Data Science newsletter – June 24, 2019

Newsletter features journalism, research papers, events, tools/software, and jobs for June 24, 2019

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Data Science News



A swarm of 1,000 earthquakes hit Southern California — how nervous should we be?

Los Angeles Times, Rong-Gong Lin II


from

There is general agreement that the recent swarm probably isn’t a precursor to a catastrophic quake. But other small quakes — especially ones near major fault lines like the San Andreas — are potential warnings.

“I would redefine normal as: You should still be prepared for a large earthquake,” U.S. Geological Survey research geophysicist Andrea Llenos said. “We do know a big earthquake is going to happen” — just not when and where.


The Revenge of the Poverty-Stricken College Professors

Splinter, Hamilton Nolan


from

Students at Florida’s enormous community colleges (Miami Dade College alone has more than 165,000 students) may not be conscious of this dynamic, but they sit at its center, and they pay the price—not only in their student loan bills, but by sitting in classes taught by teachers who are overworked, underpaid, given virtually no professional resources or continuity of scheduling, and who are often forced to rush from job to job in order to make ends meet, leaving little time for helping students outside of classroom hours, much less for publishing work in their fields to advance their careers. Now, Florida’s higher education system sits at the center of another trend as well: the unionization of those well educated but miserably compensated adjunct professors.


NAB writes consumer privacy rights into its data architecture

iTnews, Ry Crozier


from

NAB [National Association of Broadcasters] is using Europe’s “high-water benchmark” on data privacy as guardrails for its own expanding analytics ambitions, complicating its still-evolving data architecture.

Chief data officer Glenda Crisp told the recent AWS Summit in Sydney that NAB is designing its data architecture to meet foreseeable higher standards of privacy in the domestic market.


Janssen Announces Collaboration with University of California, Berkeley and University of California, San Francisco to Expand Data Science Research in Healthcare

Business Wire, Janssen, Johnson & Johnson


from

Janssen Research & Development, LLC, part of the Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson (Janssen), today announced a collaboration with the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), with the goal of inspiring data-driven approaches to improve health and develop the next generation of leaders in healthcare data sciences. This program will be the first of its kind in the San Francisco Bay Area, which serves as a hub of both tech and biotech industries and is home to two of the world’s top universities. The agreement was facilitated by Johnson & Johnson Innovation.

The parties will collaborate to create and establish a data science health innovation fellowship program, run by UCSF and UC Berkeley, working with product and platform teams within Janssen. The program will recruit serial cohorts of up to five outstanding data scientists from industry or academia to conduct innovative research in areas of unmet patient need. Fellows will have access to computer science, engineering, and statistics expertise and technology innovation at UC Berkeley and clinical expertise and data at UCSF, which they will use with other health and biological datasets to safely and respectfully conduct research projects over two years with mentorship from Janssen, UCSF and UC Berkeley.


The Gender Gap in Computer Science Research Won’t Close for 100 Years

The New York Times, Cade Metz


from

Women will not reach parity with men in writing published computer science research in this century if current trends hold, according to a study released on Friday.

The enduring gender gap is most likely a reflection of the low number of women now in computer science, said researchers at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a research lab in Seattle that produced the study. It could also reflect, in part, a male bias in the community of editors who manage scientific journals and conferences.

Big technology companies are facing increasing pressure to address workplace issues like sexual harassment and a lack of representation by women as well as minorities among technical employees.


University of Iowa nabs record-breaking grant to collect data on space weather

Iowa City Press-Citizen, Aimee Breaux


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NASA awarded a UI team led by Professor Craig Kletzing $115 million to develop satellites that can collect data on “space weather,” or a system of radiation, created by the sun. The UI’s satellites, referred to as Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites, will launch no later than August 2022 alongside four suitcase-sized satellites created developed by Southwest Research Institute scientists.


BU Establishing New Data Sciences Faculty Unit

Boston University, BU Today


from

“The creation of the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences and the construction of the Center for Computing & Data Sciences gives Boston University the ingredients to be a leader in the development of computing and data sciences and their applications across the University and to educate generations of students with this competency,” says [Robert] Brown.

[Jean] Morrison, who also serves as BU’s chief academic officer, says the distributed nature of the Faculty of CDS is well suited to a field that has been embraced by departments across the University.

