Data Science newsletter – December 3, 2019

GROUP CURATION: N/A

The University of Arkansas at Fayetteville used the team approach in creating a new bachelor degree program for data science.

The university will start offering classes in the fall of 2020, and officials expect approximately 50 students to enroll in the program each year. That would be welcome news for the business leaders of the state and northwest Arkansas who have been clamoring for more skilled graduates in an increasingly digital world.

Google scientist François Chollet has made a lasting contribution to AI in the wildly popular Keras application programming interface. He now hopes to move the field toward a new approach to intelligence. He talked with ZDNet about what he hopes to accomplish.

A new rule requiring face scans of customers signing up for new mobile plans in China came into effect Sunday (Dec. 1), amid widespread adoption of facial-recognition technology across the country.

In September, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced the change (link in Chinese) in a notice to telecom operators, saying it would “protect the legitimate rights and interest of citizens in cyberspace.” The notice said that “artificial intelligence and other technical methods” should be used to match the faces of customers buying new SIM cards with their identity documents.

Stanford scholars reviewed the first page of Google search results for every candidate running for federal office in the 2018 U.S. election over a six-month period. After a systematic audit of about 4 million URLs scraped from the search engine, they found that sources from either end of the political spectrum are not being excluded from results. For the most part, the researchers found that the news sources most commonly held a relatively centrist point of view.

“Our data suggest that Google’s search algorithm is not biased along political lines, but instead emphasizes authoritative sources,” said Jeff Hancock, a professor of communication in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences, and author on the study that recently published in the Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery on Human-Computer Interaction. “I think audits of large-scale algorithms that play such an important role in so many aspects of our lives are crucial. We need to be able to trust that these AI systems aren’t biased in important ways, and without audits, it’s difficult to assess these opaque algorithms.”

Have you ever dreamed of turning yourself into an inch-tall plastic figure who can’t bend their arms or legs, and must interact with the world using a pair of lobster-like claw hands? Lego’s new theme park, opening next year in New York, will make that dream a reality using sophisticated motion tracking and neural network facial recognition.

Officials with the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), which will be the world’s biggest radio telescope, say they have nearly finalized designs and are planning for construction to begin in Australia and South Africa. This week, at a final engineering meeting in Shanghai, China, designs were presented for the array’s dishes and antennas, which a committee will review in the coming weeks—setting the stage for construction to begin.

“I’m feeling confident,” of starting construction in early 2021, says Philip Diamond, SKA director general at the organization’s headquarters near Manchester, U.K. The design review committee is expected to make suggestions, “but we’re not expecting any show-stoppers,” he says.

Sébastien Puel was recently named General Manager of Google’s Stadia Games and Entertainment studio in Montréal. We sat down with him for a short Q&A to gain insight into the vision he has for the studio and the gaming ecosystem as a whole.

We find a large racial gap: voters in all-black neighborhoods wait 29% longer than those in all-white areas (see figure below).

Correlation One, the quantitative assessment firm which specializes in selecting data science talent for banks, hedge funds and trading firms, has put together a ranking of the top PhD programs for data scientists based on performance in its tests. Correlation One’s data suggests that studying a PhD rather than a masters in data science really does make you a better data scientist. On average, PhD students whose schools scored the highest in its tests achieved a score of 58%, compared to 51% for masters students and just 45% for bachelors students. In terms of aptitude, at least, a PhD makes sense.

Imagine if a computer could learn from molecules found in nature and use an algorithm to generate new ones. Then imagine those molecules could get printed and tested in a lab against some of the nastiest, most dangerous bacteria out there—bacteria quickly becoming resistant to our current antibiotic options.

Or consider a bandage that can sense an infection with fewer than 100 bacterial cells present in an open wound. What if that bandage could then send a signal to your phone letting you know an infection had started and asking you to press a button to trigger the release of the treatment therapy it contained?

These ideas aren’t science fiction. They’re projects happening right now, in various stages, in the lab of Penn synthetic biologist César de la Fuente, who joined the University as a Presidential Professor in May 2019. His ultimate goal is to develop the first computer-made antibiotics. But beyond that, his lab—which includes three postdoctoral fellows, a visiting professor, and a handful of graduate students and undergrads—has many other endeavors that sit squarely at the intersection of computer science and microbiology.

University of Arkansas alumnus Kent Burnett of Greenbrier believes that attracting the best faculty helps attract the brightest students. His $250,000 commitment to the G. Kent and Deborah D. Burnett Endowed Faculty Excellence Award in Data Science will recognize outstanding faculty in the College of Engineering and count toward Campaign Arkansas, the $1.25 billion capital campaign to advance academic opportunity at the U of A.

