NYU Data Science newsletter – May 16, 2016

GROUP CURATION: N/A

Better data, more sophisticated data integration and the growing role of ad tech and marketing clouds will continue to fuel the increase in advertising’s share of total marketing spend and total brand revenue.

Today, for instance, it is easier than ever to create a privacy-protected, single-source database that allows advertisers to compare the purchase activity of individuals who have seen the ad with the purchase activity of individuals with a very similar profile but who have not seen the ad. This not only helps advertisers understand the ROI of their advertising; it also helps them improve the productivity of their future advertising spending. In fact, our own work for our clients suggests that advertisers can typically increase advertising ROI by 15 percent or more by applying what they learn from these types of data analyses.

Harry Brignull, a user-experience consultant in Britain who helps websites and apps develop consumer-friendly features, has a professional bone to pick with sites that seem to maneuver people into signing up for services they might not actually want.

He even has a name for the exploitative techniques: “dark patterns.” To him, these are debased versions of the typical sign-up, sharing, shopping, checkout and download processes that are standard practice online.

“It’s a term for patterns that are manipulative, that you are doing on purpose to get one over on users,” Mr. Brignull said when I recently called him.

Nearly one in two Internet users say privacy and security concerns have now stopped them from doing basic things online — such as posting to social networks, expressing opinions in forums or even buying things from websites, according to a new government survey released Friday.

This chilling effect, pulled out of a survey of 41,000 U.S. households who use the Internet, show the insecurity of the Web is beginning to have consequences that stretch beyond the direct fall-out of an individual losing personal data in breach. The research suggests some consumers are reaching a tipping point where they feel they can no longer trust using the Internet for everyday activities.

Digitization has the power to transform whole industries—not least banking, where technological innovation is among the forces behind the recent wave of profound change. Incumbents have been busy rebuilding the financial system and complying with new rules and regulations in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Meanwhile, fintech start-ups have moved swiftly from the sector’s periphery toward its core. In 2015, global investment in fintech companies totaled nearly $20 billion,1 confirming a continued interest within the venture-capital community and a growing appreciation among incumbents of the sector’s importance (exhibit).

The study of networks by data scientists is leading to new business models that may someday result in innovative drug therapies keyed to individual patients, said Jennifer Tour Chayes, managing director and distinguished scientist at Microsoft Research. Research into the networks that regulate human genes could, for example, lead to the development of new, personalized drug therapies to fight cancer and other diseases, said Chayes during a presentation at the inaugural Women in Data Science (WiDS) Conference at Stanford University on Nov. 2, 2015. Chayes also noted that the data centers that support cloud computing consume 5 percent of the electricity used in the United States. Better algorithms are needed “so we won’t have to keep pumping oil out of the ground,” she said.

There are growing discontinuities between the research practices of data science and established tools of research ethics regulation. Some of the core commitments of existing research ethics regulations, such as the distinction between research and practice, cannot be cleanly exported from biomedical research to data science research. These discontinuities have led some data science practitioners and researchers to move toward rejecting ethics regulations outright. These shifts occur at the same time as a proposal for major revisions to the Common Rule — the primary regulation governing human-subjects research in the U.S. — is under consideration for the first time in decades. We contextualize these revisions in long-running complaints about regulation of social science research, and argue data science should be understood as continuous with social sciences in this regard. The proposed regulations are more flexible and scalable to the methods of non-biomedical research, but they problematically exclude many data science methods from human-subjects regulation, particularly uses of public datasets. The ethical frameworks for big data research are highly contested and in flux, and the potential harms of data science research are unpredictable. We examine several contentious cases of research harms in data science, including the 2014 Facebook emotional contagion study and the 2016 use of geographical data techniques to identify the pseudonymous artist Banksy. To address disputes about human-subjects research ethics in data science, critical data studies should offer a historically nuanced theory of “data subjectivity” responsive to the epistemic methods, harms and benefits of data science and commerce.

At the close of the Second World War, the United States government embarked on an enormous artistic enterprise. It is estimated to have cost nearly $3 billion and, at its height, employed more than 2,000 people. I am talking about the topographic mapping program of the United States Geological Survey. It was an opus of Whitmanesque proportion, a heroic rendering of the American landscape; every last whorl and hachure and dotted line of actual topography — not to mention the name of every last desert wash, old mine or glorified goat track — was exhaustively cataloged. This 54,000-tile mosaic was not, of course, done in the cause of aesthetics, but it nevertheless represents as gorgeous and complete a depiction of the country as any ever made.

For the past number of years, I have been collecting the U.S.G.S.’s maps, treating them as eminently affordable pieces of American art.

With its second term wrapping up, President Obama’s administration wants to fit at least one more high-profile “initiative” into its scientific legacy. Having launched efforts to map the human brain, fight drug-resistant bacteria, advance precision medicine, and cure cancer, the White House has now set its sights on the untold number of enigmatic microbes that define our environment and fill our bodies.

The National Microbiome Initiative, rolled out in an event today by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), aims to fund cross-disciplinary projects that would help understand the function of individual microbes and map how they interact in communities—from those that may fend off disease in the human intestines, to those that help plants pull nutrients from soil, to those that capture and release carbon dioxide in the ocean.

The digital revolution has turned pop into a world of smart playlists and surprise albums. Yet the way we engage with music remains remarkably similar.

Vikash Kumar and University of Washington colleagues have developed a simulation model that allows robotic hands to learn from their own experiences, while performing dexterous manipulation. Human direction is not required.

The O’Reilly Artificial Intelligence Conference Call for Speakers is open. Also, see the essay, Why AI is finally going mainstream, by Tim O’Reilly.

New York, NY on Monday-Tuesday, September 26-27.

Deadline to apply to speak is Monday, June 6.

… Vector maps have been one of the largest leaps in Mapbox’s history. We built a map renderer from the ground up. We created the industry standard for distributing vector map tiles, the Mapbox Vector Tile spec, which has also been adopted by other companies, including Esri. We keep improving every detail of the system, from size efficiency to text rendering and animations, and building an ecosystem around Mapbox GL JS, the Mapbox iOS SDK, and the Mapbox Android SDK.

As part of this transition, we created a new language: the Mapbox GL Style Specification. It is the realization of the lessons we learned creating CartoCSS, and it is the next step in cartographic styling. Like the Mapbox Vector Tile specification, it’s an open standard and we’re seeing other organizations starting to adopt it.

Redis Labs recently announced a new way of extending Redis: The Redis Module System. Redis has previously been extendable through Lua scripts, but modules provide lower-level access to the Redis data structures, which opens up new options.

I spoke with Redis creator Salvatore Sanfilippo about what this new system means for developers. Our full conversation is available in the embed below. [audio, 11:25]