“Student demand for education in computing and data sciences is pervasive across our schools and colleges,” she says. “There are exciting opportunities for research in these disciplines and in their application, and the University is responding to these opportunities.”


Agriculture Department buries studies showing dangers of climate change

POLITICO, Helena Bottemiller Evich


from

The Trump administration has refused to publicize dozens of government-funded studies that carry warnings about the effects of climate change, defying a longstanding practice of touting such findings by the Agriculture Department’s acclaimed in-house scientists.

The studies range from a groundbreaking discovery that rice loses vitamins in a carbon-rich environment — a potentially serious health concern for the 600 million people world-wide whose diet consists mostly of rice — to a finding that climate change could exacerbate allergy seasons to a warning to farmers about the reduction in quality of grasses important for raising cattle.


Turning to Machine Learning for Molecular, Materials Research

Lehigh University, Lehigh News


from

Late in 2018, the NSF unveiled its support for I-DISC to organize these open workshops, part of a broader funding announcement around $8.5 million in grants for 19 collaborative projects involving 23 U.S. universities. Two of the grants were awarded to Lehigh.

The inaugural workshop brought together computer scientists, applied mathematicians, material scientists, chemists, biologists, and chemical, industrial and bioengineers. Through a series of presentations, poster sessions, and networking opportunities, attendees focused on recent developments and application of data science algorithms and tools.

Speakers came from academia, national laboratories and industry. Paulette Clancy, head of the chemical and biomolecular engineering department at Johns Hopkins University, gave a plenary talk on “Merging Physical Science and Machine Learning to Tackle Complexity and Combinatorics in Materials Processing.”


NSF Invests $4 Million in Big Data for Southern United States

South Big Data Hub


from

Precision medicine and understanding health disparities, innovation to power competitive manufacturing, technology for smarter communities, and addressing coastal hazards such as hurricanes are among the challenges facing the Southern United States. A $4 million award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) will help apply data science and engineering to address those challenges.

The funding will continue support for the South Big Data Innovation Hub, an organization that helps 16 Southern States and the District of Columbia identify and utilize data science and engineering to address critical societal needs. One of four NSF-supported regional data hubs in the U.S., the South Big Data Hub is managed by the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.


Columbia Sportswear family gifts $10 million to University of Oregon to fight cancer

OregonLive.com, Jeff Manning


from

The research center will develop new approaches to quickly and efficiently analyze large groupings of data, allowing researchers to “listen in” on cell development for early detection of lethal diseases.

Bill Cresko, an Oregon biology professor and executive director of the data science initiative, said the partner with OHSU is “just the beginning.

The partnership, he said, “provides a model for development of data science programs in other focal areas, such as environmental big data, business analytics, behavioral data science, and data science ethics and communication. It ranges from the natural sciences to architecture to music.”


Is Firefox better than Chrome? It comes down to privacy.

The Washington Post, Geoffrey A. Fowler


from

Our latest privacy experiment found Chrome ushered more than 11,000 tracker cookies into our browser — in a single week. Here’s why Firefox is better.


What Happens After Amazon’s Domination Is Complete? Its Bookstore Offers Clues

The New York Times, David Streitfeld


from

Amazon takes a hands-off approach to what goes on in its bookstore, never checking the authenticity, much less the quality, of what it sells. It does not oversee the sellers who have flocked to its site in any organized way.

That has resulted in a kind of lawlessness. Publishers, writers and groups such as the Authors Guild said counterfeiting of books on Amazon had surged. The company has been reactive rather than proactive in dealing with the issue, they said, often taking action only when a buyer complains. Many times, they added, there is nowhere to appeal and their only recourse is to integrate even more closely with Amazon.


Artificial Intelligence Will Soon Make Ransomware Attacks Scarier

Fortune, Bernhard Warner


from

A year ago, network security specialists spotted a worrying new trend: hackers began unleashing ransomware attacks on really big targets—America’s cities. Atlanta, Baltimore, and Greenville, N.C. would later grind to a halt after devastating computer outages disrupted everything from the collection of parking tickets to the sale of new homes.

The next big thing that keeps computer scientist Adam Kujawa up at night? Ransomware powered by artificial intelligence, a development that could give exploits such as RobbinHood and WannaCry a potent new makeover to evade cyber defenses, burrow into computer networks and wreak mayhem.