“I love the University of Arkansas, particularly the engineering college,” Burnett said. “We can compete with anyone in the world in analytics and big data, and I’m excited about the opportunities there. Corporations have a need for more and better data, as well as people who can use the software. The U of A can be competitive in this area.”

The University is in the process of creating various designs for the upcoming renovations in Altgeld Hall and a complete reconstruction of Illini Hall.

“We have the two departments in our college, mathematics and statistics, which are two of our most rapidly growing departments in the college,” said Derek Fultz, director of facilities in the College of LAS administration. “They are housed in Illini Hall and Altgeld Hall mostly and teach most of their classes in those two buildings, and those buildings need desperate renovation.”

The new designs would open up larger spaces for collaborative work to occur as opposed to the limited space the departments currently have. Since the buildings are old, there will be various installations to improve the overall structure.

Magdalena Balazinska, professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, has been awarded a grant of $2 million for two years from the National Science Foundation as part of the NSF’s Harnessing the Data Revolution Frameworks program.

The manufacturing life cycle starts with discovering new molecules and materials, often through computer simulations, and identifying promising candidates that can later be tested in laboratories. The grant, starting in September, will support development of new data science approaches to accelerate the engineering life cycle of design, characterization, manufacturing and operation.

Listening to a lecturer just to fulfill a graduation requirement may no longer align with the desires of the next generation of college students.

This year, Purdue outlined its Road Map for Transformative Undergraduate Education, which envisions a much more cross-disciplinary Purdue undergraduate education in 2030.

Building upon existing growth, the plan focuses on supporting effective teaching, developing transdisciplinary curricula and maximizing potential for all students as it adapts to the needs of the next generation.

William & Mary has received a $19.3 million gift from an alumna who wishes to remain anonymous to establish a landmark Institute for Integrative Conservation (IIC). The gift will position the university as a global leader in transformational research to protect ecosystems and safeguard world populations. It will cultivate leaders prepared to drive policy, advance advocacy and inspire action at the local, national and international levels.

To be launched in 2020, the IIC will be the nation’s premier cross-disciplinary institute in this critical field. In its innovative programming, academia combines forces with public, private and nonprofit sectors to advance solutions to the world’s most pressing conservation and sustainability challenges.

Boston, MA December 16, starting at 4 p.m. “The Boston Children’s Hospital Computational Health Informatics Program (CHIP) invites you to our Landmark Ideas Series Lecture!”

“The move to GitHub will make lives easier for big data specialists in the machine learning sector, and no doubt provide some useful ecosystem links to the Chinese giant.”

“Alibaba Cloud has made the core codes of its Alink data processing platform open-source to help widen the development opportunities for artificial intelligence and machine learning.”

The leading approaches in language modeling are all obsessed with TV shows of my youth – namely Transformers and Sesame Street. Transformers this, Transformers that, and over here a bonfire worth of GPU-TPU-neuromorphic wafer scale silicon. We opt for the lazy path of old and proven techniques with a fancy crypto inspired acronym: the Single Headed Attention RNN (SHA-RNN). The author’s lone goal is to show that the entire field might have evolved a different direction if we had instead been obsessed with a slightly different acronym and slightly different result. We take a previously strong language model based only on boring LSTMs and get it to within a stone’s throw of a stone’s throw of state-of-the-art byte level language model results on enwik8. This work has undergone no intensive hyperparameter optimization and lived entirely on a commodity desktop machine that made the author’s small studio apartment far too warm in the midst of a San Franciscan summer. The final results are achievable in plus or minus 24 hours on a single GPU as the author is impatient. The attention mechanism is also readily extended to large contexts with minimal computation. Take that Sesame Street.

Since 2010, we have offered Download Your Information to allow people who use our services to access a secure copy of the data they have shared with Facebook. In 2018, we announced our participation in the Data Transfer Project, a collaborative effort with Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter to build a common way for people to transfer their data between online services. The goal of this project has been to make it easier for services of any size to securely make direct transfers for data portability from one service to another and to make the process simpler for the people who use these services.

Over the past year, an open source framework has been developed. Today, we are announcing a new tool on Facebook that allows people to transfer photos and videos directly from Facebook to Google Photos. We plan to expand this to other services in the near future. This tool will begin rolling out in Ireland today and will be available worldwide in early 2020.

“These release notes cover the new features, as well as some backwards incompatible changes you’ll want to be aware of when upgrading from Django 2.2 or earlier.”