NYU Data Science newsletter – December 9, 2015

GROUP CURATION: N/A

Stitching together a live world map from many different satellite images lets algorithms keep an eye on the health of crops and problems like flooding.

This free data science curriculum is organized into 5 units and a capstone project spread over 12 weeks, and is made up entirely of freely-available online resources. Units cover probability and statistics, data analysis, intro to R, data visualization, data wrangling, and analytics. Maybe you can benefit from this!

Science is competitive—very competitive. We compete with our scientific peers for funding. Departments and institutions compete for the best talent. There can even be competition between colleagues within the same lab. The currency of success is high-impact publications. Principal Investigators need to publish as senior author in order to obtain funding and secure tenure, and students and postdocs need first author (ideally first first author) publications in order to some day receive a tenure-track position. Given that competition is both intense and widespread at every level of professional science, it is a subject worth giving serious thought.

… alternatives to an MBA are multiplying in business schools, as increasing numbers of specialized master’s degree programs offer a quick ticket to a job. Since around 2009, top schools have been adding such programs at a dizzying pace, both in traditional fields such as finance and marketing as well as in hot fields such as business analytics and big data and a broad spectrum of other business niches.

Half of the top-25 schools have unveiled new specialized master’s programs in the past three years, and they’ve been attracting huge numbers of applicants. Globally, more than a fifth of prospective business students are focused exclusively on specialized master’s programs, according to the Graduate Management Admission Council.

If you’ve never heard your therapist use the phrase “it sounds like,” well it may be time to find a new therapist.

Researchers have shown that an automated computer system using only audio recordings of sessions can effectively evaluate the level of empathy shown by a psychotherapist.

“It’s picked up as a strong indicator, but it’s not the only way to show empathy,” said the University of Southern California’s Panayiotis Georgiou of the phrase, “it sounds like.” “There are other things like ‘what I hear you saying.’”

… The unprecedented advancements in AI research this year can be attributed to a confluence of nerdy factors. For one, cloud computing infrastructure is vastly more powerful and affordable, with the ability to process complex information. There are also more plentiful datasets and free or inexpensive software development tools for researchers to work with. Thanks to this, a crucial class of learning technology, known as neural networks, have gone from being prohibitively expensive to relatively cheap.

That’s led to rapid uptake by the tech industry’s largest companies, including Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. Each operates its own AI lab that conducts important research in the field and publishes much of it for the academic community to build upon. This year, Google researchers nabbed the cover of scientific journal Nature with a system that can learn to play and master old Atari games without directions. Facebook built a way to let computers describe images to blind people; Microsoft showed off a new Skype system that can automatically translate from one language to another; and IBM singled out AI as one of its greatest potential growth areas.

Transformative innovation takes ambitious support from both the government and the private sector. That’s why we’re partnering with the U.S. Department of Transportation to create the Smart City Challenge. With this public-private partnership, we are going to enable the most innovative, ambitious and forward-thinking city in America to show just how practical and rewarding it can be to start transitioning to lower carbon, cleaner energy sources.

Deadline for high-level description of author’s vision of a Smart City is February 4, 2016.

Some dismiss them as “slacktivists,” but a new study in PLOS One finds that these peripheral players actually play a critical role in extending the reach of social movements — even doubling them.

Led by Professor Sandra González-Bailón of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and Pablo Barberá from New York University, the study analyzed tens of millions of tweets surrounding a few specific social protests: the 2013 Gezi Park protests in Turkey, and the 2012 United for Global Change campaign, which was led by the Indignados (Spain) and the Occupy movements. [video, 2:27]