To fully appreciate Dr. Jim Heath’s relationship with Institute for Systems Biology, you have to go back to ISB’s early days — shortly after the research organization was founded in 2000.
“I met Lee when he was at UCLA giving a seminar. I didn’t understand a single thing he talked about, but I understood the systems approach he was taking to the problem he was trying to address,” Heath recalled about his first encounter with ISB co-founder and biotechnology pioneer Dr. Lee Hood. “It was identical to the approach we were taking to a very different problem.”
That common language sparked a relationship that is now approaching two decades.
Company Data Science News
How should the big four tech companies be regulated? The European Union is going after them based on claims to privacy rights via the General Data Privacy Regulation. In the US, our cultural ethos has much weaker assumptions of individual privacy (Jones, 2016). We do get our panties in a twist about monopoly power and market failures, which is where NYU Stern School of Business Professor Rob Seamans went in his recent overview article about a slate of regulatory proposals and thought experiments to prevent the big four from relaxing into market domination. Let’s at least make market domination a little uncomfortable. Seamans argues that proposals that would establish a data portability act, allowing individuals to port their social graph from one app or platform to the next, won’t actually help start-ups much, but they will increase competition between established companies. If innovation is a goal, “data portability alone would [not] have any noticeable effect on startups; it would seem impractical for a startup to assemble such large training datasets by relying on individual users porting their data to the startup in a piecemeal fashion.”
If you’re worried about the big four, consider migrating your life online to the decentralized Internet. Apparently, all the cool anti-establishment kids are doing it. All joking aside, this is what an online protest march looks like.
Luis Perez-Breva, head ofMIT’s Innovation Lab and a research scientist in MIT’s School of Engineering, wades into the hype about AI + retail, arguing that retail is lagging, “Throwing data at machines doesn’t make machines (or anyone) smarter.” If you’re one of those people wondering which industries need AI most, retail AI is still nascent with plenty of data.
Microsoft has a new student plan: Azure for Students cloud computing services. This is the classic get ’em while they’re young strategy for building long term commitment to a product with a bit of a learning curve.
Google is partnering with the Pentagon to develop image recognition for aerial footage captured by drones. Reportedly, certain employees at Google were outraged at the level of surveillance suggested by this project…which is…like getting mad at other kids for making fun of your brother while you continue to sit on him.
Kensho an AI start-up that helps predict trends in specific stocks and financial markets by taking a macroeconomic / political viewpoint was acquired for $550m by S&P Global.
Fei Fei Li, an AI star splitting time between Google and Stanford, offers three steps for making AI that’s actually good (meaning ‘good’ as in AI that functions optimally and improves society). First, “A.I. needs to reflect more of the depth that characterizes our own intelligence.” Ok, so that’s tough, and will require her second tenet: collaboration. She writes “programmers will have to learn to collaborate more often with experts in other domains.” Her third pillar, “ensur[e] that the development of this technology is guided, at each step, by concern for its effect on humans”, including job loss and diminished face-to-face contact with other humans.
Joelle Pineau head of Facebook AI Research in Montreal wants more diversity in AI teams. She writes, “within the wider field of AI research, while we’ve made some progress, women and under-represented minorities are not yet well represented, and women in particular leave the field at a higher rate than men at every career stage.” That’s all good. But then she says, “we must all do a better job of communicating how diverse and fascinating working in AI can be to encourage a wider spectrum of people to enter the field.” Research out of the Kapor Center suggests that the reason women and people of color (which is a group that also includes women) leave tech jobs is not lack of interest, it is the presence of discrimination and harassment.
Carnegie Mellon University is at the forefront of smart cities research, development, and deployment. At the center of this effort is Metro21, the university’s smart cities initiative.
To spark bigger and better projects that will continue to improve the quality of life in metropolitan regions, Metro21 is entering a new phase by launching the Smart Cities Institute. This campus-wide academic center will address the complex challenges facing metro areas in the 21st century and build on the exciting work that has already come out of Metro21.
