NYU Data Science newsletter – January 19, 2016

GROUP CURATION: N/A

Despite a surge in policy and research attention to conflict and bullying among adolescents, there is little evidence to suggest that current interventions reduce school conflict. Using a large-scale field experiment, we show that it is possible to reduce conflict with a student-driven intervention. By encouraging a small set of students to take a public stance against typical forms of conflict at their school, our intervention reduced overall levels of conflict by an estimated 30%. Network analyses reveal that certain kinds of students (called “social referents”) have an outsized influence over social norms and behavior at the school. The study demonstrates the power of peer influence for changing climates of conflict, and suggests which students to involve in those efforts.

Tighter compliance regulations have challenged financial institutions in a variety of ways. Yet those who adapt best may enjoy a distinct competitive advantage.

Planning to surprise the love of your life with a romantic trip to Bali? Or do you really want to go backpacking this summer in Costa Rica in order to learn how to surf? Chances are that the biggest cost of the whole trip will be flying to the destination of choice. While most of the people argue that there is not much you can do to prevent this cost, everybody knows that booking in the last weeks will cost you a lot of money. So what if we told you that the price of the same flight is moving down and up the whole time prior to departure? What if we told you that, with the right timing of booking, you could save a lot of money? And what if we told you that the price of the flight is not standard but is influenced by a lot of different factors (for instance the month of the year the flight is departing, as denoted in the graph below where vertically the average price can be seen from Amsterdam to Curacao, horizontally the amount of days before departure of a the flights and colours denote different departure months).

Would you still book your flight whenever you feel like it, or be more conscious about this timing?

… Mr. Craine, a 28-year-old tech support worker in Washington, D.C., uses Apple Pay at the stores and restaurants that accept it. About 20 times a month, he turns to Venmo, a digital wallet for transferring money from one person to another, to pay his share of rent, meals, groceries and utility bills. To refinance his student loans last year, he went to an online lending start-up, Earnest.

Mr. Craine’s money choices point to the millennial-led shift toward new digital financial services, a change in behavior that threatens to upend the consumer banking industry. The popularity of the services has left the major banks rushing to adapt, even as they have regained their footing after the financial crisis.

If the banks fail to meet the challenge, Brian Moynihan, the chief executive of Bank of America, warned in November, “it may allow part of our industry to be forever taken away from us.”

Google’s robotics division has been plagued by low morale and a lack of leadership since the unit’s founder left abruptly in 2014. Now Alphabet is cleaning it up.

Over the last two months, Alphabet, the new holding company that separated Google from its collection of speculative projects, has reframed the robots effort, moving it from a stand-alone division inside Google to a piece of the X research division. The company has also hired Hans Peter Brondmo, a technology industry veteran who last worked at Nokia, to help with management.

Cornell University’s Johnson School of Management is developing a digital technology program for MBA and computer science students with help from companies including Twitter, Yahoo and Amazon, BusinessBecause has learnt.

The final list of firms supporting the course is still being finalized but potential project sponsors include Silicon Valley’s Salesforce, LinkedIn, and EY.

We welcome submissions on any topic, but we are especially interested in:

computational social science in industry

computer-assisted text analysis and natural language processing

network analysis

large-scale experiments

causal inference and computational methods

science and technology studies approaches to computational science work

Deadline for submissions is Sunday, January 31.

The Program in Quantitative Social Science (QSS) seeks one or two postdoctoral research fellows for full-time appointment during the 2016-2017 academic year. The fellows will work with Assistant Professor of Government Brendan Nyhan and will be housed in and affiliated with QSS, an interdisciplinary program that integrates modern statistical and computational research techniques with contemporary social science questions. Applicants should have a proven record of research success; excellent writing and organizational skills; and expertise in experimental design, applied statistics, and/or computational social science.

Applications will be reviewed starting on February 1, 2016.

The Data Science Studies (DSS) group at New York University, UC Berkeley, and Univeristy of Washington, part of the Moore and Sloan Data Science Environment (MSDSE), together with collaborators from The Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, & Society (CSTMS) at UC Berkeley, are organizing a thematic track on Critical Data Studies for the 4s/EASST Conference BCN-2106 Science + Technology by Other Means: Exploring Collectives, Spaces, and Futures in Barcelona, August 31–September 3, 2016.

We invite papers investigating data-driven techniques in academic research and analytic industries and the consequences of implementing data­-driven products and processes. Papers utilizing computational methods or ethnography with theorization of technology, social power, or politics are encouraged.

Deadline for the abstract submissions to open tracks is Sunday, February 21, 2016.

We want GitLab to be the best place for any software project, whether open source or not, whether big or small.

The letter of GitHub’s open source community is clearly not addressed to us, but we’re thinking a lot about the issues that were mentioned in it. We see many of these things happening and have been working on them for a long time, not in the least because we develop on a busy public issue tracker ourselves.

Here we would like to share our thoughts about these issues and what we’re planning to do to make things better with GitLab.