NYU Data Science newsletter – July 8, 2015

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Over the past year and a half the ClojureScript community has collectively become the industry’s leading experts on building effective and compelling user experiences over immutable data. However, while immutability and functional programming dramatically reduce the complexity of client side code there is more work left to do, especially at the boundary between clients and servers. There are a growing set of technologies and ideas that can complete the story that deserve assessment. We’ll examine Relay (Facebook), JSONGraph (Netflix), and Datomic (Cognitect) and see how these technologies are guiding the design of the next version of Om, a popular React binding for ClojureScript.

DIGITS is an interactive deep learning development tool for data scientists and researchers, designed for rapid development and deployment of an optimized deep neural network. NVIDIA introduced DIGITS in March 2015, and today we are excited to announce the release of DIGITS 2, which includes automatic multi-GPU scaling. Whether you are developing an optimized neural network for a single data set or training multiple networks on many data sets, DIGITS 2 makes it easier and faster to develop optimized networks in parallel with multiple GPUs.

Friends, peers and colleagues, lend me your bandwidth and 10 minutes of your time. Gather around and let me tell you about the greatest, most interesting and fantastically diverse Big Data and Data community right here in our very midst on the amazing LinkedIn community.

We have a new Big Data/Data group, and the group is aptly named The Big Data Contrarians, and yet it is neither a ‘me too’ group, of which there are too many to mention, or a ‘belief circle’, of which the less said, the better. No, The Big Data Contrarians group is a place for cool opinion pieces, creative abrasion, practical insight and (within the realms of the possible) BS free comment.

Prof. Laura McLay, at the University of Wisconsin Madison, discusses her research using mathematics to route ambulances.

For every musician who’s ever wanted their SoundCloud track to sound like it was produced by Timbaland, LANDR, a startup applying big data analytics to music mastering, has raised $6.2 million to build just the tool.

Warner Music Group led the Series A round, joined by previous investors Real Ventures and YUL Ventures. Rapper and record producer Nas, Plus Eight Private Equity (a fund started by DJs Richie Hawtin, Tiga, John Acquaviva and Pete Tong), and HDGL also participated.

Three foundations pledged $6M over the next three years to Project Jupyter, an open-source software project that supports scientific computing and data science across a wide range of programming languages via a large, public, open and inclusive community.

Fernando Perez of University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Brian Granger of California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo will lead the project at their institutions. Perez and Granger’s efforts with Project Jupyter are the result of their work developing IPython, a popular user interface for interactive computing across multiple programming languages.

With this award from the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, these researchers will expand and improve the capabilities of the Jupyter Notebook, a web-based platform that allows scientists, researchers and educators to combine live code, equations, narrative text and rich media into a single, interactive document.

The limitations of algorithmic curation of news and culture has prompted a return to the use of actual humans to select, edit, and explain. Who knows, this might spread to another less traditional media: apps.

Michael Stonebraker has made fundamental contributions to database systems, which are one of the critical applications of computers today and contain much of the world’s important data.