Data Science newsletter – September 19, 2021

Today, the U.S. National Science Foundation announced six new science and technology centers to advance ambitious, complex research in fields ranging from mechanobiology to particle physics to climate change. For decades, NSF science and technology centers have transformed cellular biology, combined scientific disciplines to enhance accelerator capabilities, and revolutionized real-time functional imaging by providing the ability to observe the activity of a single atom.

The centers will focus on establishing new scientific disciplines and developing transformative technologies that have the potential for broad impacts on science and society. The centers will shine light on emerging STEM fields to develop a globally competitive STEM infrastructure and conduct outreach to inform the public of breakthrough science.

… Emergencies and disasters are extreme events, but we can learn much from them about how identity dynamics operate under more normal, less terrifying circumstances. A sense of common fate produces a shared identity, the knowledge that we, together, are part of a group. In turn, that shared identity produces solidarity and the ability to work together collectively. When they cohere, shared identities become foundations on which people can coordinate and cooperate. It allows them to face and overcome a crisis that might have been difficult to address alone.

We consider nutritional stability as the capacity of #FoodSystems to provide #nutrients despite disturbance. There are many aspects of #FoodSystems that will affect resilience

#CropDiversity is one aspect that has clear links to nutritional availability

Faculty hiring networks—who hires whose graduates as faculty—exhibit steep hierarchies, which can reinforce both social and epistemic inequalities in academia. Understanding the mechanisms driving these patterns would inform efforts to diversify the academy and shed new light on the role of hiring in shaping which scientific discoveries are made. Here, we investigate the degree to which structural mechanisms can explain hierarchy and other network characteristics observed in empirical faculty hiring networks. We study a family of adaptive rewiring network models, which reinforce institutional prestige within the hierarchy in five distinct ways. Each mechanism determines the probability that a new hire comes from a particular institution according to that institution’s prestige score, which is inferred from the hiring network’s existing structure. We find that structural inequalities and centrality patterns in real hiring networks are best reproduced by a mechanism of global placement power, in which a new hire is drawn from a particular institution in proportion to the number of previously drawn hires anywhere. On the other hand, network measures of biased visibility are better recapitulated by a mechanism of local placement power, in which a new hire is drawn from a particular institution in proportion to the number of its previous hires already present at the hiring institution. These contrasting results suggest that the underlying structural mechanism reinforcing hierarchies in faculty hiring networks is a mixture of global and local preference for institutional prestige. Under these dynamics, we show that each institution’s position in the hierarchy is remarkably stable, due to a dynamic competition that overwhelmingly favors more prestigious institutions. These results highlight the reinforcing effects of a prestige-based faculty hiring system, and the importance of understanding its ramifications on diversity and innovation in academia.

Britain said it would overhaul its data protection regulator to help strengthen economic growth and better protect the public, giving authorities scope to impose tougher penalties and fines for nuisance calls and text messages.

The changes to the remit of the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) follow the selection of New Zealand Privacy Commissioner John Edwards as the preferred candidate to be Britain’s new information commissioner, the government said.

Britain said last month it would reform data protection following its departure from the European Union, taking what it termed a “common sense” approach that could help it strike technological partnerships with the United States and other countries.

The first part of the campaign aims to add 1,000 scholarships and 75 new faculty endowments, and to improve more than 500,000 square feet of space on campus.

The Crimson Standard component of the campaign has a $600 million fundraising goal for UA Athletics and launched its public fundraising campaign in 2018.

In August, 32 faculty and 117 research scientists, postdocs, and students at Stanford University, long one of the biggest players in AI, declared that there has been a “sweeping paradigm shift in AI”. They coined a new term, “Foundation Models” to characterize the new paradigm, joined forces in a “Center for Research on Foundation Models”, and published the massive 212-page report “On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models.”

Although the term is new, the general approach is not. You train a big neural network (like the well-known GPT-3) on an enormous amount of data, and then you adapt (“fine-tune”) the model to a bunch of more specific tasks (in the words of the report, “a foundation model …[thus] serves as [part of] the common basis from which many task-specific models are built via adaptation”). The basic model thus serves as the “foundation” (hence the term) of AIs that carry out more specific tasks. The approach started to gather momentum in 2018, when Google developed the natural language processing model called BERT, and it became even more popular with the introduction last year of OpenAI’s GPT-3.

A tax on the richest private U.S. college endowments would be curtailed under a plan by House Democrats, provided the schools address tuition costs.

The provision would reduce the tax through a calculation that weighs revenues from undergraduate tuition and fees against undergraduate financial aid, according to Liz Clark, a vice president at the National Association of College and University Business Officers.

The Carters star in Tiffany’s controversial campaign; the two have also partnered on the Love Scholarship Program via BeyGOOD and the Shawn Carter Foundation.

