NYU Data Science newsletter – December 17, 2015

GROUP CURATION: N/A

I believe that the field of data vis would benefit from a clear line between art and design. I believe that we need that boundary to judge both forms according to different criteria and therefore more fairly.

Data art, data vis. Who decides what is which? Some data vis projects feel like a third category to me: To artistic to be considered by design questions. But too designed to be considered art and judged as art (for example data journalism). They want to be everything at once.

JavaScript is the lingua franca of the web, the standard way of building applications that run inside the browser. Created in the mid-’90s by an engineer at Netscape—the company that first pushed the web browser into the mainstream—this fairly simple programming language has allowed even those with little coding experience to create dynamic web sites and services. But in recent years, Javascript has evolved into something more. It’s a way of rapidly building applications of almost any kind, from apps that run on iPhones and Android devices to the server software that drives these apps from inside distant computer data centers.

Today, Google pushed JavaScript even further down this road, releasing a “beta” version of Angular 2, a new incarnation of a widely used tool that aims to simplify and streamline the way that coders build apps with JavaScript.

A number of people have written about why messaging matters, from essays on conversational commerce, to lists of invisible apps, to coining the term Assistant-as-a-Service. … It seemed like a good time to jot down some of my thoughts around:

why messaging is an increasingly dominant way to engage on smartphones—with people, with service providers, and with software

where I see opportunity for new players vs. platform expansion

whether the economics are good

who’s playing for the opportunity now

A year ago today, I published my original attempt at mapping the machine intelligence ecosystem. So much has happened since. I spent the last 12 months geeking out on every company and nibble of information I can find, chatting with hundreds of academics, entrepreneurs, and investors about machine intelligence. This year, given the explosion of activity, my focus is on highlighting areas of innovation, rather than on trying to be comprehensive.

The brief video is an introduction to an OpenCon community webcast and will provide a glimpse of where PLOS believes the future of science communication is headed. That future is no longer only about Open Access – it is about Open Data and Open Science.

Health insurers are scooping up huge quantities of personal information in a bid to figure out when you’re likely to get sick — and to design interventions to keep you healthy.

Insurance companies have always had access to your medical records, and in some cases your genetic data, too. Now, they’re paying data miners to sift through information on everything from what model car you drive to how many hours you sleep, from which magazines you read to where you shop and what you buy.

The goal: To decipher patterns that will allow them to steer you away from health emergencies. And to save themselves a whole lot of money in the process.

Nanigans is best-known as a Facebook advertising company, but CEO Ric Calvillo said that by adding MoPub founder Jim Payne to its board of directors, it can grow the “non-Facebook” side of its business.

“Although Facebook’s done so well and we want to continue to be the best advertising automation platform on Facebook, we think there’s an opportunity to be a truly independent platform as an alternative to the Facebook and Google stacks,” Calvillo said.

California on Wednesday unveiled preliminary regulations for autonomous-driving cars, a long-awaited development required before any of the vehicles can be sold to consumers.

The proposed rules hold motorists responsible for obeying traffic laws, regardless of whether they are at the wheel. Deciding if the car or its occupant is responsible for accidents and other mishaps has been at the center of debates over how to regulate driverless cars.

Scientists have long wondered if the human brain contains neural mechanisms specific to music perception. Now, for the first time, MIT neuroscientists have identified a neural population in the human auditory cortex that responds selectively to sounds that people typically categorize as music, but not to speech or other environmental sounds.

“It has been the subject of widespread speculation,” says Josh McDermott, the Frederick A. and Carole J. Middleton Assistant Professor of Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. “One of the core debates surrounding music is to what extent it has dedicated mechanisms in the brain and to what extent it piggybacks off of mechanisms that primarily serve other functions.”

The finding was enabled by a new method designed to identify neural populations from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data. Using this method, the researchers identified six neural populations with different functions, including the music-selective population and another set of neurons that responds selectively to speech.

A new review finds that, 20 years on, the National Institutes of Health hasn’t fulfilled its promise to check whether drugs are safe and effective among people of all backgrounds.

Google Inc. plans to make its self-driving cars unit, which will offer rides for hire, a stand-alone business under the Alphabet Inc. corporate umbrella next year, a person briefed on the company’s strategy said.

Google’s autonomous vehicles have logged more than 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) on public roads, mostly around San Francisco and Austin, Texas, making these cities logical places for launching a service, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the plans are private. The fleets ­– which would include a range of large and small vehicles — could be deployed first in confined areas like college campuses, military bases or corporate office parks, the person said.

At a recent conference on student entrepreneurship in higher education, I was surprised by how many of my peers were struggling to make university-led innovation programs work within academic settings.

The major problem was that they were approaching their problems like school administrators and not like an entrepreneur.

Higher education initiatives aimed at promoting innovation, entrepreneurship, and small business development need to be run like a venture, not like the English department.