Data Science newsletter – January 27, 2020

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… The researchers determined that people generally age along certain biological pathways in the body: metabolic, immune, hepatic (liver) and nephrotic (kidney). People who are metabolic agers, for example, might be at a higher risk for diabetes or show signs of elevated hemoglobin A1c, a measure of blood-sugar levels, as they grow older. People with an immune ageotype, on the other hand, might generate higher levels of inflammatory markers or be more prone to immune-related diseases as they age. But the ageotypes are not mutually exclusive, and a metabolic ager could also be an immune ager, for example.

Digital photos drive down the cost of archival research, allowing an individual to capture far more documents per hour. So an archival visit becomes a process of standing over documents, snapping pictures as quickly as possible. Some researchers organize their photos swiping on an iPhone, or with an open-source tool named Tropy; some, like Alex Wellerstein, a historian at Stevens Institute of Technology, have special digital-camera setups, and a standardized method. In my own work, I used Dropbox’s photo tools, which I used to output PDFs, which I dropped into Scrivener, my preferred writing software.

These practices might seem like a subtle shift—researchers are still going to collections and requesting boxes and reading papers—but the ways that information is collected and managed transmute what historians can learn from it. There has been, as Milligan put it, a “dramatic reshaping of historical practice.” Different histories will be written because the tools of the discipline are changing.

In 2017, when Professor Laura Haas was recruited to lead the campus’s newly created College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS), she knew she wanted to distinguish the college in some way. “I wanted us to have a sense of who we were,” says Haas. CICS already had a highly collaborative faculty, with some of the brightest minds in computer networks, systems, artificial intelligence, and data science; Haas sought to take that collaborative spirit further and to apply CICS research and educational strengths in a way that would align their efforts for a greater good.

After a year of brainstorming with faculty and staff, the Computing for the Common Good initiative, or C4CG, was born. “C4CG is about integrating values into your work, research, and education. That’s the heart of it,” says Haas. “We spent a year talking about who we are and what we want to do and what our aspirations are. This whole notion of working ‘for the common good’ emerged from these discussions. It’s about education and research, the two pillars of any college that are going to make lives better not only for the citizens of Massachusetts, but also for the world.”

Haas says there are three prongs to C4CG: education; research to improve computer technology, making it better and safer for all; and research to apply that technology or technologies in general to do some good in the world.

A machine learning algorithm accurately predicted inpatient and emergency department (ED) utilization using only publicly available social determinants of health (SDOH) data, showing that it’s possible to determine patients’ risk of utilization without interacting with the patient or collecting information beyond age, gender, race, and address.

That’s the major finding of a study recently published in the American Journal of Managed Care.

Washington state could become a pioneer in regulating artificial intelligence if lawmakers and Microsoft get their way. A series of bills introduced this legislative session seek to blaze a trail for this new frontier of technological innovation.

The legislation focuses on biometric screening and digital profiling. Those topics are part of a broader set of tech-related bills that the state legislature is considering.

Microsoft and its president, Brad Smith, have been pleading with regulators to enact laws governing artificial intelligence for months. The company says it wants safeguards in place before the technology becomes too disruptive. Smith noted last year that AI guidelines established in the state would have an impact globally because of the tech companies based here.

When severe acute respiratory syndrome or SARS struck southern China in 2002-2003, Chinese officials were criticized for waiting too long to alert proper authorities of the outbreak and delaying efforts to bring the deadly virus under control. This time around, as the world watches – and worries about ‑ a new respiratory virus known as nCOV2019 emerging in China, many are praising China’s scientific community for sharing information about the virus as soon as it becomes available.

Yale School of Public Health Assistant Professor of Epidemiology (Microbial Diseases) Nathan Grubaugh is watching the events unfolding in China closely. Grubaugh specializes in a field known as virus genomics, which Chinese health officials are using to determine the origins of nCOV2019 and how it is being spread. Grubaugh is, in many ways, a virus detective, using bits of DNA and molecular evidence to track down the origins, evolution and transmission of viruses like West Nile, Zika, chikungunya and Powassan throughout the world. He recently shared his thoughts about the new virus, the importance of rapid data sharing and virus genomics in epidemiology, and how nCOV2019 is playing out differently than SARS.

Google hopes that one day it might be able to save your life. As the tech giant moves deeper into healthcare, it plans to fight medical misinformation in search results, create tools to be used by thousands of doctors, and improve the accuracy of diagnosis with technologies like computer vision to read X-rays.

Those are just its aims for this year. Google’s broader health mission was outlined at a conference in San Francisco earlier this month, where its top doctor set out to show why the company may be the most ambitious of the many trying to use technology to transform healthcare.

“We have 10 companies with 1 billion users and five with 5 billion or some insane numbers,” said David Feinberg. “We would love to be one of those where we can say we saved billions of years of life this year.”

With the current outbreak, involving a coronavirus that originated in Wuhan and has so far taken over 40 lives, the Chinese government is being more transparent, as Germany’s health minister noted to Bloomberg yesterday on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos. (Others share a dimmer view of its efforts.)

But even if Beijing had been less forthcoming, the world now has better information tools at its disposal than it did 17 years ago. One is provided by Bluedot, a Toronto startup whose AI-driven health monitoring platform analyzes billions of data points. Launched in 2014, the venture alerted its clients to the outbreak on Dec. 31, well ahead of notifications from the World Health Organization and US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The company says it “uses big data analytics to track and anticipate the spread of the world’s most dangerous infectious diseases.” Last August it announced an investment round that brought its total funding to about $10 million.

