Data Science newsletter – March 27, 2020

GROUP CURATION: N/A

You may have heard of the terms “echo chamber” and “filter bubble.” While they are sometimes used interchangeably, they mainly refer to two different features in online discussions. The term echo chamber describes a phenomenon where people tend to interact with those whose opinions are similar to their own, and filter bubble describes the phenomenon of people not interacting with opinions different from their own.

“In our model, we looked at homophily, which refers to how people with the same opinion or similar opinions are more likely to interact with each other,” said Fabian Baumann, a physicist from Humboldt University of Berlin in Germany and an author of the paper.

The new partnership, called Understanding the World Through Code, is made possible by a major new grant from the National Science Foundation, through its Expeditions in Computing program. This initiative is focused on “ambitious fundamental research agendas that promise to define the future of computing and information.” These grants, given to just three teams every two years, are the largest given by the NSF’s Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering. … The leading institution for the collaboration is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The other institutions involved are the California Institute of Technology, Rice University, Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Texas at Austin.

Nine days before the World Health Organization announced that it had identified the novel coronavirus, a Toronto-based startup called BlueDot, which uses artificial intelligence to track the spread of diseases, picked up a local news article about an unusual cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China.

Researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital who have been using similar technology to scrape disease-related chatter from social media and chat rooms since 2006 also flagged the news story. A third machine learning tool picked it up too: The WHO’s own Epidemic Intelligence from Open Sources project, which is now scraping information on the global spread of COVID-19 from up to 120,000 articles each day.

From a corner of the pool at the Easton/Phillipsburg Branch of the Greater Valley YMCA, the Coral Manta 3000 knows a human head from any old beach ball. The machine, which the branch is testing on behalf of YMCAs across the country, uses artificial intelligence to recognize body parts and learn how humans act in the pool in an effort to prevent drownings.

It’s not that the branch has had any drownings in the last 25 years, branch Executive Director Lori Metz said. Nor will the robot replace lifeguards.

A simulation system invented at MIT to train driverless cars creates a photorealistic world with infinite steering possibilities, helping the cars learn to navigate a host of worse-case scenarios before cruising down real streets.

“The thing about panic-buying is that it gives us a sense of control at a time when we’re lacking that,” says Deborah Small, a psychologist who studies consumer judgment and human decision-making at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. She adds that things get harried when “people hear that other people are buying something, and they say, ‘Oh, I need that too.’ And it just spirals to this level where we have none.”

But seeing what’s being left behind at grocery stores, like all that unloved Skippy the couple passed over, also tells a compelling story. As beleaguered systems like healthcare, immigration, and labor practices buckle under the weight of an unparalleled pandemic, the cracks being exposed are the ones that have actually always been there—if you knew where to look. The same is true for what the average consumer can now learn about the American food system, plain as day.

Many of us have heard of “the fog of war,” a term coined by the 19th-century Prussian military writer Carl von Clausewitz. It refers to the idea that war is often conducted in a haze of uncertainty: Militaries do not fully understand either their enemy’s threat or their own capacity to combat it.

What we’re experiencing now is the fog of pandemic. The officials tracking COVID-19 are swimming in statistics: infection rates, case-fatality ratios, economic data. But in these early stages of the fight against the coronavirus, these figures each have their own particular limitations. We are already seeing how, in the haze of confusing data, political leaders are trying to marshal that uncertainty to override the advice of public-health experts. Indeed, President Donald Trump seems eager to seize on anything that can justify his push to reopen public life in mid-April, perhaps while daily cases are still increasing.

In the wrong hands, [brain computer interfaces] could be used to decode private thoughts, interfere with free will, and profoundly alter human nature.

Rafael YusteTo counter that possibility, Columbia University professor of biological sciences and Data Science Institute member Rafael Yuste founded the NeuroRights Initiative, which advocates for the responsible and ethical development of neurotechnology. The initiative puts forth ethical codes and human rights directives that protect people from potentially harmful neurotechnologies by ensuring the benign development of brain-computer interfaces and related neurotechnologies.

The grocer started communicating with Chinese counterparts in January and was running tabletop simulations a few weeks later. (But nothing prepared it for the rush on toilet paper.)

To date, at least 1,102 colleges and universities in the U.S. have closed their campuses due to coronavirus, choosing to move classes online. Georgetown professor Bryan Alexander estimates that college closures have impacted over 14 million students. “At least,” he stresses.

