Data Science newsletter – April 27, 2018

GROUP CURATION: N/A

Given that a majority of people use internet search as part of their job search, in work presented at the CHI 2018 conference we explored whether we could use Bing searches, anonymized and aggregated, to augment these traditional approaches to surveying the shifting employment landscape. The use of internet search data provides several advantages, including the ability to update employment measures in near real-time, to measure at significant scale, both in terms of population size and geographies covered, and finally to understand intent to change jobs that may or may not be realized.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded a $10 million, four-year grant to HudsonAlpha Institute of Biotechnology in support of their newborn whole genome sequencing project, which will help with the diagnosis and care of newborns with birth defects and genetic disorders.

HudsonAlpha Institute will collaborate with University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) School of Medicine and the University of Mississippi Medical Center for this endeavor.

The University of Calgary is meeting the challenges of our data-driven world by launching two new short-term graduate-level programs that will prepare students — many of them mid-career professionals — to succeed in the fast-growing areas of data science and business analytics. In the future, there may be the opportunity to apply these credentials towards completion of a master’s level program.

Jeff Brantingham is as close as it gets to putting a face on the controversial practice of “predictive policing.” Over the past decade, the University of California-Los Angeles anthropology professor adapted his Pentagon-funded research in forecasting battlefield casualties in Iraq to predicting crime for American police departments, patenting his research and founding a for-profit company named PredPol, LLC.

PredPol quickly became one of the market leaders in the nascent field of crime prediction around 2012, but also came under fire from activists and civil libertarians who argued the firm provided a sort of “tech-washing” for racially biased, ineffective policing methods.

Now, Brantingham is using military research funding for another tech and policing collaboration with potentially damaging repercussions: using machine learning, the Los Angeles Police Department’s criminal data, and an outdated gang territory map to automate the classification of “gang-related” crimes.

Thanks to a Department of Defense grant, researchers are planning for a future when unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have the ability to fly themselves in emergency situations.

A research team from the Cockrell School of Engineering and the College of Natural Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin has been selected by the DOD to lead a $7.5 million Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) project aimed at developing artificial intelligence for UAVs.

While almost all artificial intelligence, or AI, technology is reliant on the availability of massive amounts of data, Texas Engineers have been charged with the task of developing machines that can learn “on the fly” in situations where there is little data to inform them. The interdisciplinary team hopes their combined efforts will assist the Department of Defense in the development of truly autonomous systems that can not only operate in challenging environments but also survive disruptions or recognize when they are fatal.

Last month, Google Bangalore hosted the Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, with the goal of fostering collaboration between the academic and industry research communities in India. This forum was designed to exchange current research and industry projects in AI & ML, and included faculty and researchers from Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and other leading universities in India, along with industry practitioners from Amazon, Delhivery, Flipkart, LinkedIn, Myntra, Microsoft, Ola and many more. Participants spoke on the ongoing research and work being undertaken in India in deep learning, computer vision, natural language processing, systems and generative models (you can access all the presentations from the workshop here).

While we embrace the way the Internet of Things already is making our lives more streamlined and convenient, the cybersecurity risk posed by millions of wirelessly connected gadgets, devices and appliances remains a huge concern. Even single, targeted attacks can result in major damage; when cybercriminals control and manipulate several nodes in a network, the potential for destruction increases.

UC Santa Barbara electrical and computer engineering professor Dmitri Strukov is working to address the latter. He and his team are looking to put an extra layer of security on the growing number of internet- and Bluetooth-enabled devices with technology that aims to prevent cloning, the practice by which nodes in a network are replicated and then used to launch attacks from within the network. A chip that deploys ionic memristor technology, it is an analog memory hardware solution to a digital problem.

“You can think of it as a black box,” said Strukov, whose new paper, “Hardware-intrinsic security primitives enabled by analogue state and nonlinear conductance variations in integrated memristors,” appears on the cover of Nature Electronics. Due to its nature, the chip is physically unclonable and can thus render the device invulnerable to hijacking, counterfeiting or replication by cyber criminals.

Extremist propaganda, dangerous hoaxes, videos of tasered rats—the company is having its worst year ever. Except financially.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is moving to encourage the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in health care, the agency’s chief said Thursday.

“AI holds enormous promise for the future of medicine,” FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said in prepared remarks to the Health Datapalooza conference in Washington, D.C.

He said the FDA is working on an updated “new regulatory framework” that will allow regulators to keep up with new technology and “promote innovation in this space.”

Thousands of NHS staff are to be trained to use robotics and artificial intelligence as the health service sets out to embrace cutting-edge innovation and technology.

New developments in genomics, digital medicine, artificial intelligence and robotics have already revolutionised some NHS treatments such as eye surgery and knee replacements.

Health and Social Care Secretary Jeremy Hunt has called on US academic Eric Topol to carry out a review into how the NHS can pioneer new treatments and technologies to transform healthcare.

Dr Topol, an expert in cardiology, genetics and digital medicine, has previously examined the use of wireless and smartphone technology in healthcare, and led a multi-million dollar US research programme focusing on harnessing technology and data to provide more precise, tailored patient treatment.

Virginia Tech’s Flint Water Study Team will take its influential scientific detective work to more communities, thanks to an Environmental Protection Agency grant.

University Professor Marc Edwards received a nearly $2 million grant from the EPA to detect and control lead levels in public drinking water, while getting community members involved as ongoing monitors.

