Data Science newsletter – May 21, 2019

GROUP CURATION: N/A

Technology can’t enhance humanity, that it’s depersonalizing, that it’s going to detract. I actually think it’s just the opposite in medicine, because if we can outsource to machines and technology, we can restore the human bond, which has been eroding for decades. So what I mean by deep medicine is really a three part story: The first is what we call deep phenotyping. And that is a very intensive, comprehensive understanding of each person at every level. So that’s the idea of knowing all about their biology, not just their genome, their microbiome, and all the things the different layers of the person, but also their physiology through sensors, their anatomy through scans, their environment through sensors as well, and then traditional data. [video, pre-roll + 5:30]

Mike Fasil had much to celebrate when he graduated Friday alongside thousands of others from George Mason University.

The son of Ethiopian immigrants and the first in his family to go to college, the 21-year-old from Northern Virginia received a bachelor’s degree in information systems and operations management. He minored in an increasingly popular subject, data analysis, and lined up a job as a business technology analyst.

What also sets his résumé apart is a digital technology credential he earned from George Mason that educators say will soon be offered in several universities in the District and Virginia.

This new marker of achievement reflects growing demand from employers for graduates with fluency in core tech subjects, no matter what their major. It also shows the business community’s deep ties to higher education — a relationship educators and executives insist will not compromise academic quality or independence.

Facial recognition technology raises fears of a dystopian surveillance state, with vanishing privacy and a high potential for abuse. Such concerns led San Francisco this week to ban any use of facial recognition by the police and other city agencies.

But it is also a powerful and efficient tool that, much like DNA analysis, offers a way to bring policing into the modern age and help catch wrongdoers or solve crimes that have gone cold.

Question What was the association between a beverage excise tax on sugar-sweetened and artificially sweetened beverages implemented in Philadelphia in 2017 with changes in beverage prices and volume of sales?

Findings In this difference-in-differences analysis of retailer sales data in the year before and the year after implementation of an excise tax of 1.5 cents per ounce on sugar-sweetened and artificially sweetened beverages, the tax was associated with significant increases in price-per-ounce of 0.65 cents at supermarkets, 0.87 cents by mass merchandise stores, and 1.56 cents at pharmacies. Total volume sales of taxed beverages in Philadelphia decreased by 1.3 billion ounces after tax implementation (51%), but sales in Pennsylvania border zip codes increased by 308.2 million ounces, partially offsetting the decrease in Philadelphia’s volume sales by 24.4%.

Meaning A beverage excise tax on sugar-sweetened and artificially sweetened beverages in a large urban setting was associated with a significant increase in beverage prices and a significant reduction in volume sales of taxed beverages, although changes in sales volume were partially offset by purchases in neighboring areas.

The International Energy Agency’s new world investment report released this week, reveals the companies funding coal-fired power stations appear to be making significant recalculations about the long-term viability of these plants.

More than 12 years ago I wrote a feature about the workplace culture at Google, which debuted that year at No. 1 on Fortune’s annual 100 Best Companies to Work For list. It was a whimsical piece that tried to pull back the curtain on the zany yet cush environment for the mostly young workforce. The headline and sub-headline from 2007 are deliciously worth pondering today: “Search and Enjoy: The people are brilliant. The perks are epic. But can Google’s founders build a culture that doesn’t depend on the stock price?”

Fortune’s Beth Kowitt has delivered a full-throated response to that generation-ago (by Silicon Valley standards) question: Not completely. Noting Google’s idealistic founding and early years, Kowitt added up the multiple recent clashes between Google and its own employees. Then she asks a question of her own: What happens when an empowered tech workforce rebels?

The BBC wants to “pop your bubble” with unexpected and challenging content on its streaming service, BBC Sounds.

A Research Letter by NYU Wagner Professor Jan Blustein, published in JAMA Otolaryngology and Head & Neck Surgery, underscores an obstacle to public understanding of research spending on the common condition of hearing loss.

Research has long shown that the SAT perpetuates inequalities in access to education. Starting this fall, the College Board plans to add another score to the 1600: a measure that college admissions officers are calling an “adversity score,” which is based on factors like crime rates and poverty levels in a student’s neighborhood, in an attempt to account for socioeconomic background in the admissions process.