FIU is expanding its College of Engineering and Computing with a 125,000 square-foot, six-story building that will house makerspace labs, active learning classrooms and research laboratories at Modesto A. Maidique Campus.

On Thursday, the university held a groundbreaking ceremony near the future home of the new building. Florida Lt. Governor and FIU alumna Jeanette Nuñez joined President Mark B. Rosenberg, Raul Moas, Miami program director of the John S. and James L Knight Foundation, current and former South Florida legislators, FIU trustees, donors and FIU staff at the event.

The National Institutes of Health has awarded a $12.25 million grant to the University of California San Diego to develop and enhance brain-sensing and brain-stimulating platform technologies to enable treatment of drug-resistant epilepsy.

The project is led by UC San Diego electrical engineering professor Shadi Dayeh who leads the Integrated Electronics and Biointerfaces Laboratory and brings together expertise from all across UC San Diego, including the Jacobs School of Engineering and Health Sciences. The nation-wide team includes researchers and longtime collaborators of Dayeh at Massachusetts General Hospital led by Dr. Sydney Cash and Oregon Health & Sciences University led by Dr. Ahmed Raslan.

The Center for Global Discovery and Conservation Science — located in Tempe, Arizona, and in Hilo, Hawaii — does not call this paradise home just for the views. This team is leading the way in groundbreaking research to inform climate and biodiversity action around the world. And one of its projects, the Allen Coral Atlas, continues to reach new heights for what is possible.

On Sept. 8, the Allen Coral Atlas met a major milestone by completing global habitat maps of the world’s tropical, shallow coral reefs. A combination of satellite imagery, advanced analytics and global collaboration has resulted in maps that show the marine ecosystems’ benthic and geomorphic data in unprecedented detail. With eyes in the sky, the technology recognizes geomorphic, or seascape structures, up to about 15 meters (52 feet) underwater and benthic data, or the composition of the ocean floor, up to about 10 meters (33 feet) underwater.

It’s not just a science experiment. With a famed geneticist on board, Ben Lamm is launching Colossal from stealth with $15 million in funding — and hopes of saving the planet.

The new infusion of funding from the National Center for Advancing Translational Science at the NIH will enable the Irving Institute to develop new programs, including a Research Navigation System to help match the needs of individual researchers and research teams to resources and services available at Columbia. The Institute will also offer expanded training opportunities and a “data concierge service” that will link researchers with experts in biostatistics, biomedical informatics, and data science. They will also engage community leaders as “ambassadors” to promote research that improves community health.

A new National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT) award of nearly $3 million will enable Stony Brook University to provide interdisciplinary cross-training to PhD students in the data sciences alongside PhD students in the human-centered sciences to detect and address biases in data, models, people and institutions.

This innovative five-year training project spans eight departments in Stony Brook’s College of Arts and Sciences (Departments of Psychology, Linguistics, Economics, Sociology, Political Science, and Neurobiology and Behavior) and the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences (Departments of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics and Statistics). Human-centered scientists will master cutting-edge computational methods that empower their research; they will take bridge courses in computer science as well as data science graduate courses and will earn a graduate certificate in AI. Data science students will earn a certificate in the human-centered sciences; they will learn theories and practices within these disciplines including study designs, associated limitations and ethical issues.

Farming is hard and new technology can help. Meanwhile,global food needs are increasing dramatically.

Fierce Electronics asked John Deere’s Joe Hergenreter for insights on how new tech will make a difference. Hergenreter comes from a family farm and is manager of tech stack system test and validation for John Deere’s Intelligent Solutions Group where he specializes in agile digital product delivery, customer product solution validation and software development. In 1998, he joined John Deere as an intern. He holds a bachelor’s in bio-resource engineering, power machinery and precision farming from Colorado State. He answered these questions by email.

“The precision agriculture degree keeps students at the cutting edge of the intersection of agronomics, high-speed sensor technology, data management and advanced machinery development,” Killefer says. “The new Raven Precision Agriculture Center features spaces to house modern precision farm equipment, 15 teaching labs, 12 research labs and 22 collaborative spaces. Scientists from a variety of departments and agricultural industry partners can collaborate in research, education and outreach activities. The ability to participate in experiential learning with both peers and industry mentors will prepare our students for lifelong careers that support economically and environmentally sustainable agriculture.”

The $46.1 million Raven Precision Agriculture Center building project has been supported by South Dakota stakeholder groups, industry partners and legislative leaders.

Corn harvest is underway and soybean harvest will soon begin in South Carolina. To help farmers when making decisions related to storing or field drying grain crops, Clemson University has a new app.

The app is the Clemson EMC Calculator, developed by Clemson’s Department of Agricultural Sciences and Precision Agriculture group to help farmers optimize moisture content of stored grain and help evaluate field drying grain.

