Data Science newsletter – September 15, 2021

As a Nature article recently pointed out: “Substantial contributions, such as organising meetings, providing outreach or performing other activities that leave no visible trace within the code, are often neglected. Indeed, some important contributions occur entirely outside of common open-source development platforms such as GitHub and often go unrecognised.”

You think?

So, what to do? Well, the University of Vermont has joined forces with the Google Open-Source Programs Office into a project called Open-Source Ecosystems and Networks (OCEAN) to tackle the problem. Its job? Deepen our understanding of how people, teams and organisations thrive together in open-source projects and communities.

Researchers at MIT, Boston University, and Maynooth University in Ireland have now created the first silicon chip that is able to decode any code, regardless of its structure, with maximum accuracy, using a universal decoding algorithm called Guessing Random Additive Noise Decoding (GRAND). By eliminating the need for multiple, computationally complex decoders, GRAND enables increased efficiency that could have applications in augmented and virtual reality, gaming, 5G networks, and connected devices that rely on processing a high volume of data with minimal delay.

The ivory tower is anything but isolated from the world surrounding it—and it’s anything but ivory. Yet as research has consistently shown, female professors and professors of color may face harsher critiques and judgments from students based on sexist and racist preconceptions of faculty of color.

Netflix’s series The Chair, starring Sandra Oh as the first Asian American and female English department chair at an elite fictional college, takes this as a point of departure.

Movies and other forms of pop culture about professors may affect how young people think about their instructors and treat them in response, especially through course evaluations. So sociologists Mari Dagaz and Brent Harger set out to study portrayals of faculty in forty-eight films released in the United States between 1985 and 2005.

Based on advanced uses of statistics, algorithms, and fast computer processing, AI has become a focal point of U.S. innovation debates. Even more, AI is increasingly viewed as the next great “general purpose technology”—one that has the power to boost the productivity of sector after sector of the economy.

All of which is why state and city leaders are increasingly assessing AI for its potential to spur economic growth. Such leaders are analyzing where their regions stand and what they need to do to ensure their locations are not left behind.

In response to such questions, this analysis examines the extent, location, and concentration of AI technology creation and business activity in U.S. metropolitan areas.

The Department of Commerce has set up a committee to advise the president and other federal agencies on artificial intelligence issues, Secretary Gina Raimondo announced Wednesday.

It seeks to recruit top-level talent to serve on the new panel, which is called the National AI Advisory Committee. DOC also seeks members for a new AI and Law Enforcement subcommittee.

DOC and the National AI Initiative Office formed the committee, in accordance with the National AI Initiative Act of 2020. It will issue recommendations on U.S. AI competitiveness, workforce equity, funding, research and development, international cooperation, and legal issues.

To bring greater precision to climate modeling and encourage societies to prepare for the inevitable disruptions ahead, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has selected Columbia to lead a climate modeling center called Learning the Earth with Artificial Intelligence and Physics (LEAP). In collaboration with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), the center will develop the next generation of data-driven physics-based climate models. It will also train a new wave of students fluent in both climate science and working with big datasets and modern machine-learning algorithms. The center’s larger goal is to provide actionable information for societies to adapt to climate change and protect the most vulnerable.

Think about your biggest day-to-day roadway headaches like traffic, finding a parking space or avoiding that intersection with the eternal red light. Now, imagine a computer solving those problems.

That’s the goal of a new degree program launching this month at Georgia Tech. The Master of Science in Urban Analytics combines the fields of urban planning, computing, and industrial and systems engineering to “fix big city problems.”

It’s not just about transportation. Urban analytics could be used to prevent crime, mitigate flooding, limit air pollution, keep housing prices affordable — the list goes on.

“Urban analytics is essentially a discipline that uses data and data science tools to solve urban problems,” said Subhrajit “Subhro” Guhathakurta, professor at Georgia Tech’s School of City and Regional Planning.

Ethics will be at the forefront of robotics education thanks to a new University of Texas at Austin program that will train tomorrow’s technologists to understand the positive — and potentially negative — implications of their creations.

Today, much robotic technology is developed without considering its potentially harmful effects on society, including how these technologies can infringe on privacy or further economic inequity. The new UT Austin program will fill an important educational gap by prioritizing these issues in its curriculum.

“In the next 10 years, we are going to live more closely alongside robots, and we want to be sure that those robots are fair, inclusive and free from bias,” said Junfeng Jiao, associate professor in the School of Architecture and the program lead. “And because the robots we create are reflections of ourselves, it is imperative that technologists receive an excellent ethics education. We want our students to work directly with companies to create practices and technologies that are equitable and fair.”

A group of UC Berkeley researchers recently won a 3-year, $2 million National Science Foundation grant(link is external) to improve the useability of big criminal justice datasets for public defenders and others.

The new Effective Programming, Interaction, and Computation with Data (EPIC) Lab will create computing tools to help defenders, investigators and paralegals without coding expertise more easily research police misconduct, judicial decision-making and related issues for their cases. These tools will initially be used in San Francisco, Alameda and Sacramento.

“There are so many ways that defenders can get better outcomes in the criminal justice system, if they were just able to ask the right questions of the data,” said Aditya Parameswaran(link is external), a principal investigator for the lab and an assistant professor in Berkeley’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and the School of Information. “We’re thinking about what interfaces make sense for these defenders and how to build a system to support them.”

The University of Cincinnati has named a campus building after a professor who lives by a philosophy of “students first.” The Engineering Research Center, designed by Michael Graves, was rededicated today as the Mantei Center.

