NYU Data Science newsletter – October 20, 2016

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Over the years, animation has gone from traditional, 2D, hand-drawn artwork to software-designed, 3D projects utilizing full-scale computer rendering. DreamWorks Animation is at the top of the pack in this arena, and it is using Big Data analytics to help it produce the animation the public loves in the most efficient manner.

Jeff Wike, head of Research and Development at DreamWorks Animation, sat down with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Paul Gillin (@pgillin), co-hosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during the HPE Big Data Conference 2016 at the Westin Boston Waterfront in Boston, MA, to talk about Big Data and the digital revolution that has transformed modern animation.

In January of this year, Illumina (NASDAQ:ILMN) announced plans to form a new venture called GRAIL. This company, of which Illumina would own 52%, will attempt to create a single blood test for the early detection of all major types of cancer through the use of circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) testing and deep sequencing technology. This venture has attracted numerous backers, with notable investors Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. While estimates vary, should this blood diagnostic work as planned, Illumina’s management has guided toward a bull case total addressable market of $100 billion to $200 billion.

SoBigData is the European Research Infrastructure for Big Data and Social Mining. From data to knowledge, investigating stories ethically, paying attention to citizens privacy. 7 european countries, more than 100 data scientists. [video, 1:01]

[Robin] Hanson, deeply skeptical of conventional intellectual discourse, argues that academics have abdicated their societal responsibilities by ignoring more speculative work. “Relative to the future, our study of the past has hit diminishing returns,” he writes in his first book, The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life When Robots Rule the Earth (Oxford University Press), published this year. It challenges readers’ expectations for scholarly work, arguing that an insistence on considering only those ideas with strong supporting evidence needlessly discards useful thinking.

He has described his mission as a ‘sacred quest, to understand everything, and to save the world.’
While his ideas have raised plenty of eyebrows, Hanson is not quite an academic pariah. Wendell Wallach, a scholar at Yale University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, describes him as “truly a unique thinker” for the way he uses social science and economics to try to prognosticate the future. “That’s very different than what everybody else does,” he says. Nick Bostrom, a professor of philosophy at Oxford and director of the Future of Humanity Institute (with which Hanson has an affiliation), calls him “perhaps the most original thinker out there in the social sciences today.”

Machine learning aims to produce machines that can learn from their experiences and make predictions based on those experiences and other data they have analyzed. The Center for Machine Learning at Georgia Tech (ML@GT) is an Interdisciplinary Research Center that is both a home for thought leaders and a training ground for the next generation of pioneers.

I’m teaching a new course this semester on cognitive technologies (AKA artificial intelligence) to Babson MBAs. Many of them are new to this set of technologies, and seeing the topic through my students’ eyes has made me realize how overwhelming it can be. There are so many different types of AI, each requiring some technical knowledge to fully grasp, that newcomers to the field often have difficulty figuring out how to jump in.

In the simplest case, cognitive technologies can be just more autonomous extensions of traditional analytics — automatically running every possible combination of predictive variables in a regression analysis, for example. More complex types of cognitive technology — neural or deep learning networks, natural language processing, and algorithms — can seem like black boxes even to the data scientists who create them.

DNA extracted from skeletons at Ain Ghazal and other early settlements in the Near East. These findings have already challenged long-held ideas about how agriculture and domestication arose.

What’s more, the new data are showing that early farmers would leave a tremendous mark. People from Ireland to India trace some of their ancestry to people who began growing barley and wheat in the Near East thousands of years ago.

“It’s a part of the story of civilization that we’re just beginning to understand,” said Iosif Lazaridis, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard Medical School.

The two living species of bison (European and American) are among the few terrestrial megafauna to have survived the late Pleistocene extinctions. Despite the extensive bovid fossil record in Eurasia, the evolutionary history of the European bison (or wisent, Bison bonasus) before the Holocene (<11.7 thousand years ago (kya)) remains a mystery. We use complete ancient mitochondrial genomes and genome-wide nuclear DNA surveys to reveal that the wisent is the product of hybridization between the extinct steppe bison (Bison priscus) and ancestors of modern cattle (aurochs, Bos primigenius) before 120?kya, and contains up to 10% aurochs genomic ancestry. Although undetected within the fossil record, ancestors of the wisent have alternated ecological dominance with steppe bison in association with major environmental shifts since at least 55?kya. Early cave artists recorded distinct morphological forms consistent with these replacement events, around the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, ?21–18?kya). [full text]

When I left the cocoon of academia nearly two decades ago to become a software engineer, I quickly learned two lessons.

The first was a version of the project management triangle: you can commit to a project’s scope, time, or quality?-?but not to all three. As I was told, pick any two.

The second was that my main job as a software engineer was not to design algorithms or write code: it’s to reduce the uncertainty of project estimates.

Indiana University researchers have been awarded a $1.4 million grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse for a study that will use social network analysis to examine “doctor shopping,” in which patients visit multiple physicians to get prescriptions for controlled substances.

Brea Perry, associate professor of sociology in the College of Arts and Sciences, is the principal investigator for the four-year project. Also participating in the study are Yong-Yeol “Y.Y.” Ahn, assistant professor in the IU School of Informatics and Computing, and researchers at the University of Kentucky. Perry and Ahn are affiliated faculty with the IU Network Science Institute.

This past summer, a heated debate broke out about a tool used in courts across the country to help make bail and sentencing decisions. It’s a controversy that touches on some of the big criminal justice questions facing our society. And it all turns on an algorithm.

The algorithm, called COMPAS, is used nationwide to decide whether defendants awaiting trial are too dangerous to be released on bail. In May, the investigative news organization ProPublica claimed that COMPAS is biased against black defendants. Northpointe, the Michigan-based company that created the tool, released its own report questioning ProPublica’s analysis. ProPublica rebutted the rebuttal, academic researchers entered the fray, this newspaper’s Wonkblog weighed in, and even the Wisconsin Supreme Court cited the controversy in its recent ruling that upheld the use of COMPAS in sentencing.

Predict the percent of each state that will vote for each candidate using any data you can find. Deadline for predictions is Tuesday, 8 November 2016.

New York, NY Friday-Sunday, November 18-20. Apply to participate. Deadline for applications is Thursday, November 10. [free]

Indianapolis, IN June 19 – 23, 2017. Deadline for satellite session proposals is Thursday, December 15. Deadline for presentations and posters is Sunday, January 15.

If you are interested in submitting an NSF 16-615 Transdisciplinary Research in Principles of Data Science Phase I (TRIPODS) proposal, the letter of intent is due between Wednesday, January 4, 2017 and Thursday, January 19, 2017.

Deadline to apply is Monday, January 23, 2017.

Last Wednesday, eBay’s Director of Software Development and Merchandise, Giri Iyengar, came to the Center for Data Science to discuss data science career options in the e-commerce industry.

Here’s how to set-up split test inside Google Analytics in just a few minutes.

This is a story about a tool that caught a production-impacting bug the day before we released the code. This is also the story of a tool no one uses, and for good reason. By the time you’re done reading you’ll see why this tool is useful, why it’s unusable, and how you can actually use it with your Python project.