Data Science newsletter – December 20, 2019

Newsletter features journalism, research papers, events, tools/software, and jobs for December 20, 2019

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Data Science News



NSF awards UIC $1.5M for new data science institute

University of Illinois-Chicago, UIC Today


from

A multidisciplinary team of University of Illinois at Chicago researchers received a three-year, $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to form a new data science institute.

The UIC Foundations of Data Science Institute is intended to establish a place on campus that will focus on the theory of data science. The institute will concentrate on three themes: the representation and structure of data, machine learning and complexity, and robustness and privacy. These themes will link theory with the application of data science to create new ways to apply data to research. The institute will further develop the data science curriculum at UIC, promote interdisciplinary collaborations on and off-campus, and train the next generation of data scientists.


UC Santa Cruz launches new graduate program in natural language processing

University of California-Santa Cruz, Newscenter


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The University of California, Santa Cruz, has established a new master’s (M.S.) degree program in Natural Language Processing (NLP), offered from the UCSC Silicon Valley Campus in Santa Clara. This innovative professional degree program will give students a strong background in the advanced computational technologies used to process and analyze the natural language that humans speak and write.


5G will increase energy demands of data centers, study claims

DCD, Peter Judge


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Newly introduced 5G mobile communications will drastically increase the energy demands of data centers, according to a German study sponsored by utility provider E.ON.

The report (PDF, German) from RWTH Aachen University, found that by 2025, high-bandwidth 5G networking would drive such a boost in demand for data that the energy consumed by German data centers would increase by 3.8 terawatt-hours (TWh) per year, the equivalent of the electricity consumed by the 2.5 million people in Cologne, Dusseldorf, and Dortmund.


Artificial Intelligence and Food Safety: Hype vs. Reality

FoodSafety Magazine, Kristen M. Altenburger, A.M., and Daniel E. Ho, Ph.D.


from

Much as [Google Flu Trends] promised a new, faster, and more accurate surveillance system, can artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning transform food safety?

Many think so. One trade publication describes AI as “playing a predominant role in the world of food safety and quality assurance.”[9] Frank Yiannas, the deputy commissioner for food policy and response at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), praised AI as one of the best tools for the future of food safety at the 2019 International Association for Food Protection meeting. And earlier in the year, FDA announced a pilot program to use AI to help ensure food safety of imported foods.[10] Just as AI promises to transform sectors across the economy, foodborne pathogen surveillance may be fundamentally altered by emerging technology.

At the same time, how can policy makers, industry, and consumers tell the difference between hype and reality?


Alienated, Alone And Angry: What The Digital Revolution Really Did To Us

BuzzFeed News, Joseph Bernstein


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We were promised community, civics, and convenience. Instead, we found ourselves dislocated, distrustful, and disengaged.


Apple Has Secret Team Working on Satellites to Beam Data to Devices

Bloomberg Technology, Mark Gurman


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The iPhone maker is ramping up hiring, hoping for the initiative to produce results within five years.


Expanding Environmental Insights Across Canada

Official Google Canada Blog


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At COP25 this year, we shared how Google is focused on building sustainability into everything that we do and making it possible for everyone to build a more sustainable world.

As cities now account for more than 70 percent of global emissions, we believe that empowering city governments with comprehensive, climate-relevant data and technology can play a critical role in driving action.

One way we are doing this is with our online tool, the Environmental Insights Explorer (EIE), providing high-resolution data to cities across the world to measure greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and take informed action to reduce CO2 emissions.


This AI researcher is trying to ward off a reproducibility crisis

Nature, News Q&A, Elizabeth Gibney


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Joelle Pineau doesn’t want science’s reproducibility crisis to come to artificial intelligence (AI).

Spurred by her frustration with difficulties recreating results from other research teams, Pineau, a machine-learning scientist at McGill University and Facebook in Montreal, Canada, is now spearheading a movement to get AI researchers to open up their methods and code to scrutiny.


White Paper: Machine Learning for Physics and the Physics of Learning

University of California-Los Angeles, IPAM, News


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During the last couple of decades advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) have revolutionized many application areas such as image recognition and language translation. The key of this success has been the design of algorithms that can extract complex patterns and highly non-trivial relationships from large amounts of data and abstract this information in the evaluation of new data. In the last few years these tools and ideas have also been applied to, and in some cases revolutionized problems in fundamental sciences, where the discovery of patterns and hidden relationships can lead to the formulation of new general principles.

This IPAM program focused on the opportunities and challenges in the application of ML tools in the physical sciences and if/how theoretical results in the physical sciences can help in the definition of new ML methods.


Why the Census Bureau Is Establishing a “Trust & Safety” Team

U.S. Census Bureau, Ron S. Jarmin


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The spread of misinformation (incorrect information spread unintentionally) and disinformation (incorrect information spread intentionally) about the 2020 Census is something we are actively fighting. We want the public to have the correct information so they can participate in the census and shape their future and the future of their community. That is why we are pooling our communications and external resources together into a unified Census Bureau Trust & Safety Team to ensure the public is properly educated on how the 2020 Census affects everyone.


