NYU Data Science newsletter – October 17, 2016

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In an unprecedented move, U.S. intelligence agencies are teaming up with the nation’s most prestigious scientific body in a bid to make better use of findings from the country’s leading social and behavioral scientists.

The partnership between the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) in Tysons Corner, Virginia, and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine aims to build bridges between communities that historically have either ignored one another or butted heads. The effort includes the creation of a permanent Intelligence Community Studies Board at the academies, which will meet for the first time next week, as well as a first-ever study of how social and behavioral science research might strengthen national security.

While free online courses have provided access to Stanford faculty to learners worldwide, computer scientist Jennifer Widom is taking the idea one step further. For the next year, Widom will travel across the globe to share her knowledge with a wide swath of students at lesser-resourced institutions across the globe.

Widom is using her year-long sabbatical to experiment with what she’s jovially described as a “massively open in-person course,” or “MOIC.” The name riffs on MOOCs, or massively open online courses, a medium that made Widom something of a global engineering celebrity over the last few years thanks to her enormously popular “Databases” MOOC, which has generated 8 million video views and 600,000 assignment submissions since its 2011 debut.

A team of chemists including Daniel Weix from the University of Rochester has developed a process for identifying new catalysts that will help synthesize drugs more efficiently and more cheaply. The trick was to do something that has not been attempted before, to examine libraries of drugs to find the cure for bad chemistry: new catalysts.

When Yi Wang returned to his homeland of China from the U.S. in 2011, he soon found a way to marry the cultures of the two countries in a business startup. With a classmate and a friend, both of whom worked for high-tech Silicon Valley firms, he cofounded a company that helps people learn English through a speech-recognition app that encourages community and competition among its users.

Shanghai-based Liulishuo Information Technology Co. launched its English-language learning app, called English Liulishuo (or “Speak English Fluently”) in 2013. It now has 30 million registered users.

IT’S HARD TO think of a single technology that will shape our world more in the next 50 years than artificial intelligence. As machine learning enables our computers to teach themselves, a wealth of breakthroughs emerge, ranging from medical diagnostics to cars that drive themselves. A whole lot of worry emerges as well. Who controls this technology? Will it take over our jobs? Is it dangerous? President Obama was eager to address these concerns. The person he wanted to talk to most about them? Entrepreneur and MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito. So I sat down with them in the White House to sort through the hope, the hype, and the fear around AI. That and maybe just one quick question about Star Trek.

“In a recent study in Nature, we introduce a form of memory-augmented neural network called a differentiable neural computer, and show that it can learn to use its memory to answer questions about complex, structured data, including artificially generated stories, family trees, and even a map of the London Underground. We also show that it can solve a block puzzle game using reinforcement learning.”

University of Michigan researchers have received a $2.5 million NSF grant to develop a computational model that is hoped to significantly advance natural hazards engineering and disaster science.

Natural hazards engineers study earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, landslides, and other disasters. They work to better understand the causes and effects of these phenomena on cities, homes, and infrastructure and develop strategies to save lives and mitigate damage.

Technology giants IBM Corp, Google and seven others have joined hands to launch an open specification that can boost datacenter server performance by up to ten times, to take on Intel Corp.

The new standard, called Open Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (OpenCAPI), is an open forum to provide a high bandwidth, low latency open interface design specification.

The open interface will help corporate and cloud data centers to speed up big data, machine learning, analytics and other emerging workloads.

When Yiannis graduated from engineering school in his native Athens in 2007, the world was still largely innocent about cybersecurity. The first massive hacks – to individual retailers’ payment card networks – were just appearing. Yiannis, a telecommunications engineer, earned an MBA and entered the workforce as a product manager for telecom operators’ solutions in a large systems integrator in Central and Eastern Europe.

“Cybersecurity didn’t even exist as a term then,” he says, “but all networks were negatively exposed to potential adversaries that wanted to gain information or had financial motives. No one seemed to share my views, so I decided that I had to do something about it.” So in 2011 he founded his own company, Crypteia Networks.

[Sherlock] Holmes followed those quivers with relentless logic, masterful disguises, and a band of loyal ruffians. These days, Takayuki Mizuno accomplishes something similar using a supercomputer.

Mizuno is an econophysicist at Japan’s National Institute of Informatics, and an unlikely heir to Holmes’s deerstalker. His office overlooks the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, for centuries a symbol of stability and order. From it the young scientist surveys the world, applying the tools of physics to the study of economic and social systems. He has created a software to spot stock market bubbles, and a digital measuring stick for charting the progress of start-ups.

Now Mizuno believes he might be able to use the same technologies to unravel criminal networks and track the business ties of terrorists. But his moment of insight came with an earthquake.

Segment 1: What Does It Mean To Be Scientific And What Is Replication? [video, 33:55]

Chennai, India Deadline for abstracts is extended to Saturday, October 22.

“JASP aims to be a complete statistical package for both Bayesian and Frequentist statistical methods, that is easy to use and familiar to users of SPSS”

“Although extremely useful for visualizing high-dimensional data, t-SNE plots can sometimes be mysterious or misleading. By exploring how it behaves in simple cases, we can learn to use it more effectively.”

One of the most important skill for data scientists to have is the ability to clearly communicate results to a general audience. The impact of data scientists’ work depends on how well others can understand their insights to take further actions. But most data science projects are hard to digest and deep in the math and the computation! Therefore, to clearly communicate data science findings can be very hard, especially when you have an audience with very diverse backgrounds. This is why tools like Shiny become a data scientist best friend.