NYU Data Science newsletter – March 23, 2016

GROUP CURATION: N/A

A new supercomputer simulation of blood moving around the entire human body compares extremely well with real-world flow measurements, researchers say.

Engaging respondents with interesting measurement tasks. Involving clients with visualizations of actionable findings. Challenging marketing research to provide a theoretical basis for its measurement procedures.

Judith Kornfeld is the chief business and operations officer for ORCATECH, an R&D center formed in combination with the biomedical engineering and neurology departments at Oregon Health and Science University.

Her group has developed a system for clinical research based on remote sensing and pervasive computing whereby data is collected unobtrusively and continuously. ORCATECH installs sensors in patient homes, rather than outfitting patients with wearable devices, to monitor patient activity. We chatted with Judith at the Partnerships In Clinical Trials conference in Hamburg, Germany, to discuss how technology is transforming clinical development.

Recently I wrote about a new service being offered by tech giant IBM to utilize machine learning in the field of radiology.

The service, called Avicenna, hopes to identify anatomical features and abnormalities in medical images, and by taking this analysis and cross-referencing it with the patient’s medical record provide support for a successful diagnosis.

Cities are complex environments. Planning interventions that borrow principles from theoretical physics could help to improve peoples’ lives.

[Matthew] MacWilliams studies authoritarianism — not actual dictators, but rather a psychological profile of individual voters that is characterized by a desire for order and a fear of outsiders. People who score high in authoritarianism, when they feel threatened, look for strong leaders who promise to take whatever action necessary to protect them from outsiders and prevent the changes they fear.

So MacWilliams naturally wondered if authoritarianism might correlate with support for Trump.

He polled a large sample of likely voters, looking for correlations between support for Trump and views that align with authoritarianism. What he found was astonishing: Not only did authoritarianism correlate, but it seemed to predict support for Trump more reliably than virtually any other indicator

So Apple has confirmed that they are indeed in advanced talks with their main GPU supplier as a potential acquisition, but said that they are not going forward with it at this time.

Why are GPUs important? Historically they’ve been used to process many many triangles necessary for 60 frames per second games on iPhones. But increasingly, they will be used for the intense artificial intelligence tasks required for machine and deep learning.

In anticipation of more clinical trials thanks to breakthroughs in precision medicine, the FDA and NIH are providing additional guidance to the research community.

As the Precision Medicine Initiative starts to increase the amount and scope of medical research, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and FDA are seeking public comment on a draft template that provides guidance to investigators looking to document the results of their clinical trials.

Science is the best method that we’ve found for seeking truth. I trust science, but I don’t trust scientists. Science itself demands that we doubt and therefore scrutinize the work of scientists. This is fundamental to the scientific method. Science is too important to allow scientists to turn it into an enterprise that primarily serves the interests of scientists. Many have sounded the alarm in recent years that this tendency exists and must be corrected. BBBC Radio 4 recently aired a two-episode series by science journalist Alok Jha titled Saving Science from the Scientists. Jha does an incredible job of exposing some of ways in which science is currently failing us, not because its methods are flawed, but because scientists often fail to follow them.

In the highly complex world of risk management, mistakes, shortcuts and a lack of planning or regulation can lead to grave consequences if and when disaster strikes. But the digital revolution of the past several decades has contributed a number of innovations to help risk managers craft more effective and airtight strategies for facing such situations.

At a recent conference marking the 30th anniversary of Wharton’s Risk Management and Decision Processes Center, experts in the field discussed new products and solutions for addressing challenges associated with current and emerging risks. Panelists noted that science and technology play a key role in improving the modeling of risks and developing strategies for reducing future losses and aiding recovery.

“A poor decision can turn a natural disaster into what in retrospect looks very much like a man-made catastrophe,” University of Pennsylvania Provost Vincent Price said in his introductory remarks to the conference.

The goal of a research compendium is to provide a standard and easily recognisable way for organising a reproducible research project with R. A research compendium is ideal for projects that result in the publication of a paper because then readers of the paper can access the code and data that generated the results in the paper. A research compendium is a convention for how you organise your research artefacts into directories. The guiding principle in creating a research compendium is to organise your files following conventions that many people use. Following these conventions will help other people instantly familiarise themselves with the structure of your project, and also support tool building which takes advantage of the shared structure.

Some of the earliest examples of this approach can be found in Robert Gentleman and Duncan Temple Lang’s 2004 paper “Statistical Analyses and Reproducible Research” Bioconductor Project Working Papers and Gentleman’s 2005 article “Reproducible Research: A Bioinformatics Case Study” in Statistical Applications in Genetics and Molecular Biology. Since then there has been a substantial increase in the use of R as a research tool in many fields, and numerous improvements in the ease of making R packages. This means that making a research compendium based on an R package is now a practical solution to the challenges of organising and communicating research results for many scientists.

As we have become more mature, we realized that the best form of #dataviz #infographics storytelling is often static

-@archietse

The social graph is made up of nodes and edges, or objects and associations, that all have a list of attributes. A typical query on the graph starts at a node and fetches all edges of a given type for that node. For example, the query could start at a node that represents you and fetch all your friends in a particular order, such as the order in which you friended them.

The way we query this information has evolved from memcached and MySQL into a system called TAO (The Associations and Objects server) which was optimized for a very high volume of single-hop queries.