” of the personal data of nearly four million US government workers, officials said.

Elizabeth Churchill, a Director of User Experience at Google, is an applied social scientist working in the areas of human computer interaction, computer mediated communication, mobile/ubiquitous computing, and social media. Prior to her current position, her roles have included Director of Human Computer Interaction at eBay Research Labs in San Jose, California and Principal Research Scientist and Research Manager at Yahoo! in Santa Clara, California.

A psychologist by training, Churchill holds a BS in Experimental Psychology and an MS in Knowledge Based Systems from the University of Sussex, and a PhD in Cognitive Science from the University of Cambridge. She has helped to create online collaboration tools, mobile applications, and public media installations that promote collaboration and communication. Her current work focuses on the design of developer tools for device ecosystems.

Facebook is opening a new artificial intelligence lab in Paris after building a dedicated AI team that spans its offices in New York and Silicon Valley.

The New York University professor who oversees the company’s AI work, Yann LeCun, was born and educated in Paris. LeCun tells WIRED that he and the company are interested in tapping the research talent available in Europe.

NYU Center for Data Science is a sponsor of SciPy 2015.

Two CDS researchers have accepted talks:

Brian McFee, Librosa: Audio and Music Signal Analysis in Python

Andreas Mueller, PyStruct – Structured Prediction in Python