NYU Data Science newsletter – March 15, 2016

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When you live and work in Silicon Valley, you grow accustomed to a kind of semantic saturation from overused buzzwords. Terms such as “disruptive,” “innovative,” and “mission driven” come to mind—all favorites among Valley startups, whether they’re building operating systems for robotic arms or phone-based bowling games.

So it captures your attention when the CEO of one of the most buzzed-about of those startups sidesteps that kind of language and instead explains his company’s decision-making process as “80% Piaget and 20% Hobbes.”

The CEO is Alex Karp of Palantir Technologies, the Palo Alto–based data analytics company that may or may not have helped track down Osama bin Laden. Karp holds a Ph.D. in social theory, which explains why that Piaget-Hobbes formula (more on that in a moment) figures in his view of how to manage and give purpose to a business. And like the formula, Palantir’s version of the tech industry’s “change the world” ethos becomes more distinctive, and more of a departure from the Silicon Valley norm, as you dig into it more deeply.

Palantir, currently valued at about $20 billion, is one of tech’s biggest “unicorns.” Its two main products, Gotham and Metropolis, serve the same basic purpose—bringing together massive, disparate data sources and scouring them for connections and patterns that aren’t obvious to the human eye.

A small group of computer scientists and AI experts at the University of Massachusetts Amherst whose early work in machine learning helped to shape AlphaGo’s approach are enjoying the machine’s victory.

Sridhar Mahadevan, co-director of the Autonomous Learning Laboratory at the College of Information and Computer Sciences at UMass Amherst with professor emeritus Andrew Barto, says, “This is a huge breakthrough for AI and machine learning. AlphaGo was not programmed explicitly to play Go, but learned to play using an approach called reinforcement learning, or RL, pioneered here at UMass Amherst several decades ago by Andy Barto, considered the father of RL, and his students, principally Rich Sutton. Many of the top researchers in the field today are his students. So this achievement was made possible by research done at UMass Amherst computer science, and it’s a source of special pride for us all.”

… A California nonprofit called The Earth Genome thinks it can change that, working with the world’s second largest chemical company, Dow, to prove the power of its data-crunching tool.

“Just because scientists make valuations, doesn’t make that [calculation] valuable,” says Glen Low, a former consultant who co-founded The Earth Genome with Steve McCormick, former president of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and The Nature Conservancy, in 2014. “They publish information that says, well this is what this part of nature is worth. But you have to ask: did anyone use that information to make a better decision which led to better conservation of that resource or to better outcomes for the corporation?”

More Environmental Data Science:

Researchers propose satellite mission to improve understanding of global vegetation change (University of Minnesota, March 7)

An API for the World’s Weather & Climate Data (Planet OS, March 14)

New climate science innovation center opens downtown (WLOS, Asheville NC, March 11)

Can a long-dead reverend help save Amazonia’s freshwater dolphins? (Science, ScienceInsider, March 11)

Seafood CSI (Hakai Magazine, March 8)

A Computer With a Great Eye Is About to Transform Botany (WIRED Design, March 17)

What does big data know about you?

Quite a lot.

Every time we use a computer, access our phones, or open an app on a tablet, we’re leaving a digital trail. Most people are vaguely aware that Google knows what they’ve searched for, or that Facebook knows who their friends are, but it goes much, much deeper than that.

Bloomberg’s Mark Halperin and John Heilemann reports on how real-time data helps campaigns on “Bloomberg West.”

The pilgrimage to HIMSS [Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society conference] has once again come to pass. While certainly not a spiritual pilgrimage – after all it did take place in Sin City – it is a trek into the depths of healthcare IT (HIT). No other venue in the U.S., brings together such a broad swath of HIT leaders, especially from the vendor community – after all this is a trade show – thus the annual pilgrimage for us is well worth it.

As we have done in years past, Chilmark Research sent a large team to HIMSS to get a sense of where the market is today and where it is headed.

… He washes a few of the filaments with a squirt of distilled water and tucks them in a test tube with an enzyme solution for later genetic tests. If all goes well, the telltale DNA inside the stringy bits will reveal whether the soup contained shark species banned under international law.

Genetic identification has become faster, cheaper, and more reliable in recent years, with advances coming so quickly that even enterprising undergraduates like Ayer can now fashion themselves as DNA detectives. In the not-too-distant future, next-generation sequencing—which allows machines to read millions of gene sequences in one batch—and the promise of a rapid or instant DNA test will transform much of what we know about life in the sea and how fast we can know it.

A disarmingly simple model of ecology does everything well — except for predicting how rapidly nature can change. Can it become more realistic while still avoiding biology’s messy complexities?

Researchers from a NASA-sponsored working group on satellite monitoring of global terrestrial biodiversity, including University of Minnesota associate professor Jeannine Cavender-Bares, have called for a satellite mission to track global changes in plant functional diversity.

The mission, proposed in an article published last week in the scientific journal Nature Plants, would improve predictions of future change and fill critical gaps in our knowledge of the pace and consequences of global change, according to the authors. It would extend — literally to another level — research Cavender-Bares, an associate professor in the College of Biological Sciences, has underway to improve our ability to monitor vegetation changes on Earth using aircraft-based remote sensing.

Follow the leaders in Data science, engineering, and analytics on Twitter. Listed below in alphabetical order.

Lloyd S. Shapley, who shared the 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science for work on game theory that has been used to study subjects as diverse as matching couples and allocating costs, died on Saturday in Tucson. He was 92.

How do you select participants for a workshop? That’s the question I asked myself around this time last year. To me, going through this became one of the most informative experiences of the entire organization process, which is why I am devoting a whole (probably very long) blog post to this issue. Bear with me; I hope it will be useful.

There is no question that data are big: 2.5 quintillion new bytes are added every day from our keyboards, sensors, entertainment, and medical scans, to name but a few. Data scientists have begun refining tools to encourage civilians to join them in extracting important insights from the aggregation and analysis of big data sets.

NYU Tandon Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Enrico Bertini and his graduate student Cristian Felix recently received a $35,000 Knight Foundation Prototype Fund grant to do just that for RevEx, which can perform faceted searches and analyze a combination of text and data across multiple domains. The Knight Foundation, which supports investigative journalism, will support refinements to RevEx that will enable reporters to elicit stories, but the appeal of the tool reaches well beyond the Fourth Estate.

… I’m always happy to talk to scientists about these matters. But recently I’ve gotten a bit leery about just how far their enthusiasm for communication is getting. I’m noticing a trend in pieces with headlines such as “Why Scientists Should Write for the Public” and “Science and the Public: Why Every Lab Should Tweet.”

Note the use of the word should.

That word transforms a voluntary act of joy into a dreaded mandatory task. Expecting all scientists to engage with the public non-stop also ignores some fundamental facts about science communication in the twenty-first century.

For one thing, your average reader is drowning in an ocean of things to read, watch, and listen to.

Collected series of YouTube videos with source code on GitHub.