The new Mantei Center honors Emeritus Professor Thomas D. Mantei of the College of Engineering and Applied Science, an award-winning teacher, department chair, researcher and mentor to generations of students.

The renaming of one of UC’s signature buildings was inspired by a $25 million gift to the university by Jim Goetz, a former Mantei student.

Undergraduate students at UBC Vancouver have two new options to pursue studies in data and computational science this fall with the launch of new minor and first-year cohort programs.

UBC Vancouver’s new Data Science Minor is an interdisciplinary program offered jointly via the departments of Computer Science and Statistics. Students in the program will gain an understanding of key data science concepts like implementing reproducible data science workflows, applying statistical methods, and using machine learning with data. The minor augments the skills students learn in their chosen major.

Meanwhile, the new First Year Focus: Computation program enables first-year UBC Science students to take a common set of five online computer science, math, data science and communications courses with a consistent group of fellow undergraduates. FYF helps students build a strong foundation in the computational sciences in a supportive, cohort-based program and gives them the opportunity to explore a wide range of disciplines as they advance to second year.

Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc. (Hereinafter referred to as Sony CSL) announced today the launch of an AI-assisted music production app, Flow Machines Mobile (FM Mobile) in Japan and the United States.
To expand the creativity of music makers with AI, Sony CSL has been conducting Flow Machines(FM) project since 2012. In 2019, Sony CSL launched Flow Machines Professional (FM Pro), a plugin for use in a digital audio workstation (DAW). This technology has been used within the Sony Group, both in Japan and internationally, to produce numerous pieces of music. FM Mobile, the new mobile application for iOS, is a cloud-based AI music production tool compatible with a wide range of DAW plugins. [free at Apple iPad App Store]

As the idea of preserving sensory heritage quietly catches on in the cultural and museum fields, an ambitious project aims to investigate how scents defined communities in the past. ODEUROPA is the first pan-European initiative to use artificial intelligence (AI) to create a library of historic smells. The research team plans to bring some of these aromas from the 17th and 18th century back to life and to preserve them, either by finding words that accurately describe them or by using modern scientific processes to recreate these smells in the lab.

“One of our aims is to make cultural experiences more tangible,” explained Inger Leemans, professor of cultural history and project lead of ODEUROPA at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). “Smell is a very direct route to people’s connection with the past. We want to help people find out about the role it played long before they were born, and to safeguard these smells for the future.”

Long-term modeling of our future energy system points to a paradigm shift in the number of significant things in the future energy network. The future will not just involve a move from power systems with hundreds or thousands of large generators to systems with millions of small solar projects and wind turbines. It will also involve hundreds of millions of networked electric vehicles and also, potentially billions of networked sources of energy demand — things like lighting systems, boilers, and heat pumps. Their connections to each other have obvious value, from informing operators of conditions to transacting between parties. Energy transition networks at a scale of billions of things will be too big to be run only by humans. They will require artificial intelligence.

A new white paper from my BloombergNEF colleagues, the Deutsche Energie-Agentur (Germany’s energy agency) and the World Economic Forum outlines 15 functions that AI can perform for the energy transition. Many of them are improvements on existing industrial functions that companies use today, from asset optimization and demand forecasting for renewable power generation, to designing and monitoring power grids.

AI’s energy transition applications also cover a newer area: materials discovery and innovation.

For a century, researchers have tracked genetic traits to find out which cattle produce more and better milk and meat. Now, two University of Florida scientists will use artificial intelligence to analyze millions of bits of genetic data to try to keep cattle cooler and thus, more productive.

Raluca Mateescu, a UF/IFAS professor, and Fernanda Rezende, a UF/IFAS assistant professor – both in animal sciences — gather hundreds of thousands of pieces of information about cattle genetic traits. They plan to use UF’s supercomputer, the HiPerGator, to analyze that data. With the information Mateescu and her team get from the HiPerGator, they can give ranchers better recommendations on which animals to keep and breed for improved quantity of beef and dairy.

“AI has rapidly emerged as a powerful approach in animal genomics and holds great promise to integrate big data from multiple biological layers, leading to accurate prediction of future traits – for example, meat yield,” Mateescu said. “My research group is investigating the use of AI methods to develop approaches to accurately predict the value of certain genes. Ultimately, we plan to provide more effective strategies to improve animal productivity.”

Recently Clive Thompson
wrote a story about the Framework repairable laptop. I was absolutely astounded by what that laptop is and isn’t. I do recommend reading his post and following the links to the company that is making this machine.

If I still had the income I had in my heyday, I’d buy one of those just out of curiosity!

My instantaneous thought was, “If a small company like that can do this, why can’t Apple?”

The legislation before the science committee authorizes 5- and 10-year spending plans for agencies under its jurisdiction, which include DOE, the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The increases are aimed at boosting research across many disciplines, including efforts to combat climate change and bolster innovation. The bill is separate from a $1 trillion package of infrastructure spending approved last month by the Senate and pending in the House. The legislation is also distinct from stand-alone bills passed in June by the House that authorize future spending levels for specific programs at NSF and DOE.

Using a groundbreaking new technique at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an international collaboration led by NIST researchers has revealed previously unrecognized properties of technologically crucial silicon crystals and uncovered new information about an important subatomic particle and a long-theorized fifth force of nature.

By aiming subatomic particles known as neutrons at silicon crystals and monitoring the outcome with exquisite sensitivity, the NIST scientists were able to obtain three extraordinary results: the first measurement of a key neutron property in 20 years using a unique method; the highest-precision measurements of the effects of heat-related vibrations in a silicon crystal; and limits on the strength of a possible “fifth force” beyond standard physics theories.