Edwards said the funding, which was announced Wednesday, will enable what he called the “largest engineering citizen-science project in American history.”

EPA administrator Scott Pruitt heads to Capitol Hill Thursday for two separate hearings, ostensibly to answer questions about his agency’s budget. But House lawmakers—both Republican and Democrat—will instead focus on a series of scandals that have turned the agency upside down. From his paranoia about personal security and that $43,000 soundproof telephone booth to sweetheart lodging deals with lobbyists and big pay raises for young aides, Pruitt will be answering some skeptical House members.

At last count, Pruitt faces 10 investigations by the Government Accountability Office, Office of Inspector General, and congressional committees. And while the administrator defends himself against allegations of misconduct and ethics missteps, environmental advocates and some EPA employees are focused on what federal environmental and climate policies could look like in a possible post-Pruitt era.

“It would be great for morale if he were to get the axe,” says an EPA employee who asked not to use his name for fear of losing his job. “That said, we don’t really know him. He’s a shadowy figure, a kind of boogieman.” The employee, a life scientist in an EPA regional office, said he and his colleagues don’t receive much information from EPA headquarters about Pruitt’s policies, agenda, or even his visits. Employees there get most of their information about Pruitt’s agenda from TV news. “[Pruitt] was here last week, but nobody told us,” the scientist said.

Neurodegenerative disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease (PD) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD), are important public health problems warranting early detection. We trained machine-learned classifiers on the longitudinal search logs of 31,321,773 search engine users to automatically detect neurodegenerative disorders. Several digital phenotypes with high discriminatory weights for detecting these disorders are identified. Classifier sensitivities for PD detection are 94.2/83.1/42.0/34.6% at false positive rates (FPRs) of 20/10/1/0.1%, respectively. Preliminary analysis shows similar performance for AD detection. Subject to further refinement of accuracy and reproducibility, these findings show the promise of web search digital phenotypes as adjunctive screening tools for neurodegenerative disorders.

Last month, Digg, an old beloved content aggregation destination, made the sad announcement to its loyal following that it was shutting down its RSS platform, Digg Reader. This wasn’t merely a product decision, it turns out, but a development as the company transitioned to a new parent company.

Multiple sources tell me that Digg, formerly owned by Betaworks, has been sold to the little-known Boston-based ad-tech company BuySellAds. The company bought Digg’s assets, as well as its editorial and revenue teams, for an undisclosed amount. Additionally, the blockchain-based digital publishing platform Civil has hired up many people from Digg’s tech team. Most recently, Digg raised a Series C round of funding that was led by Gannett.

Eric Spina was leaving out a key piece of information as he addressed the Syracuse University faculty and staff gathered in Hendricks Chapel.

It was November 2013, and Spina, then SU’s provost and interim chancellor, was leading a forum about a university-wide assessment being administered in partnership with consulting firm Bain & Company.

The assessment, Spina said, would culminate in a report containing “a set of facts and a deep knowledge base” that would be presented to Chancellor-designate Kent Syverud, serving as a crucial foundation to guide his decisions. Data was to be collected through budgetary analysis, interviews with campus leaders and surveys of faculty and staff.

Further input would be provided from the assessment’s steering committee, which was a mix of faculty and administrators. Spina emphasized that the steering committee would play a leading role in the assessment.

“It’s not really the Bain project,” he said. “That’s a clear message I want you to hear. This is the Syracuse University project that is being run by the steering committee.”

What Spina didn’t mention was that there was another committee involved: the assessment’s executive committee, which was privy to more information than the steering committee and had authority over it. The executive committee consisted of Spina, four other upper-administrators, SU trustee John Riley and, notably, trustee Steven Barnes.

Amerherst, MA September 22. “StatFest is a great opportunity for undergraduate students from historically underrepresented groups (African American, Hispanic, Native Americans) to network and consider careers and graduate studies in the statistical sciences.” [save the date]

Fort Worth, TX June 6-7 at the University of North Texas Health Science Center in Fort Worth in conjunction with the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in 2018. “This year’s theme is Open Medical and Health Information.” [registration required]

“Swift for TensorFlow provides a new programming model that combines the performance of graphs with the flexibility and expressivity of Eager execution, with a strong focus on improved usability at every level of the stack. This is not just a TensorFlow API wrapper written in Swift — we added compiler and language enhancements to Swift to provide a first-class user experience for machine learning developers.”

As of last week, we’re prioritizing this and staffing it with talented employees from our Executive, Community, Data, Design, Research, and Engineering teams. We’re listening to our community and those sharing their experiences. I want to thank those of you who’ve been vocal about the need for improvement. It hurt to hear, but we needed to hear it.

We’ve started with user research, and we’re keeping an open mind to all ideas. There are opportunities to work on things like reviewing site copy for inclusive language. Maybe it’s time we re-visited things like our “no pleases or thank yous’” rule.

“The creation of ethics modules that can be inserted into a variety of classes may help ensure that ethics as a subject is not marginalized and enable professors with little experience in philosophy or with fewer resources to incorporate ethics into their more technical classes. This post will outline some of the topics that professors have decided to cover in this field, as well as suggestions for types of assignments that may be useful. We hope that readers will consider ways to add these into their classes, and we welcome comments with further suggestions of topics or assignments.”