Helmholtz Zentrum München, German Research Center for Environmental Health
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Autonomous driving, automatic speech recognition, and the game Go: Deep Learning is generating more and more public awareness. Scientists at the Helmholtz Zentrum München and their partners at ETH Zurich and the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have now used it to determine the development of hematopoietic stem cells in advance. In Nature Methods they describe how their software predicts the future cell type based on microscopy images.
With Metro’s most recent SafeTrack shutdown, Northern Virginia riders are finally doing the thing that Metro has been asking them to do for years: They’re switching from the historically overcrowded Blue Line to roomier Yellow Line trains.
But after Surge 12 concludes Tuesday, will these riders stick with their new commuting routes?
Zhan Guo thinks he can help. Guo is director of the urban planning program at New York University’s Wagner School of Public Service, and he’s done research into how a simple thing like the design of a subway map can radically shape people’s commuting decisions.
While US-based companies like Alphabet, IBM, Facebook, and Microsoft typically dominate US artificial-intelligence headlines, China’s government is now accelerating the country’s own contributions to the field.
China’s National Development and Reform Commission, a government agency tasked with planning economic and social strategies, will fund search giant Baidu’s development of a national deep-learning research lab, according to a post on Baidu’s Chinese WeChat account. The amount of funding was not disclosed, but Beijing-based Baidu will work with Tsinghua and Beihang universities, as well as other research Chinese institutions.
One important caveat: The laboratory won’t be a physical structure, but instead a digital network of researchers working on problems from their respective locations.
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Culture of Health blog, Oktawia Wojcik
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For the first time ever, the CDC and CDC Foundation are providing city and neighborhood level data for 500 of the largest U.S. cities, making it possible to identify emerging health problems and effective interventions.
IBM left private keys to the Docker host environment in its Data Science Experience service inside freely available containers.
This potentially granted the cloud service’s users root access to the underlying container-hosting machines – and potentially to other machines in Big Blue’s Spark computing cluster. Effectively, Big Blue handed its cloud users the secrets needed to potentially commandeer and control its service’s computers.
A new University of Queensland-led study could help scientists more accurately predict and explain patterns of diversity in nature.
Ecology Centre Director in the UQ School of Biological Sciences Associate Professor Margie Mayfield said the project had developed a mathematically simple framework for accurately assessing the outcomes of species’ interactions.
“This advancement will improve the accuracy of studies of the diversity of biological communities,” she said.
Computing Community Consortium, The CCC blog, Khari Douglas
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The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently announced that Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, and Microsoft will participate in it’s new Critical Techniques, Technologies and Methodologies for Advancing Foundations and Applications of Big Data Sciences and Engineering (BIGDATA) research program.
The three major cloud providers will supply cloud credits and resources to qualifying NSF-funded projects. This collaboration aims to combine cutting-edge, industry cloud computing resources with real data sets and assorted NSF-supported projects to advance research in big data and data science.
Competition in the self-driving space is a good thing; it pushes everyone to develop better, safer and more affordable technology. But we believe that competition should be fueled by innovation in the labs and on the roads, not through unlawful actions.
Recently, we uncovered evidence that Otto and Uber have taken and are using key parts of Waymo’s self-driving technology. Today, we’re taking legal action against Otto and its parent company Uber for misappropriating Waymo trade secrets and infringing our patents. We wanted to share more context on why we made this decision.
At SatSummit, 231 global development and satellite industry experts joined us to map how we can do smarter development work with satellite data. The major satellite data providers (including NASA, ESA, DigitalGlobe and Planet) joined big data gurus (from AWS, IBM, and Orbital Insights) and dozens of global development organizations (including USAID, World Bank, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, and World Resources Institute) for a truly inspiring day of discussion
Company Data Science News
Facebook let Steven Levy in to profile its renowned applied machine learning group. [Long read]
Textbook publisher Pearson reported record losses. US university students’ are abandoning textbooks for online course material and an overall downturn in US enrollments.
ZestFinance offers a new machine learning credit score application, ZAML, that claims to offer capacity to score users with little or no credit history. The model was developed in China where practices around spending, saving, and lending patterns are meaningfully different compared to the US. Buyer beware the biases.
Forbes reports on a stunning failed partnership between IBM Watson and MD Anderson cancer center at the University of Texas. The university reportedly lost a breathtaking $62m in a twisted university-industry partnership arrangement. More bad news, an attendee to an IBM data science event discovered the company had left private keys to their Docker host environment in a publicly accessible container.
