IN DECEMBER 1989 Guido van Rossum, a Dutch computer scientist, set himself a Christmas project. Irked by shortcomings in other programming languages, he wanted to build his own. His principles were simple. First, it should be easy to read. Rather than sprawling over line-endings and being broken up by a tangle of curly braces, each chunk would be surrounded with indented white space. Second, it should let users create their own packages of special-purpose coding modules, which could then be made available to others to form the basis of new programs. Third, he wanted a “short, unique and slightly mysterious” name. He therefore called it after Monty Python, a British comedy group. The package repository became known as the Cheese Shop.
Nearly 30 years after his Christmas invention, Mr Van Rossum resembles a technological version of the Monty Python character who accidentally became the Messiah in the film “Life of Brian”. “I certainly didn’t set out to create a language that was intended for mass consumption,” he explains. But in the past 12 months Google users in America have searched for Python more often than for Kim Kardashian, a reality-TV star.
The Office of Management and Budget announced Grant Schneider will be the second federal chief information security officer.
As such, Schneider will lead cybersecurity strategy across the executive branch and chair the CISO Council. Schneider has been filling the CISO role in an acting capacity and is the National Security Council’s senior director for cybersecurity. He will continue serving in his position on the NSC, according to an administrative official.
Germany Defence and Interior ministry officials are pushing for the creation of a new agency this year that will study disruptive technologies relevant to Germany’s defense and security.
A decision on the way forward is expected “shortly,” a Defence Ministry spokesman told Defense News on Wednesday. Planning is underway to get the green light from the Finance Ministry, a necessary step because the agency would be set up as an “in-house” limited liability corporation, according to the spokesman.
If all goes according to plan, insiders believe Cabinet-level consideration of the effort could come as early as September. While there is no official word on the exact timing, the spokesman said creating the agency is firmly on the calendar for 2018.
Even in a world where planes spend most of their time on autopilot and robo-cars are roaming cities all over the world, teaching a helicopter to fly itself is a gnarly problem. These workhorses must be able to hover over ships bobbing up and down on rough seas, and descend onto oil rigs in gusting winds. They have to dodge power lines and cell towers that may not show up on navigation charts, and balance single skids on sheer cliffs in order to rescue injured climbers.
“Helicopters have very high crew workloads and obstacle-rich environments,” says Chris Van Buiten, vice president of Sikorsky Innovations, the division of the Lockheed Martin-owned company that’s pursuing autonomous flight.
Creating systems that require less data and have more common sense is a key goal for making AI smarter in the future.
“Clearly we’re missing something in terms of how humans can learn so fast,” Yann LeCun, Facebook’s chief AI scientist, said in a call with reporters last week. “So far the best ideas have come out of robotics.”
Among the people Facebook is hiring are Jessica Hodgins , the former Disney researcher; and Abhinav Gupta, her colleague at Carnegie Mellon University who is known for using robot arms to learn how to grasp things.
Germany’s Helmholtz Association centers DESY and Forschungszentrum Jülich, and Canada’s TRIUMF, TRIUMF Innovations, D-Wave Systems Inc., and 1QBit have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to jointly establish corresponding Canadian and German quantum computing and machine learning networks and to collaborate on applied quantum computing and machine learning initiatives of mutual interest. The corresponding networks aim to facilitate national and international collaboration in the use of quantum computing and machine learning tools to enhance research and will be open to additional partners as they are developed. The networks include four joint working groups to focus on four pillars of data science: Quantum Computing, Large Scale Computing, Machine Learning, and Big Data Analytics.
“It’s perfectly fine for employers to have a test,” said John Hart, professor and director of online professional programs in computer science. “We prepare students for lifelong careers in computing and data science, with lectures focusing on fundamentals and not on the latest platforms.”
Glassdoor reported ‘data scientist’ has been named the best job in America for the third year in a row, with a median salary of $110,000 and 4,524 job openings.
Along with the abundance of job openings, Hart said the University’s enrollment for the master of computer science in data science degree has been exploding. Students in the MCS-DS program will study data visualization, machine learning, data mining, cloud computing and how to properly analyze big data for future employers.
Alfredo Tirado-Ramos, Ph.D, has joined the Dartmouth community to lead biomedical and translational informatics programs for the Geisel School of Medicine and the Dartmouth-Hitchcock health system.
Tirado-Ramos will serve as director of biomedical informatics at Synergy Clinical and Translational Science Institute, and of the Biomedical Data Science Research Software Laboratory. In addition, he will be an associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Data Science at Geisel and scientific director of biomedical informatics for Dartmouth-Hitchcock.
The manipulation of public opinion over social media platforms has emerged as a critical threat to public life. Around the world, government agencies and political parties are exploiting social media platforms to spread junk news and disinformation, exercise censorship and control, and undermine trust in media, public institutions and science.
Now, a new report from the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) at Oxford University, has found that despite efforts to combat computational propaganda, the problem is growing at a large scale.
I am proud to announce that as of July 1st, I have joined the NumFOCUS staff full time. My role is being generously funded by the Sloan Foundation as part of our Sustainability Grant. It is the first time in the six years of working on NumFOCUS that I will receive pay for this work and signals an important moment in our organization.
The board has asked me to continue to work as the President of the Board and oversee the activities of the staff. Thus my title doesn’t change but my role will have a significant shift. This time allows me to focus efforts on new initiatives for growing the revenue streams of the organization. Our Executive Director Leah Silen and I will work together to manage all the projects and priorities for the organization.
Dangerous shark encounters are also incredibly rare. Your risk of being attacked by a shark is about 11.5 million to one. That means you’re more likely to be struck by lightning or die from the flu than fall victim to a shark attack.
Your risk of encountering a shark also depends on where you choose to go for your beach vacation. Florida is the shark attack capital of America, accounting for 244 shark attacks over the span of a decade. Hawaii was the runner-up with 65.
I talk to Kirill Eremenko about my journey to data science, how KDnuggets started, why you should start honing your machine learning engineering skills at this very moment, what’s the future of data science, and more. [link to audio]
A proposal to dramatically shift how libraries create metadata and greatly improve how users discover library holdings has been accepted and awarded to Stanford Libraries by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In partnership with the libraries of Cornell, Harvard and the University of Iowa, Stanford will lead the effort to integrate library data into the Web, in a semantic way, so it can be discovered intelligently in Web searches as well as in a library’s catalogue.
“By taking advantage of the semantic web, library users can directly benefit from other important data sources on the Web,” said Philip Schreur, Associate University Librarian for Technical Services at Stanford Libraries. “The Web is an international environment, by shifting to linked data, libraries worldwide can take advantage of the existing bibliographic and authoritative data many national libraries create and make available as linked data.”
The Mellon grant will allow Cornell, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Iowa to implement a prototype environment, from metadata acquisition/creation through to discovery. An important enhancement in this round of funding will be collaborating with the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) and the Library of Congress to expand the number of libraries implementing linked data.
Boston, MA August 4-5. “During this event, you will grasp how science is blended with advanced baseball statistics and traditional scouting assessments to produce outstanding results for teams.” [sold out]
Time Lattice is “a memory-efficient data structure that makes use of the implicit temporal hierarchy to enable interactive OLAP queries over large time series. Time Lattice is a subset of a fully materialized cube and is designed to handle fast updates and streaming data.”
One of the most challenging aspects of leading a data science team is gaining and maintaining stakeholder buy-in on a project. Developing the skills and process to do this well is critical to your success in this role.
In this article, I will go over three ways to maximize the chances of turning your stakeholders into happy customers and project champions.
