Data Science newsletter – February 22, 2019

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Here is how some of the leading European research centers are revolutionizing research with DGX Systems:

DFKI

The German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), the leading research center in Germany in the field of innovative commercial software technology using AI,was the first institution in Europe to adopt the NVIDIA DGX-2.

Software- and computer-based works of art are fragile–not unlike their canvas counterparts–as their underlying technologies such as operating systems and programming languages change rapidly, placing these works at risk.

These include Shu Lea Cheang’s Brandon (1998-99), Mark Napier’s net.flag (2002), and John F. Simon Jr.’s Unfolding Object (2002), three online works recently conserved at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, through a collaboration with New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.

More than 40% of women with full-time jobs in science leave the sector or go part time after having their first child, according to a study of how parenthood affects career trajectories in the United States. By contrast, only 23% of new fathers leave or cut their working hours.

The analysis (see ‘Parents in science’), led by Erin Cech, a sociologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, might help to explain the persistent under-representation of women in jobs that involve science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). The study also highlights the impact of fatherhood on a career in science, she says.

To maintain its strategic position in the world, succeed on future battlefields and protect the homeland, the Department of Defense must increase the adoption of artificial intelligence, according to the department’s newly released Artificial Intelligence Strategy.

“Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly changing a wide range of businesses and industries,” the document stated. “It is also poised to change the character of the future battlefield and the pace of threats we must face. We will harness the potential of AI to transform all functions of the department positively, thereby supporting and protecting U.S. service members, safeguarding U.S. citizens, defending allies and partners, and improving the affordability, effectiveness and speed of our operations.”

The strategy singles out China and Russia as making significant investments in militarized AI, including applications that cast doubt on the adherence to “international norms and human rights,” the document noted.

Scientists call it California’s “other big one,” and they say it could cause three times as much damage as a major earthquake ripping along the San Andreas Fault.

Although it might sound absurd to those who still recall five years of withering drought and mandatory water restrictions, researchers and engineers warn that California may be due for rain of biblical proportions — or what experts call an ARkStorm.

This rare mega-storm — which some say is rendered all the more inevitable due to climate change — would last for weeks and send more than 1.5 million people fleeing as floodwaters inundated cities and formed lakes in the Central Valley and Mojave Desert.

Some scientists are calling on the Food and Drug Administration to establish standards for advanced algorithms that are developing at a “staggering” pace before they are put in medical devices to help predict patients’ outcomes.

What’s new: Advanced algorithms are starting to be deployed in some devices to help provide automated real-time predictions, but these offer a whole new level of possibilities and challenges from older predictive tools. Standards are needed to check for safety and effectiveness before they are implemented in a clinical setting, the scientists say in a policy forum in Science Thursday.

“I’m really happy to see that in 2018, a lot of that dust settled and we started to see real, concrete examples of its use,” [Taha Kass-Hout] said.

One of these, which Kass-Hout also touched on in the interview, is Comprehend Medical, a machine learning service for health information that Amazon launched in late 2018. One early partner, Change Healthcare, which processes health claims for pharmacies, uses Comprehend Medical to predict whether an insurance claim will likely be denied.

A team of University of Washington researchers including eScience postdoctoral fellow Timothy A. Thomas, Ott Toomet, Ian Kennedy, and Alex Ramiller, has released a report titled “The state of evictions: results from the University of Washington Evictions Project” as a living website that will be frequently updated with their work: https://evictions.study.

Washington is in the midst of an eviction crisis that is devastating communities of color. The team finds that one in six black adults in Pierce County (17%) were evicted over five years, while one in 11 black adults were evicted in King County. Given this issue, the team believes that evictions are not only a mechanism leading to homelessness, but a civil rights issue as well.

Five years ago—an eternity in the world of tech startups—two college buddies from India, both living in Chicago, decided to build software that would give the then-emerging class of Airbnb hosts the ability to quickly adjust their prices based on shifts in demand.

Anurag Verma, who built dynamic pricing tools for United Airlines, provided the technical know-how. The business insight came from Richie Khandelwal, a Northwestern University MBA student and frustrated Airbnb host. They recruited a third Chicago co-founder, software engineer Syed Hassan, and built the first version of their product, PriceLabs.

