NYU Data Science newsletter – June 13, 2016

GROUP CURATION: N/A

Would you rather a robot car that can drive you anywhere and at anytime, or a car that throws in the towel as soon as a storm hits or one that flat out refuses to take you anywhere at night?

No other challenge is bigger for the many Fortune 500 companies and start-ups battling to gain an edge in the self-driving car domain than developing an all-weather driverless car.

The billions of dollars invested in research and development to date has merely served as the prequel. We have many robot cars that can drive well “most of the time” but none that can drive well all of the time.

… So the question is, who solves the Trolley Problem? If engineers set the rules, they’re making ethical decisions for drivers. But if a car learns on its own, it becomes its own ethical agent. It decides who to kill.

“I believe that the trajectory that we’re on is for the technology to implicitly make the decisions. And I’m not sure that’s the best thing,” says Oren Etzioni, a computer scientist at the University of Washington and the CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. “We don’t want technology to play God.” But nobody wants engineers to play God, either.

Ars is excited to be hosting this online debut of Sunspring, a short science fiction film that’s not entirely what it seems. It’s about three people living in a weird future, possibly on a space station, probably in a love triangle. You know it’s the future because H (played with neurotic gravity by Silicon Valley’s Thomas Middleditch) is wearing a shiny gold jacket, H2 (Elisabeth Gray) is playing with computers, and C (Humphrey Ker) announces that he has to “go to the skull” before sticking his face into a bunch of green lights. It sounds like your typical sci-fi B-movie, complete with an incoherent plot. Except Sunspring isn’t the product of Hollywood hacks—it was written entirely by an AI. To be specific, it was authored by a recurrent neural network called long short-term memory, or LSTM for short. At least, that’s what we’d call it. The AI named itself Benjamin.

Canada’s University of Calgary paid almost $16,000 ($20,000 Canadian, ~£10,800) to recover crucial data that has been held hostage for more than a week by crypto ransomware attackers.

The ransom was disclosed on Wednesday morning in a statement issued by University of Calgary officials. It said university IT personnel had made progress in isolating the unnamed ransomware infection and restoring affected parts of the university network. It went on to warn that there’s no guarantee paying the controversial ransom will lead to the lost data being recovered.

Together with Aaron Hertzmann and Eli Shechtman, our collaborators at Adobe Research, we found a way to transfer only drawing style, but maintain the color composition of the original photo.

Computer science faculty at Indiana University Bloomington will participate in a five-year study funded by the National Science Foundation and designed to improve science, technology, engineering and math education at research universities.

The IU Bloomington Office of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, in collaboration with seven other institutions, will take the lead on a $2.2 million NSF grant to support teaching initiatives that foster engaged, active learning for undergraduate students enrolled in large STEM courses.

The Transforming Education, Stimulating Teaching and Learning Excellence — or TRESTLE — project will be led by the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Program at the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning on the Bloomington campus.

Anders Ynnerman and Alexander Bock
Department of Science and Technology, University of Linköping, Norrköping, Sweden [video, 57:40]

Game theory is not new to government. It has been used by intelligence agencies for more than 20 years to analyze events around the globe and to make predictions about future events.

With that in mind, it’s a bit surprising that game theory is only recently being applied to homeland security. Yet according to Milind Tambe, professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Southern California, that’s the case. And he should know because he directs USC’s Teamcore Research Group, which receives funding from the Department of Homeland Security and is focused on applying artificial intelligence and game theory to optimize security deployments.

In fall 2016, we will launch the U.S.’s first master’s degree in sociology with a focus on Digital Sociology. Digital Sociology is the study of the social processes that shape technologies like the Internet and how those technologies shape social processes. We study what all this change means for how we work, go to school, form families, understand ourselves, and enact social change. This rigorous degree program will prepare graduates to shape emerging local, national and global conversations about big data, privacy, algorithms, inequality and social movements.

This August in NYC, researchers in machine listening and related fields will convene at the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) conference. … We interviewed NYU Steinhardt Professor Juan Pablo Bello, an organizer of ISMIR 2016 working in machine listening, to learn more about the conference and the latest developments in the field.

Also, at ISMIR:

Call for Volunteers

17th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference site

The objective of the workshop is to deliver a quantitative understanding of the socio-technical mechanisms involved in open and citizen science. The event will also touch upon practical implementation issues, with talks on software development and best practices. Time and space will be provided to foster emerging ideas and data science projects in the field of complex systems.

Amsterdam, The Netherlands Tuesday, September 20

Deadline to submit long talk proposals is Wednesday, June 22.

The First International Workshop on Data mining for the Analysis of Performance and Success (DAPS 2016) will be held in conjunction with The IEEE International Conference on Data Mining series (ICDM) .

Barcelona, Spain Monday-Friday, December 12-16.

Deadline to submit paper proposal is Monday, August 1.

I recently completed UT Austin’s Distributed Computing class, taught by Lorenzo Alvisi. My project partner Pato and I decided to give it a go in Haskell, and ended up using Haskell for all project assignments (Chandy-Lamport, Paxos, and Bayou).

This turned out to be an excellent idea. We put in a fraction of the time most implementations (in Java, Python, or C++) required.

Neural Networks and Deep Learning is a free online book. The book will teach you about:

Neural networks, a beautiful biologically-inspired programming paradigm which enables a computer to learn from observational data

Deep learning, a powerful set of techniques for learning in neural networks

Managing research material in the digital age is still a widely inefficient process. Alexander Naydenov, co-founder of PaperHive, looks at how this web platform could transform reading into a more social and active process of collaboration. Close to 1.2 million academic articles and books can currently be read and discussed with PaperHive. The platform enables contextual and structured discussions in real time. Comments are persistent, shareable and can become a part of the academic literature.