NYU Data Science newsletter – December 8, 2015

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When Hanna Wallach learned that Jenn Wortman Vaughan also would be attending a major machine learning conference a decade ago, she was happy just to have another woman to share a hotel room with.

A conversation in that hotel room sparked an idea: What if we held an entire workshop devoted just to the tiny community of women in machine learning?

“We really wanted to showcase the amazing research these women were doing,” Wallach said.

A new center to study the implications of artificial intelligence and try to influence its ethical development has been established at the U.K.’s Cambridge University, the latest sign that concerns are rising about AI’s impact on everything from loss of jobs to humanity’s very existence.

The Department of Homeland Security wants to devote more research and development to data science, according to a new plan to better secure U.S. critical infrastructure.

DHS last week released a list of top priorities for “critical infrastructure security and resilience” R&D, including “harness[ing] the power of data sciences” to protect both physical and virtual systems from attack, including by explosions, chemicals, biological agents, nuclear devices or cyberattack.

Modern metropolises and smart homes will have a big effect on the market for Internet of Things (IoT) technologies next year, predicts a new forecast from Gartner.

In 2016, smart cities will use 1.6 billion connected devices, a 39 percent increase compared to this year. In 2018, Gartner expects that figure to jump to over 3.3 billion things.

IF YOU’VE got a message to keep safe, look to the skies. You could use the afterglow of the big bang to make encryption keys – all you need is a radio telescope.

The security of many systems relies on generating large random numbers to act as keys to encrypt information. Computers can use algorithms to spawn these keys, but they aren’t truly random, so another computer armed with the same algorithm could potentially duplicate the key.

An alternative is to rely on physical randomness, like the weather, the thermal noise on a chip or the timing of someone’s keystrokes. Now Jeffrey Lee and Gerald Cleaver at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, have taken this to the extreme by suggesting we use the thermal radiation left over from the big bang – the cosmic microwave background.

Dr. Lucas Joppa, Scientist at Microsoft Research discusses the changing and increasing role of data in conservation. He discusses the difference between ‘big data’ and ‘small data’ as well as the amazing potential and limitations of what data can do. He also explores Microsoft Research’s models such as the Madingley Model and CCF1.0 and he highlights how these can be applied for conservation planning.

WWF is always looking for new ways to advance the scientific foundation that supports our global conservation work. Learn more about the Fuller Symposium and the Kathryn Fuller Science for Nature Fund: worldwildlife.org/initiatives/fuller-science-for-nature-fund [video, 17:38]

Companies doing data analytics next year will focus on refining data, move away from filling huge data warehouses, and start using external sources to gain richer insights, according to analysts.

As data analysis depends heavily on how well data is cleansed and transformed, more organisations will look to into how they can further refine their data next year, said Mark Koh from Frost & Sullivan.

The [Religious Landscape Survey] surveys more than 35,000 Americans from all 50 states about their religious affiliations, beliefs and practices, and social and political views.

V is for Verily.

Alphabet, the company formerly known as Google, revealed a new name for the company’s Life Sciences division: Verily.

Alphabet made the branding announcement with a video and a company website that went live on Monday. In it, Verily laid out a multidisciplinary approach to health and longevity, describing disease as a “continuum” that will be fought with experts from different fields and divisions working on hardware such as medical devices, software that might use algorithms to look for health patterns, as well as clinical studies like the Baseline Study of health and disease.

For those of us who have enjoyed access to the Internet for decades now, it can be pretty difficult to remember our first online interactions. But there are plenty of people for whom that feeling is recent and powerful: In just the past five years, more than a billion users have connected to the Internet for the first time. Whether on a desktop or a smartphone, through broadband or Google’s high-altitude balloon Wi-Fi network, they are only now experiencing how profound the simple act of getting online can be. Consider, for instance, that a girl in a schoolhouse in rural Indonesia may read this article on a tablet today — something that was impossible for her as recently as a year ago. Her experience online, when she leaves this article and ventures out onto the rest of the Web, is one that holds great potential.