Space research has made many significant discoveries since man first set foot in outer space over 50 years ago, but one Cambridge startup is still dedicating its resources to understanding the moon better.

Lunar Station Corporation is a startup that does moon navigational research to help its customers including exploration professionals, rocket builders, and aerospace researchers navigate the moon for their lunar expeditions and scientific research. The three-year-old company sells MoonHacker, an analytical software that gives data about the moon’s atmosphere, terrain, and environmental factors that help identify the challenges that need to be overcome to go to the moon.

Myth 1: TensorFlow is a Tensor manipulation library

Myth 2: Image datasets are representative of real images found in the wild

Myth 3: Machine Learning researchers do not use the test set for validation

Myth 4: Every datapoint is used in training a neural network

Myth 5: We need (batch) normalization to train very deep residual networks

Myth 6: Attention > Convolution

Myth 7: Saliency maps are robust ways to interpret neural networks

In Queens—a district where 40 percent of the population are immigrants and more than a quarter are Hispanic—Amazon’s relationship with ICE is a big reason why some local activists are glad the tech company is no longer coming to town. “There are already many immigrants who are afraid to seek help and fight for their rights. We see that Amazon has added to their fear and danger, by collaborating with ICE,” said Bianca McPherson, an organizer with the local advocacy group Queens Neighborhoods United, which fought the Amazon deal.

“For every person who said, ‘Why don’t we try to get more jobs from Amazon?’ we could counter that with, ‘That doesn’t stop them from colluding with ICE,’” added Shrima Pandey, another organizer with Queens Neighborhoods United, in an email to Inequality.org.

New industry-funded AI Masters, and 16 dedicated Centres at universities across the country to train the next generation of AI PhDs

prestigious Alan Turing Institute AI research fellowships now open – allowing Britain to retain and attract the very best global talent

new figures show that inward investment to the UK AI sector has increased by 17% over the past year, more than the whole of Europe combined

rin Hawley grew up immersed in video games, progressing from Pong on the Atari 2600 to Sonic the Hedgehog on the Sega Genesis to Tomb Raider on the Sony PlayStation.

But as the hand-held controllers became more complex and her muscular dystrophy became more debilitating, she was eventually forced to stop playing console games. Even holding a controller is difficult for Ms. Hawley because of the weight, and her hands are unable to reach certain buttons.

To support gamers with physical disabilities, an industrious community has for years modified existing controllers or devised new ones altogether. And now those efforts, by organizations like Warfighter Engaged, the AbleGamers Charity and SpecialEffect, have been amplified by Microsoft, which in September released an adaptive controller for the Xbox One.

Governance of the digital economy was a key topic on the global agenda at Davos 2019, from panel discussions to Shinzo Abe’s announcement of a G20 track for data governance. It seems as though we are at the start of a new era in globalization, in which global trade in data is ever rising, while trade in physical goods is levelling off. New thinking about economic development is needed, otherwise we will see old dynamics play out again, with digital globalization favouring the few countries who build up early dominance at the right points in the value chain.

Montreal, QC, Canada March 21-22. “AI on a Social Mission is a major conference on social impact of AI. Discover new applications of AI for Social Good, be inspired, share ideas, expertise, and contribute to social, economic and policy innovation.” [$$$]

In the previous post, we talked about what is Julia, how to install it and we have learned how to work rightaway with tabular data. Now we are going to take one more step and learn new tricks with the DataFramesMeta package.

Synthetic networks may increase the availability of some data while still protecting individual or institutional privacy, according to a Penn State statistician.

“My key interest is in developing methodology that would enable broader sharing of confidential data in a way that can aid in scientific discovery,” said Aleksandra Slavkovic, professor of statistics and associate dean for graduate education, Eberly College of Science, Penn State. “Being able to share confidential data with minimal quantifiable risk for discovery of sensitive information and still ensure statistical accuracy and integrity, is the goal.”

Slavkovic has found solutions to this data privacy problem through interdisciplinary collaborations, especially with computer and social scientists.