Watch artificial intelligence predict Conan O’Brien’s gestures just from the sound of his voice

Science, Matthew Hutson


from

Every time you talk, your body moves in sync, whether it’s something as subtle as eyes widening or more extreme movements like flailing arms. Now, researchers have designed an artificial intelligence that knows how you’re going to move based purely on the sound of your voice.

Researchers collected 144 hours of video of 10 people speaking, including a nun, a chemistry teacher, and five TV show hosts (Conan O’Brien, Ellen DeGeneres, John Oliver, Jon Stewart, and Seth Meyers). They used an existing algorithm to produce skeletal figures representing the positions of the speakers’ arms and hands. They then trained their own algorithm with the data, so it would predict gestures based on fresh audio of the speakers.

The generated gestures were closer to reality than were randomly selected gestures from the same speaker or predictions from a different type of algorithm originally designed to anticipate the hand movements of pianists and violinists. Speakers’ gestures were also unique.

 
Events



SONYC Data Inspire New Performance Works at ISSUE Project Room, Brooklyn

Sounds of New York City


from

Brooklyn, NY July 19-20. “Two new pieces inspired by urban sound data collected by SONYC will be premiered at ISSUE Project Room, Brooklyn, NY this summer. 2019 Harvestworks Resident artist Natacha Diels presents Sad Music for Lonely People, on Friday July 19th at 8pm, while 2019 Harvestworks Resident artist Ursula Scherrer & composer Michael Schumacher present Exotica on Saturday 20th July at 8pm. Both shown in conjunction with Michael Morley: Music for The Never Quartet.” [$$]

 
Deadlines



A Survey of Common Errors in Data Science & Machine Learning

“Analyzing data is error prone. We want to hear YOUR war stories! Our goal is to drive the design of tools to help practitioners combat errors, bugs, mistakes, and other screw ups. For that we need to know where to look.” Study is being conducted by Helena Kotthaus and Jan Vitek.
 
Tools & Resources



Deep Learning: Exploring High Level APIs of Knet.jl and Flux.jl in comparison to Tensorflow-Keras

juliabloggers.com, Al-Ahmadgaid B. Asaad


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“Let’s take look at Julia’s deep learning libraries and compare it to high level APIs of TensorFlow, i.e. Keras’ model specification.”


Visualizing Variable Veracity: Visualization Papers At CHI 2019

Medium, Multiple Views: Visualization Research Explained, Michael Correll


from

“I’d like to talk about a few papers that help us to be more reliable, robust, and overall trustworthy with data.”


Extracting the Data from Static Images of Graphs with magick

R-bloggers, Omni Analytics Group, Eric Hare


from

Prior to the era of reproducible research, it was quite common for published graphs, charts, and other figures to be released solely as static images such and PNGs or JPEGs. Often times this is not done with accompanying code, or with the plot data available as a separate download, making it difficult to either reproduce or validate the findings.

We’ve talked about the virtues of the magick package in the past, and it turns out magick provides us with a way of extracting data from images. The exact details vary depending on the properties of the plot, including its saturation, lightness, and hue, but some general themes emerge. We wanted to briefly document one particular instance of this problem.


Data-As-A-Service Bible: Everything You Wanted To Know About Running DaaS Companies

Safegraph, Auren Hoffman


from

I’ve spent the last 13 years running data companies (previously LiveRamp (NYSE:RAMP) and now SafeGraph), investing in dozens of data companies, meeting with CEOs of hundreds of data companies, and reading histories of data businesses. I’m sharing my knowledge about data businesses here — written primarily for people that either invest or operate data businesses. I put this together because there is so much information on SaaS companies and so little information on DaaS companies.


DoD’s Joint AI Center to open-source natural disaster satellite imagery data set

VentureBeat, Khari Johnson


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As climate change escalates, the impact of natural disasters is likely to become less predictable. To encourage the use of machine learning for building damage assessment this week, Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute and CrowdAI — the U.S. Department of Defense’s Joint AI Center (JAIC) and Defense Innovation Unit — shared plans to open-source a labeled data set of some of the largest natural disasters in the past decade. Called xBD, it covers the impact of disasters around the globe, like the 2010 earthquake that hit Haiti.

 
Careers


Postdocs

Postdoc Positions



Johns Hopkins University, Zanvyl Krieger Mind/Brain Institute; Baltimore, MD

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