Every fifteen minutes or so, as I wrote this story, I moved my cursor northward to click on the disk in the Microsoft Word toolbar that indicates “Save.” This is a superstitious move, as my computer automatically saves my work every ten minutes. But I learned to use a computer in the era before AutoSave, in the dark ages when remembering to save to a disk often stood between you and term-paper disaster. The persistence of that disk icon into the age of flash drives and cloud storage is a sign of its power. A disk means “Save.” Susan Kare designed a version of that disk, as part of the suite of icons that made the Macintosh revolutionary—a computer that you could communicate with in pictures.
From digital analysis of Bach sonatas to mining data from crowdsourced compositions, researchers at the University of Michigan are using modern big data techniques to transform how we understand, create and interact with music.
Four U-M research teams will receive support for projects that apply data science tools like machine learning and data mining to the study of music theory, performance, social media-based music making, and the connection between words and music. The funding is provided under the Data Science for Music Challenge Initiative through the Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS).
“MIDAS is excited to catalyze innovative, interdisciplinary research at the intersection of data science and music,” said Alfred Hero, co-director of MIDAS and the John H. Holland Distinguished University Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “The four proposals selected will apply and demonstrate some of the most powerful state-of-the-art machine learning and data mining methods to empirical music theory, automated musical accompaniment of text and data-driven analysis of music performance.”
Porch is back up to more than 450 people — approaching the number that the home improvement marketplace and renovation data startup had at its peak before major layoffs in 2015 and 2016 dramatically reduced its staff.
Porch CEO and co-founder Matt Ehrlichman revealed the company’s growth in a LinkedIn post that represents its emergence from a “rightly timed pause” that began about two years ago. The company went quiet after shifting its focus to profitability and building a stronger product rather than just pure growth.
Porch, whose platform connects home improvement professionals with homeowners, is nearing a break-even point, Ehrlichman wrote, and is now growing faster than ever. But this time around, Ehrlichman insists the growth will come in a more sustainable way.
“The company has emerged stronger, more focused, and better equipped to delight homeowners and empower home service professionals to thrive,” Ehrlichman wrote.
Company Data Science News
Lyft has reintroduced the job title Research Scientist which will mostly be used by people who used to be called Data Scientists. All the people who were Data Analysts before will now be Data Scientists. They are doing this for two main reasons: 1) they believe this division of labor and titles offers more organizational clarity after the initial confusion dies down; and 2) “more that once, we’ve lost a Data Analytics candidate to a competitor merely because that company offered the Data Scientist title.” To me, this is a sign that data science is going through the typical pruning, defining, and reframing process of becoming a profession. It’s also a sign that applicants who are interviewing for one position are already thinking about the next position they could land. Otherwise, why would they care so much about a title that they would select one job over another?
Alphabet, formerly Google funds so much science with advertising revenues. Verily is an Alphabet subsidiary partnering with Nikon to detect diabetic retinopathy. A new report by CB Insights mentions this and a bunch of other health-related initiatives as a “spray-and-pray” approach, proving that I am not the only person who likes spicy turns of phrase.
This week’s not-so-good news about Facebook comes from an investigative report conducted by The Washington Post that demonstrated how people in Facebook groups are producing pay-for-review networks to boost products’ ratings on Amazon. The investigators scraped the content of reviews on Amazon for a given product and then discovered suspiciously repetitive phrasing between reviews supposedly written by different individuals. Amazon responded by kicking some sellers off of its platform. Facebook responded by shutting down some groups (though it wouldn’t say which ones or how many users were impacted). Bluetooth headphones and speakers, weight loss pills, and testosterone boosters all appeared to have 50% or more of their reviews written by sock puppets.
The bot that won Amazon’s Alexa Prize was able to hold a conversation with judges for an average of ~10 minutes. Good job, University of Washington, you’ve bested many humans in a domain we’ve handled somewhat poorly for centuries: conversation.
Sergey Brin co-founder of Google (now Alphabet) wrote his annual letter last week, using a hackneyed Charles Dickens quote – “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” – to warn his fellow technologists not to get swept away in the tidal wave of data science-powered advancement. I may quibble with his choice of referents, but I agree with his message: “powerful tools also bring with them new questions and responsibilities.” Google, there’s space available to be one of the responsible companies. Please find a way to occupy it.
Adobebought a computer vision company the NYC-based Uru so this is a good time to mention that Adobe, a technology company with a strong position in online media and publishing industries, is also a machine learning company these days.
New York University has launched the Center for Environmental and Animal Protection, a research unit to inform policy related to these linked societal and scientific concerns.
“The nexus of animal agriculture, climate change, and conservation represents one of the most pressing and least understood threats to a sustainable future and will be a main focal point of the Center’s activities,” explains NYU’s Dale Jamieson, the Center’s founding director and professor of environmental studies and philosophy.
Extra Extra
Adidas and video start-up Grow made personal highlight reels for all 30,000 runners in this year’s brutally cold, rainy Boston marathon using 8 cameras and a coinciding editorial marathon that concluded in 24 hours.
Artificial intelligence is among the hottest topics across industries, and the advances in its use are stunning. As the pace of innovation quickens, however, there is worry about issues of privacy and quality in the use if AI. Earlier this month, Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and Bank of America announced the formation of The Council on the Responsible Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), a new effort to address critical questions surrounding this far-reaching and rapidly evolving application for data and technology. In a press release, Dan Schrag, Co-Director of the Belfer Center’s Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program noted, “Artificial intelligence and machine learning have potential to improve our lives in all sorts of exciting ways, but there are also risks. The Council will help investigate how to use these technologies in a responsible manner across various domains.”