Uber had an atrocious week. The company’s human resources department was revealed to be consistently insensitive to claims of sexism by Susan J. Fowler, an articulate former member of Uber’s engineering staff. Then Uber’s self-driving truck subsidiary Otto was sued. Allegedly, departing Google employees stole LiDAR technology IP from Google’s Waymoproject and used it at their new positions with Otto. Reportedly, Uber’s partnership with Carnegie Mellon researchers was not performing quickly enough for Otto/Uber who were desperate to keep up in the competitive driverless car market. One small upside: Professor Christopher Knittel at MIT is helping the company reduce racism in the Boston Uber market (passengers with black sounding names have been more likely to have their requests cancelled).
Body Labs, a computer vision startup in New York, develops accurate models of individual human bodies, hoping to integrate them into sizing assumptions made by fashion retailers. Is it possible that someday, clothing ordered online might actually fit upon arrival? Eddie Bell has a post on working with fashion models, that is, models to predict fashion customer preferences.
The Intercept reports that Palantir has been working with the NSA for years to surveil the whole world. Palantir is run by Silicon Valley heavyweight and Trump Economic Advisory board member Peter Thiel.
In a crowded convention center in San Jose, Calif., this past January during the Genesis 4 Super Smash Bros. tournament, away from the main competitive stage, a small group of gamers gathered around a clunky, four-year-old HP laptop. Amidst the onlookers, a professional player called Gravy was battling on familiar ground against an unfamiliar opponent.
The arena was Battlefield, a flat stage with three small platforms, considered the standard for professional play. He’s played professionally as Captain Falcon for nearly five years, and considered one of the world’s top players for the character—but he was losing to the AI playing as the same character. It had only been practicing for two weeks.
SFI Professor Luis Bettencourt has accepted an offer to direct the Mansueto Institute of Urban Innovation at the University of Chicago. Starting July 1, Bettencourt will transition to SFI’s external faculty as he assumes his new role as Pritzker Director of the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation and Professor of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago.
Millimeter-wave wireless truly is a frontier. Today the millimeter band is largely uninhabited and inhospitable, as signals using these wavelengths run up against difficult propagation problems. Even when signals travel through free space, attenuation increases with frequency, so usable path lengths for millimeter waves are short, roughly 100 to 200 meters. Such distances could be accommodated with the smaller cell sizes envisioned in 5G, but there are numerous other impediments. Buildings and the objects in and around them, including people, block the signal. Rain and foliage further attenuate millimeter waves, and diffraction—which can bend longer wavelengths around occluding objects—is far less effective. Even surfaces that might be conveniently nicely reflective at longer wavelengths appear rougher to millimeter waves, and so diffuse the signal.
So there may be gold in that frontier, but it is going to be very difficult to mine. [longform]
Chicago We are pleased to announce that the SIGMOD/PODS Conference 2017 will be held in Chicago in the week of May 14, relocating from North Carolina. [$$$]
Washington, DC Among the two dozen official partners of the upcoming March for Science, a recent addition dwarfs the rest: The American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific organization.
The partnership represents a legitimacy boost for the march, planned for April 22 in Washington, D.C., with satellite marches in various other cities.
In collaboration with the White House Data Cabinet Policy Working Group, the Big Data Hubs are seeking input on how community leaders are developing data science capacity. We would love to hear your perspective on this critical topic.
Sponsored by Tableau – an opportunity for data scientists to showcase their skills by analysing and visualizing data from the new UNDG Transparency Portal. Deadline for submissions is April 30.
I really, really like the Wasserstein GAN paper. I know it’s already gotten a lot of hype, but I feel like it could use more.
I also think the theory in the paper scared off a lot of people, which is a bit of a shame. This is my contribution to make the paper more accessible, while hopefully retaining the thrust of the argument.
In this episode we have on a nice trio of Italian visualizers — Michele Mauri (Density Design), Giorgio Uboldi (Calibro), and Giorgio Caviglia (Trifacta) — to talk about RAW, the data visualization tool they built to help people visualize data interactively. [audio, 32:06]
In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Parvez Ahammad, who leads the data science and machine learning efforts at Instart Logic. He has applied machine learning in a variety of domains, most recently to computational neuroscience and security. [audio, 44:53]
Scaling databases for the enterprise is hard. You have to parallelize, avoid bottlenecks, and shard across multiple machines. You have to carefully consider tradeoffs between data integrity and constant uptime, between optimizing for reading and writing, between speed of development and speed at runtime. You have to integrate wildly disparate data sources, satisfy stakeholders with competing expectations, and find the structure hidden in unstructured data. Working with databases at the scale of global enterprise is about bringing order to chaos.
I recently had the opportunity to interview MarkLogic’s Greg Meddles on this topic.
Google Cloud Platform gets a performance boost today with the much anticipated public beta of NVIDIA Tesla K80 GPUs. You can now spin up NVIDIA GPU-based VMs in three GCP regions: us-east1, asia-east1 and europe-west1, using the gcloud command-line tool. Support for creating GPU VMs using the Cloud Console appears next week.