Illinois residents who made finding a new job one of their 2020 resolutions will have a better understanding of how employers use artificial intelligence to assess video interviews, under a new state law that is the first of its kind.

The Illinois Artificial Intelligence Video Interview Act, which took effect Jan. 1, requires companies to notify applicants when AI will be used to screen them. Video interviews typically involve candidates recording responses at a computer and algorithms are used to analyze the answers.

The web has changed dramatically over the last two decades. To understand how user behavior has been affected by these changes, we replicated a 1997 study conducted at Xerox PARC. We asked people to describe a situation where online information significantly impacted their decisions or actions.

We found that, compared to 22 years ago, a larger proportion of current critical internet activities involved finding answers and gathering information in order to better understand a topic. A fair amount of information was acquired in a passive way, without looking for it, during browsing. And often, during critical activities, users turned to other people, asking for their help or opinion.

Despite widespread conspiracy theories about the bushfires, emerging science continues to find links between global warming and worsening wildfires, with the issue a focus of continuing investigation. As climate scientist Kevin Trenberth explained in a recent interview with videographer Peter Sinclair, global warming directly intensifies wildfires by drying out soil and vegetation, creating more fuel to burn farther and faster. That’s particularly a problem in drought-prone regions like Australia and California.

The hedge fund industry has no shortage of aggressive, in-your-face players, but few are as tough as Chris Hohn. The British billionaire takes the typical playbook to new levels—scuttling deals, pushing to remove bosses, and battering companies with litigation and threats. One opponent was so peeved after losing a boardroom battle with Hohn that he titled a book about the experience Invasion of the Locusts. That approach made Hohn’s TCI Fund Management the world’s best-performing, large hedge fund last year.

Now Hohn is bringing his hardball tactics to the fight against global warming.

Quantitative investors say they have a solution. These traders use computers to sort through reams of data, and they say they’re better than anyone else when it comes to making investment decisions based on messy or incomplete information. Quants are “used to filling in the gaps,” says Andrew Dyson, CEO of QMA, a quantitative investment firm that’s part of asset manager PGIM. It launched a socially conscious investment strategy in 2018.

QMA figured out a way to give companies a social and environmental score even when they don’t report a lot of data—tripling the number of stocks QMA can consider, Dyson says. It starts by looking at companies where there’s ample information. Companies can be dinged for things such as high greenhouse gas emissions or significant product recalls, and get good points for, say, having a human-rights policy. QMA analyzes returns to isolate the effect of responsible corporate citizenship. Then the money manager turns to the universe of companies where there’s not enough information. If a stock’s behavior is statistically similar to those that are known to be good, it can be classified as good, too.

Political appointees at the Interior Department have sought to play up climate pollution from California wildfires while downplaying emissions from fossil fuels as a way of promoting more logging in the nation’s forests, internal emails obtained by the Guardian reveal.

The messaging plan was crafted in support of Donald Trump’s pro-industry arguments for harvesting more timber in California, which he says would thin forests and prevent fires—a point experts refute.

The emails show officials seeking to estimate the carbon emissions from devastating 2018 fires in California so they could compare them to the carbon footprint of the state’s electricity sector and then publish statements encouraging cutting down trees.

Northeastern University is expected to announce the creation of an advanced graduate study and research institute in Portland aimed at building a high-tech workforce to grow the state’s knowledge economy.

The university would not confirm its plans, but is preparing a “major announcement” in Portland on Monday attended by its president and high-profile political and business figures.

The outlines of the school are laid out on a public website and the social media profile of a central figure in the new organization.

The Institute for Digital Engineering and Life Sciences – IDEALS – a Portland-based nonprofit, “over the past two years has created the Roux Institute at Northeastern University in Portland, Maine,” said executive consultant Chuck Hewett on his LinkedIn profile.

Cambridge, England March 9-22 at venues across the city. “The University of Cambridge-run festival, supported by the Cambridge Independent, has chosen the theme of ‘vision’ for this year and aims to suggest a vision for the future.”

A team of researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), Intelinair, and University of Oregon have introduced Agriculture-Vision, a large aerial image dataset for agricultural pattern analysis.

Accurate and real-time visual pattern recognition on farmland has enormous economic value. Aerial image semantic segmentation for detecting field conditions for example can help farmers avoid losses and increase yields throughout the growing season. Progress on visual pattern recognition in agriculture however has been slow, hindered in particular by a dearth of relevant datasets.

Every week we post a raw dataset, a chart or article related to that dataset, and ask you to explore the data. While the dataset will be “tamed”, it will not always be tidy! As such you might need to apply various R for Data Science techniques to wrangle the data into a true tidy format. The goal of TidyTuesday is to apply your R skills, get feedback, explore other’s work, and connect with the greater #RStats community! As such we encourage everyone of all skills to participate!

think that my hosts have also largely found it to be a positive experience, at least from the feedback that I’ve received. In one case, I was the pilot test for hosting extended virtual visits, and afterwards they told me that the experience had convinced them to do it regularly.

Going through these talks has taught me a few lessons about how to improve the experience, both for the speaker and for the audience.

1. Always set up a time with the host to test things out in advance in the actual venue, preferably at least a few days before the talk.