Google buys game developer Typhoon Studios

TechCrunch, Lucas Matney


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Google seems to be shopping for game studios as it courts consumer interest for its Stadia game-streaming platform, announcing Thursday that they had acquired Montreal-based Typhoon Studios.

The young studio with 26 employees hasn’t released its first title yet, after being founded nearly three years ago, but their upcoming game “Journey to the Savage Planet” will be released in late January. The title is being developed for “multiple platforms,” so for those looking forward to the title, it seems it will not be morphing into a Stadia exclusive at the last second.


Researchers Present Latest AI Algorithms at NeurIPS 2019

EE Times, Sally Ward-Foxton


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Advances will help machines identify objects and figure out how to work together, improve their ability to understand language, and improve their ability to learn.

A human can look at a bird and understand its shape in 3-D space. What is simple intuition for humans is an extraordinary task for a machine, but AI researchers keep devising innovative new ways for machines to do things humans do naturally. Several intriguing advances were revealed at NeurIPS, the annual mass convergence of AI researchers, held last week in Vancouver, Canada.

Here are the details on a selection of interesting papers from the hundreds presented, in no particular order.


Moscow plans futuristic smart city around 5G apps

FierceElectronics, Matt Hamblen


from

Four mobile carriers are running separate 5G pilots in Moscow at a sports arena and other popular venues that the Russian capital expects will create the foundation for a unified smart city platform.

“We regard 5G as a platform for creating a set of smart city solutions to link up various elements of urban infrastructure into a single, convenient and efficient network,” Eduard Lysenko, head of the department of Information Technologies for the city of Moscow said in an email interview with FierceElectronics.

In one use case, 5G at up to 3 Gbps will eventually help improve road safety by allowing vehicles to interact with each other and urban infrastructure, he said. Moscow’s Department of Information Technology is also supporting telecom operators and designers working on healthcare applications and emergency services.


Intel Hedges Its AI Bets With Habana Labs Buy

The Next Platform, Michael Feldman


from

Habana’s aggressive roadmap beat even Intel to the market with its NNP-I and NNP-T processors, the chipmaker’s two corresponding offerings for inference and training, respectively. At Intel’s AI Summit in November, Naveen Rao, corporate vice president and general manager of the company’s Artificial Intelligence Products Group, launched the two NNP product sets, announcing Baidu and Facebook as early customers.


At Mayo Clinic, AI engineers face an ‘acid test’ – STAT

STAT, Casey Ross


from

It would be easy to wonder what Zachi Attia is doing in the cardiac operating rooms of one of America’s most prestigious hospitals. He has no formal medical training or surgical expertise. He cannot treat arrhythmias, repair heart valves, or unclog arteries. The first time he watched a live procedure, he worried he might faint.

But at Mayo Clinic, the 33-year-old machine learning engineer has become a central figure in one of the nation’s most ambitious efforts to revamp heart disease treatment using artificial intelligence.

Working side by side with physicians, he has built algorithms that in studies have shown a remarkable ability to unmask heart abnormalities long before patients begin experiencing symptoms.

 
Events



Ashtekar Frontiers of Science Lectures to begin Jan. 18 at University Park

Penn State University, Penn State News


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University Park, PA January 18, starting at 11 a.m., Penn State University. “The series begins on Jan. 18 with a lecture by Murali Haran, professor and head of the Penn State Department of Statistics, titled, ‘Statistics and the future of the Antarctic ice sheet.'” [free, open to the public]


2020 FCSM Research and Policy Conference

Federal Committee on Statistical Methodology


from

Washington, DC April 14-16, 2020, Washington DC Convention Center. “The 2020 Federal Committee on Statistical Methodology Research and Policy Conference will focus on the Federal Statistical System’s role in equipping agencies and the public to leverage data resources for evidence-based policymaking.” [$$$]

 
Tools & Resources



How To Run Docker Images and Make Your Own! Docker for Data Science/Python

Medium, Aaron Abrahamson


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“This is a followup to my previous post, What is Docker, and why is it useful for data science? In this post I am going to show you how to setup Docker on your machine, and create a Docker Image from a Dockerfile, and then how to get a Docker Container running PostgreSQL up and running.”


Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Security Best Practices

Assured, Patrik


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“The intention of this blog post is to make a walk-through of a couple of GCP’s features and give security recommendations and advice on how to configure your GCP environments.”


XAI—Explainable artificial intelligence

Science Robotics, David Gunning et al.


from

The purpose of an explainable AI (XAI) system is to make its behavior more intelligible to humans by providing explanations. There are some general principles to help create effective, more human-understandable AI systems: The XAI system should be able to explain its capabilities and understandings; explain what it has done, what it is doing now, and what will happen next; and disclose the salient information that it is acting on (4).

 
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