The Conversation, Nicole Creanza and André Ché Sherriah
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Linguists go deeper than the stereotypes, though. They’ve used large-scale surveys to map out many features of dialects. The more you know about how a person pronounces certain words, the more likely you’ll be able to pinpoint where they are from. For instance, linguists know that dropping the “r” sounds at the end of words is actually common in many English dialects; they can map in space and time how r-dropping is widespread in the London area and has become increasingly common in England over the years.
In a recent study, we applied this concept to a different question: the formation of Creole languages. As a linguist and a biologist who studies cultural evolution, we wanted to see how much information we could glean from a snapshot of how a language exists at one moment in time. Working with linguist Hubert Devonish and psychologist Ewart Thomas, could we figure out the language “ingredients” that went into a Creole language, and where these “ingredients” originally came from?
The Smith School of Business at Queen’s University has a new Master of Management in Artificial Intelligence focused on building managers who can apply AI strategies to business decisions.
The program is designed for studying the application of AI and machine learning in the context of modern business decision-making. Content will be delivered by Smith faculty and adjunct faculty from the Toronto-based Vector Institute.
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, University of London, University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, Imperial College London, and Arizona State University partner with Coursera to build online degrees of the future
The 2020 Census approaches, and with budget cuts, resignations, and so much stuff up in the air, there’s cause for concern. How will the accuracy of the count compare to others? The distribution of billions of dollars rides on the estimates. The closer the counts are to reality, the more fairly money distributes to communities.
Let me explain.
University Data Science News
The Pearson Family Foundation is trying to claw back a $22.9m donation to The University of Chicago because the university hired “an institute director who allegedly recruited underqualified faculty due to favoritism” and participated in “a Catholic conference that celebrated heterosexual marriage instead of hosting a required academic forum.” The Pearsons are “profoundly disappointed” that their efforts to build an institute to study global conflict took such a petty turn.
Carnegie Mellon Universitylaunched Metro21 a smart cities institute. NYU, MIT, and other universities also have similar institutes focusing on sensors and big data in the city.
Oh, and Farnam Jahanian has been named President of Carnegie Mellon University.
The University of Michigan is offering an Applied Data Science MS degree via Coursera. There are four other universities offering computer science degrees and public health degrees through the all-online platform: University of London, University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, Imperial College London, and Arizona State University.
The University of Maryland has 17 faculty members planning a new arts + computer science interdisciplinary undergraduate degree in Virtual Reality. Sounds like fun. I haven’t seen any other schools with a VR degree. If you have, send me an email.
Jed Brubaker of the University of Colorado has been working on developing rituals and strategies for our data and virtual representations once we’ve died. Brubaker’s work is deeply thoughtful. It speaks to the value of utilizing qualitative research in technological spaces.
When asked to choose by Gallup/Knight Foundation, 53% of university students preferred diversity over freedom of speech, demonstrating an important tension in values between traditionally privileged groups (whites, men, political conservatives [though I admit that conservatives are not privileged on uni campuses]) and those who haven’t benefitted as much from the status quo (women, blacks, and liberals). Of course, I object to the idea that diversity and free speech cannot productively coexist. With a weird premise like that, it’s hard to know how to interpret the findings.
UC-Berkeley researchers have developed an app that dynamically readjusts users’ fitness goals to keep them motivated and at peak performance. CAL Fit is a prototype that will eventually be available in top app stores.
A management shuffle at the Food and Drug Administration Monday moved two officials into high-ranking positions, giving them more authority over the agency’s strategy.
Theresa Mullin is moving up from being the director of the office of strategic programs at the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research — starting Monday, she’s working directly in the office of the CDER director, Janet Woodcock, as the associate director for strategic initiatives, according to an email that Woodcock sent to her staff.
Meanwhile, Keagan Lenihan, a former political appointee at the Department of Health and Human Services and an ally of former HHS Secretary Tom Price, was hired directly into the FDA commissioner’s office, Politico reported. Lenihan will take on the role of associate commissioner for strategic initiatives.
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A small bird is tagged with a tracking band
Aspects of fieldwork are among the details that Nature is now asking from authors.Credit: Joel Sartore/National Geographic/Getty
As part of a broader effort to improve reporting quality, Nature and the Nature journals introduced a reporting checklist for life-sciences papers in 2013. This asked authors to reveal some key details of experimental design. Last year, this checklist evolved into a broader reporting-summary document that is published alongside manuscripts to promote greater transparency.