Bank of America’s sponsor for this initiative is Cathy Bessant, the company’s Chief Operations and Technology Officer. She has long been passionate about AI, a topic we discussed in an interview we did last June. I caught up with Bessant just after the announcement to better understand what she hopes will be accomplished through this partnership.
American universities are losing out to colleges in other countries in the race to enroll international students, and they’re blaming President Donald Trump.
Foreign competitors are taking advantage of Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric, aggressively recruiting the types of foreign students and faculty who would have typically come to the United States for their higher education. The data already show that U.S. colleges are falling behind foreign competitors during the Trump era.
New foreign student enrollment in the U.S. dropped by 3 percent during the 2016-17 school year, and that decline is projected to double this school year, data show. At the same time, universities overseas are seeing increases as high as the double digits. The decline in foreign students enrolling in American colleges is just the latest evidence of Trump’s immigration policies shutting doors in America. The U.S. is also granting fewer visitor visas to people from around the world.
Leading scientists have drawn up plans for a vast multinational European institute devoted to world-class artificial intelligence (AI) research in a desperate bid to nurture and retain top talent in Europe.
The new institute would be set up for similar reasons as Cern, the particle physics lab near Geneva, which was created after the second world war to rebuild European physics and reverse the brain drain of the brightest and best scientists to the US.
Named the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems, or Ellis, the proposed AI institute would have major centres in a handful of countries, the UK included, with each employing hundreds of computer engineers, mathematicians and other scientists with the express aim of keeping Europe at the forefront of AI research.
University of California-San Diego, THE TRITON student newspaper, Anabel King
from
The Data Science major at UC San Diego, which was added in Fall 2017, will begin limiting enrollment in the major on July 1 due to growing demand. Students will be accepted into the major based on their GPA in three screening courses: Math 20C, Math 18/20F, and DSC 10.
Data Science is an interdisciplinary field that studies statistics and machine learning and applies it to data collection methods and modern technology. According to the department, there are currently 387 students declared in the major.
“Data has emerged in our society as an essential means by which we can better understand the world around us and vastly improve the way we conduct business, govern, and deliver healthcare,” a statement from the major’s department website said. “Yet, the methods and tools of this emerging field of data science are still in its early stages of development and not yet in practice.”
Eric and Wendy Schmidt, in partnership with the Rhodes Trust, today announced the 14 members of the inaugural 2018-2019 class of Schmidt Science Fellows at an event at the Apella Alexandria Center for Life Science in New York City. This unique post-doctoral program focused on scientific leadership and interdisciplinary research is aimed at providing the next generation of leaders and innovators with the tools and opportunities to drive world-changing advances across the sciences and society.
Data USA unveiled Monday a trove of public data on 7,363 universities and colleges culled from the U.S. Department of Education and other sources.
The universities profiles aims to transform the raw extensive data into a user-friendly digestible format for the public to peruse, especially prospective students, parents and high school counselors. But it’s also meant for higher education administrators and their IT staff, given that it includes features to easily do side-by-side comparisons of institutions.
The universities category includes such data as the average net price to attend a specific institution after factoring in financial aid, financial aid by income level, SAT scores, graduate demographics, most common jobs by major and the academic rank and gender of the instructional staff.
San Francisco Chronicle, Steve McCormick and Jon Christensen
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The Natural Resources Agency, which oversees state parks, assembled a transformation team composed of veteran park personnel regarded as “change-makers” along with two independent members and charged the team with turning the commission’s recommendations into an implementable plan. And the governor appointed Lisa Mangat as the new director of the Department of Parks and Recreation. A former budget manager in the state Department of Finance, Mangat had no background in parks or recreation. She was an unorthodox selection to lead an agency widely seen as an old boy’s club ruled by long-serving superintendents with law enforcement backgrounds.
Mangat was actually an inspired hire. Her fresh perspective was just what state parks needed. And her experience as an outcome-oriented pragmatist who knows how to play the inside game has enabled her to work the byzantine bureaucracy of state government while keeping her sights on a far more ambitious agenda. The subsequent changes in state parks have been systemic and sweeping.
In 2017, the volume of opioid prescriptions saw its biggest decline in 25 years, reflecting changing guidelines and more aggressive population health management techniques, according to a new report from the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science.
Dispensed opioid prescriptions dropped by 10.2 percent, while high-dose prescriptions saw a 16.1 reduction.
Overall, the nation saw a 12 percent decrease in the total volume of clinically prescribed opioids by morphine milligram equivalents (MME) in 2017.
When dealing with real-world data, dirty data is the norm rather than the exception. We continuously need to predict correct values, impute missing ones, and find links between various data artefacts such as schemas and records. We need to stop treating data cleaning as a piecemeal exercise (resolving different types of errors in isolation), and instead leverage all signals and resources (such as constraints, available statistics, and dictionaries) to accurately predict corrective actions.
New York, NY June 4-6 at Columbia University. “The main goal of the conference is to bring together researchers in statistical machine learning and data mining from academia, industry, and government in a relaxed and stimulating atmosphere to focus on the development of statistical learning theory, methods and applications.” [$$$]
London, England May 1, starting at 6 p.m, SAGE Publishing. “We will be talking about how the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) affects product managers and their products.” [free, rsvp required]
When hiring technical talent – especially developers – it’s important to understand exactly what traits will add max value to your existing team. Whether you need seasoned senior talent to serve as the foundation of a key team, or bright and trainable junior talent to build and execute – both Junior and Senior Developers play key, but differing roles in an engineering organization.
We’ve created a checklist of the top traits to look for in both Junior and Senior Developers in your search beyond just “X number years of experience”.