NYU Data Science newsletter – June 24, 2016

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One local organization was selected to help students learn and teachers teach nationwide.

Muskingum Valley Educational Service Center is collaborating with the University of Chicago’s Eric and Wendy Schmidt Data Science for Social Good Summer Fellowship. A summer program designed to train data scientists to work on projects with social impact.

“The University of Chicago wants big data to train their graduate students on. They don’t want it to be just an academic thing, they want where they are getting some real live data, messy data they have to clean it up and more importantly they want that data. Once they are able to package it the way that says something about our kids they want us to do something with it,” said Mike Fuller, Director, Muskingum Valley Educational Service Center. [video, 1:19]

We are using intelligent machines for everything from self-driving cars to online searches. But how about leveraging artificial intelligence, or AI, to save lives? “A momentous change in health care is under way,” says Suchi Saria, an associate professor in computational biology at Johns Hopkins, with startups harnessing the recent explosion of electronic health data to help doctors make critical decisions and extend care to patients between appointments. Here are five ways that machine learning is poised to bring new rigor to medicine.

1. Drug Creation

Beating out six other finalists (San Francisco, Austin, Portland, Kansas City, Denver and Pittsburgh), Columbus, Ohio has won the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Smart City Challenge. The city will receive $50 million in funding from the federal government and Paul Allen’s Vulcan Inc. to build an “intelligent” transportation system.

“Whiz-bang” technology is fun to see, says US Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx. But “we want everyone to be thought about at the beginning.”

Good thing Columbus is on the case. If all goes according to plan, the Ohio capital will soon burst with electric vehicles, autonomous shuttles, platooning trucks, and bus rapid transit, which will sail through smart traffic lights that turn green just for them. Every resident will benefit.

Foxx today declared Columbus the winner of the $40 million Smart City Challenge, a competition that asked mid-size governments to envision how their city could capitalize on growing overlaps in transportation and technology.

Practicing doctors and other health care professionals will be familiar with how little of what they find in medical journals is useful. The term “clinical research” is meant to cover all types of investigation that address questions on the treatment, prevention, diagnosis/screening, or prognosis of disease or enhancement and maintenance of health. Experimental intervention studies (clinical trials) are the major design intended to answer such questions, but observational studies may also offer relevant evidence. “Useful clinical research” means that it can lead to a favorable change in decision making (when changes in benefits, harms, cost, and any other impact are considered) either by itself or when integrated with other studies and evidence in systematic reviews, meta-analyses, decision analyses, and guidelines.

TK: Clinical Research bundle

Starting in the coming days, when you ask Google about symptoms like “headache on one side,” we’ll show you a list of related conditions (“headache,” “migraine,” “tension headache,” “cluster headache,” “sinusitis,” and “common cold”). For individual symptoms like “headache,” we’ll also give you an overview description along with information on self-treatment options and what might warrant a doctor’s visit. By doing this, our goal is to help you to navigate and explore health conditions related to your symptoms, and quickly get to the point where you can do more in-depth research on the web or talk to a health professional.

We create the list of symptoms by looking for health conditions mentioned in web results, and then checking them against high-quality medical information we’ve collected from doctors for our Knowledge Graph. We worked with a team of medical doctors to carefully review the individual symptom information, and experts at Harvard Medical School and Mayo Clinic evaluated related conditions for a representative sample of searches to help improve the lists we show.

The IBM Watson AI XPRIZE is a $5 million competition, challenging teams globally, to develop and demonstrate how humans can collaborate with powerful AI technologies to tackle the world’s grand challenges. The prize aims to accelerate adoption of AI technologies, and spark creative, innovative and audacious demonstrations of the technology that are truly scalable and solve societal grand challenges. To encourage innovation in any form, the competition is an open challenge in AI. Rather than set a single, universal goal for all teams, this competition will invite teams to each declare their own goal and solution to a grand challenge. The IBM Watson AI XPRIZE is a four-year competition with annual milestone competitions in 2017, 2018, and 2019.

The deadline to apply is December of this year, with detailed project proposals due in March.

In a recent paper titled, “Should You Trust Your Money to a Robot?” CDS Faculty member Vasant Dhar investigated the possibility of using machine learning techniques to make financial decisions for humans.

So should we trust our money to a robot?

It depends on the investment at hand. Because machines only rely on previously collected data, they can’t spot a “one of a kind” investment opportunity in the same way that humans can?—?granted, most humans can’t spot a “one of a kind” investment opportunity either. But since machines rely so heavily on said data, they tend to make much smarter investment decisions. Generally speaking, humans are not very good at investing.

As data collection and data analysis have become entrenched in our daily lives, the conversations surrounding the ethical treatment and usage of data are becoming increasingly important. Almost every interaction you have—talking with a friend on social media, information you give to your doctor, or a purchase you make online—can be translated into and analyzed as a piece of data. The debates surrounding ethics, in any field, are never just a philosophical discourse: ethical debates in academia and private business often proceed changing legal tides. With all of the rapid advancements taking place in the field of data science, how do we ensure that our laws and legal codes reflect the longstanding ethical standards that have been cornerstones of fields such as health and medicine?

Last Monday, Women Who Code—an organization, with over 50,000 members, that hosts presentations and provides networking opportunities for women in the technology sector—gave a series of presentations on the ethical treatment of data and the ethical use of data analysis.