While students, professors, administrators and public health officials agree that school closures will play an important role in limiting the transmission of coronavirus, this bold move is causing a ripple effect throughout the higher education community.

CNBC Make It spoke with over a dozen college students to hear how coronavirus is impacting them.

With fewer airplane flights, meteorologists are losing a key source of data just before flood season starts.

Previous Expeditions awards covered an expansive breadth of topics, from synthetic biology and behavioral neuroscience to computer vision, robotics, and quantum computing. This year, three more awards are added to the portfolio. These projects have the potential for far-reaching and enduring impacts to advance core science and engineering principles across multiple domains, build and motivate new techniques and tools, and create significant societal value.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is informing just about every facet of society, from detecting fraud and surveillance to helping countries battle the current COVID-19 pandemic. But AI is a thorny subject, fraught with complex terminology, contradictory information, and general confusion about what it is at its most fundamental level. This is why the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), the University of Oxford’s research and teaching department specializing in the social science of the internet, has partnered with Google to launch a portal with a series of explainers outlining what AI actually is — including the fundamentals, ethics, its impact on society, and how it’s created.

Most young American adults trust nonprofits to “do what’s right” during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new survey.

Sixty percent of those polled said they trust nonprofits’ responses to the pandemic “a lot” or “some.” In comparison, 57 percent said they trust local governments “a lot” or “some” to do the right thing during a pandemic, while only 49 percent said they trust the federal government to the same extent.

For nonprofits trying to figure out how to or when to approach younger donors, the data suggests they will be receptive to organizations’ messages.

This week, 1,800 scientists, engineers, designers, and other experts gathered for the IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (IEEE VR). The event brings together people from around the world to examine the latest research and advancements in the area of virtual reality (VR).

Attendees watched presentations and invited talks and participated in poster and demonstration sessions. It’s a typical academic conference in every way except for one significant change this year: it will take place entirely online, with social events hosted completely in virtual environments.

Blair MacIntyre, a professor in Georgia Tech’s College of Computing and IEEE VR conference co-chair, proposed transitioning to an all-virtual event to support social distancing recommendations related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Online April 20-24. “The Web Conference 2020 Local Organizing Committees has been working very hard behind the scenes in making the 2020 edition a safe and successful one in considering of that the COVID-19 is an extraordinary global public health issue.” [registration required]

Online April 3, starting at 9:30 a.m. “Join us for the big day… NYC Media Lab’s Combine cohort will pitch their startup concepts virtually! The Combine 2020 startups range from AR/VR to eye-tracking video technology and solar powered chargers. Attend to see how 12 weeks of venture development and market validation shaped each team’s ideas.” [registration required]

We are a network of infectious disease epidemiologists at universities around the world working with technology companies to use aggregated mobility data to support the COVID-19 response. Our goal is to provide daily updates to decision-makers at the state and local levels on how well social distancing interventions are working, using anonymized, aggregated data sets from mobile device, and to provide them analytic support for interpretation.

Researchers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering Information Sciences Institute (ISI) and the Department of Computer Science have released a public coronavirus twitter dataset for scholars.

Emilio Ferrara and Kristina Lerman, the principal researchers on this project, have a history of studying social media and bots to understand how misinformation, fear and influence spread online.

In this post, we will give a primer on how we can build a federated collaborative filtering model via matrix factorization. Let’s start with regular matrix factorization and build on it.

As the coronavirus known as COVID-19 continues to spread, schools, colleges, and universities across the country find themselves in an unprecedented position: working to uphold their teaching and research missions while switching entirely to online learning. Libraries are a key resource for educators wondering about the role of copyright in the virtual classroom.

“Libraries have a big role to play both in advocating for the public interest related to copyright, and in being more closely connected to members of the public on a day-to-day basis than lots of the other folks who work on copyright issues,” explains Nancy Sims, Copyright Program Librarian at the University of Minnesota.

With that in mind, Sims and other librarians specializing in copyright have put together a guide for instructors about navigating fair use for remote teaching. In copyright law, fair use refers to circumstances where people can legally use copyrighted works without permission. Fair use can apply to many different situations; historically, courts have often allowed people to use copyrighted materials for educational purposes or to serve the public’s interest.

with @goh5987

uploaded to arXiv Available immediately at https://docs.google.com/document/d/12ynmWpXoQUR5tqDwTKeX12x3OdypjGYI/edit destined for @PLOSCompBiol