We have now developed two new versions of the reporting summary: one for the behavioural and social sciences, launching this week, and one for ecology, evolution and environment (EEE) research, to follow later this month. Authors will be prompted to use these documents to provide important details of study design, data collection and analysis before papers are sent out for review.
Harvard Business School, Working Knowledge; Edward L. Glaeser, Hyunjin Kim, and Michael Luca
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This study finds that data from digital platforms (in this case, Yelp) can help forecast which neighborhoods are gentrifying and provide new ways to measure business landscape changes that accompany demographic changes.
University of Maryland, The Diamondback, Christine Condon
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University of Maryland faculty members are working to create an undergraduate major in immersive media design that would combine art and computer science department resources to educate students on concepts such as virtual reality.
The major would operate between the arts and humanities college and the computer, mathematical and natural sciences college, and would aim to enhance students’ knowledge of design for virtual and augmented reality platforms for purposes ranging from mapping to journalism to engineering.
A group of 17 faculty members are planning the major, and hope it will be available for students in fall 2019.
Everyone seems to be “using” artificial intelligence these days. So is retail. Big players like Amazon and Target are pouring huge amounts of resources into machine learning, and many companies sell “Artificial intelligence” tools for the retail industry.
There’s just one problem. Most of what the retail industry refers to as artificial intelligence isn’t AI. Furthermore, it’s bad for both customers and retailers. Using the “AI” that worked online in physical stores risks making physical stores look increasingly like websites amid a larger trend towards automation and reducing human presence in stores. This is altogether a very poor idea.
I teach at MIT and have worked with artificial intelligence tools to solve problems across several domains for years. AI is a field, but also an aspiration, we’re sold on (or fear) the aspiration, but it’s important for retailers to understand what AI –the field– can deliver today and how it can help (and hinder).
As Russia’s virtual war against the United States continues unabated with the midterm elections approaching, the State Department has yet to spend any of the $120 million it has been allocated since late 2016 to counter foreign efforts to meddle in elections or sow distrust in democracy.
As a result, not one of the 23 analysts working in the department’s Global Engagement Center — which has been tasked with countering Moscow’s disinformation campaign — speaks Russian, and a department hiring freeze has hindered efforts to recruit the computer experts needed to track the Russian efforts.
The delay is just one symptom of the largely passive response to the Russian interference by President Trump, who has made little if any public effort to rally the nation to confront Moscow and defend democratic institutions.
Singapore July 8-11 at Nanyang Technological University. “The goal of this workshop is to bring together a growing community of experts from academia and industry to discuss ethical, social, and legal concerns related to personalization, and specifically to explore a variety of mechanisms and modeling approaches that help mitigate bias and achieve fairness in personalized systems.” Deadline for submissions is April 18.
Stanford, CA June 25 at Stanford University. “This workshop aims to broaden the debate on algorithms and news to discuss both risks and opportunities of personalization for news consumption and to develop suitable methods for auditing algorithmic personalization and its impact on users’ news consumption behavior. It also aims to foster a dialogue between the stakeholders involved by bringing together researchers from computer science, media studies, journalism and communication sciences, as well as industry practitioners from both mainstream media and startups.” Deadline for submissions is April 30.
Using robots to analyze infant function? As part of this month’s Women in Data Science series, we catch up with Karen Adolph, Professor of Psychology and Neural Science
One of the ways of measuring the maturity of a data science team is by adapting Joel’s software test to the discipline of data science. This post explores three interpretations of this test, each of which define a set of yes/no questions to answer about your data science team. The more questions that you can answer yes to the better. I’ve answered each of these questions and provided some details about data science at Windfall. The goal of performing this exercise is to identify areas of improvement, and highlight the foundation we have in place for growing our team.
There has been a quiet push lately by tech industry giants to get ethical about future technologies. But is anything more than PR? And how do we teach technology students to preempt a possible ethical disaster? Jordan Erica Webber explores the issues [audio, 34:24]