Called the “Overall Disadvantage Level,” the score will appear on a student’s Environmental Context Dashboard alongside other measurements of relative poverty, according to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported on the plan on Thursday. It’s calculated using 15 factors based on proprietary and public data, like the United States Census, and scores will range from one to 100: Above 50 means a student faced hardship; below 50 means privilege.

At the Cleveland Clinic and HIMSS Patient Experience Summit on Wednesday, two experts showed how skills of human interaction are essential to the success of organizational missions.

Technology is transforming communication, and artificial intelligence is becoming more mature and capable every day. But some bedrock human qualities are what will truly enable positive transformation for healthcare organizations: civility, respect, empathy, collaboration, storytelling.

At Goucher College, students no longer need to take a broad range of introductory classes outside their major to graduate. For non-science majors, Introduction to Biology has been replaced by Disease and Discrimination, a course that crosses disciplines to explore the inequalities in access to health care. Introduction to Philosophy was dropped for Society in the Age of Intelligent Machines. Math has become Integrative Data Analytics.

Responding to a growing national debate over the relevance of a traditional liberal arts education, Goucher and other small, private liberal arts colleges in Maryland are adapting quickly. They have adjusted course offerings, lowered tuition, added graduate classes that lead to employment and developed other strategies to attract students. The colleges aren’t just responding to their students thirst for marketable skills, they are changing to survive a future that will include intense competition for students amid accelerating closures of small colleges in recent years.

May 20 marks the latest high point in metrology’s long history, with the official adoption of new definitions for some of science’s most important measuring units, including the kilogram, the standard measure of mass. Those changes reflect revisions in the Le Système International d’Unites (or SI), the modern version of the metric system. As overseen by the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures, SI is based on seven “fundamental” units from which other units of measure are derived. Besides the kilogram, newly defined basic units include the kelvin (for temperature), ampere (electric current) and the mole (quantity of material). Unchanged are the second (time), meter (length) and candela (luminous intensity).

This latest SI revamp represents an advance for science, but it’s only the latest of several historic landmarks for metrology. There are too many to list, but that’s no reason not to count down the top 10 momentous metrology moments of all time (or at least for as long as time has been measured).

10. Invention of anatomical units (a long time ago)

The amount of heat-trapping methane in the atmosphere seemed to be leveling off when, in 2007, it began rising again quickly. Nobody yet knows why.

Brussels, Belgium September 9-11. “Join some of the most knowledgeable AI and data experts from academia, business and startups in debates with new Members of the European Parliament.” [save the date]

“Figure out if this role is for you, how to make the move, and what skills you’ll need to build in order to be successful.”

Despite being vast repositories of factual information, cross-domain knowledge graphs, such as Wikidata and the Google Knowledge Graph, only sparsely provide short synoptic descriptions for entities. Such descriptions that briefly identify the most discernible features of an entity provide readers with a near-instantaneous understanding of what kind of entity they are being presented. They can also aid in tasks such as named entity disambiguation, ontological type determination, and answering entity queries. Given the rapidly increasing numbers of entities in knowledge graphs, a fully automated synthesis of succinct textual descriptions from underlying factual information is essential. To this end, we propose a novel fact-to-sequence encoder-decoder model with a suitable copy mechanism to generate concise and precise textual descriptions of entities. In an in-depth evaluation, we demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art alternatives.

“We are thrilled to announce that the core security features of the Elastic Stack are now free. This means that users can now encrypt network traffic, create and manage users, define roles that protect index and cluster level access, and fully secure Kibana with Spaces.”

Microsoft has made one of the most advanced AI tools it uses to better meet people’s evolving search needs available to anyone as an open source project on GitHub. On Wednesday, it also released user example techniques and an accompanying video for those tools via Microsoft’s AI lab.

The algorithm, called Space Partition Tree And Graph (SPTAG), allows users to take advantage of the intelligence from deep learning models to search through billions of pieces of information, called vectors, in milliseconds. That, in turn, means they can more quickly deliver more relevant results to users.