Equilibrium Moisture Content (EMC) is the moisture content grain will attain if exposed to a specific relative humidity and temperature for a long enough duration. Given enough time, grain moisture will come to match the temperature and relative humidity in the air around it. EMC calculations are used to determine best drying conditions.

Demonstrating that we are truly living in an era of “smart agriculture,” many of the technologies showcased in this year’s ARPA-E Summit were in the farming sector—most notably, sensors for crops and farmlands. Just like the smart devices that enable us to monitor our health every minute of the day, these agricultural sensors allow farmers to monitor plant and soil conditions close to real-time. Here are two that caught this writer’s eyes.

First up is a 3D-printed, biodegradable soil sensor that checks moisture and nitrogen levels. One of the benefits of using print electronics is being able to mass-produce at a low cost, says Gregory Whiting at the University of Colorado, Boulder, one of the principal investigators of the team working on the sensors. “Agriculture is a pretty cost constrained industry,” Whiting says, and 3D-printed sensors allow farmers to place many sensors throughout their large farmlands—often hundreds of acres—without spending a ton of money.

Researchers at Texas A&M University will lead a hub of five institutions across the country to conduct fundamental research to support holistic decision-making for historically underrepresented communities impacted by coastal hazards.

The Focused Coastline and People Research Hub at Texas A&M, which will bring together communities, stakeholders and researchers, has been established thanks to a five-year, nearly $4.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation. Along the Northern Gulf Coast, communities from Texas to Florida are particularly at risk for coastal hazards, including hurricanes, tsunamis, coastal storm surges, flooding, sea-level rise and erosion.

The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Coastlines and People (CoPe) program, an interdisciplinary research initiative supported by several NSF divisions, is aimed at studying complex interactions between coastal processes, human dynamics and the built environment.

Coupling computer automation with an ink-jet printer originally used to print T-shirt designs, researchers at Caltech and Google have developed a high-throughput method of identifying novel materials with interesting properties. In a trial run of the process, they screened hundreds of thousands of possible new materials and discovered one made from cobalt, tantalum, and tin that has tunable transparency and acts as a good catalyst for chemical reactions while remaining stable in strong acid electrolytes.

The effort, described in a scientific article published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences(PNAS), was led by John Gregoire and Joel Haber of Caltech, and Lusann Yang of Google. It builds on research conducted at the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP), a Department of Energy (DOE) Energy Innovation Hub at Caltech, and continues with JCAP’s successor, the Liquid Sunlight Alliance (LiSA), a DOE-funded effort that aims to streamline the complicated steps needed to convert sunlight into fuels, to make that process more efficient.

wtf our fridge just emailed us to say we opened its door too many times in the past month [DVotW]

“NC State is well positioned to produce effective solutions to societal challenges that require significant interdisciplinary work and innovation, and we’re pleased to be leading this crucial effort,” said NC State Chancellor Randy Woodson. “STEPS has ambitious goals that hold the potential to make a tremendous difference in phosphorus sustainability.”

Those ambitious goals include facilitating a 25% reduction in human dependence on mined phosphates and a 25% reduction in phosphorus losses to soils and water resources within 25 years, leading to enhanced resilience of food systems and reduced environmental damage.

Current food production systems rely heavily on phosphorus fertilizers, most of which originate from non-renewable phosphate deposits that are mined outside of the United States. Once in the food system, only 20% of the input phosphorus is ultimately incorporated into the human diet due to multiple system losses and inefficiencies. The “lost” phosphorus accumulates in soils and freshwater sources.

In 2018, Ewa Deelman, Research Director at the USC Information Sciences Institute, and a group of colleagues were funded to pilot a Cyberinfrastructure Center of Excellence with a goal of modeling and planning for a Cyberinfrastructure Center of Excellence. The result of this three- year effort is the recently funded center CI Compass: An NSF CI Center of Excellence for Navigating the Major Facilities Data Lifecycle. The five-year, $8 million award from NSF is a collaborative effort between Deelman at USC, Anirban Mandal, Ilya Baldin and Laura Christopherson from the Renaissance Computing Institute at UNC, Angela Murillo from Indiana University, Jarek Nabrzyski, Charles Vardeman, and Mary Gohsman, from the University of Notre Dame, Valerio Pascucci and Robert Ricci from the University of Utah, and Kerk Kee from Texas Tech University. Together, these individuals have deep expertise in a number of areas including data management, data processing, visualization, identity management, systems and infrastructure that will enable the team to focus on the “Major Facilities’” data lifecycle, from data collection to processing to dissemination to the scientific and engineering community, and the public.

Artificial intelligence is being deployed in many different areas. Within higher education, it is used for college admissions and financial aid decisions. Health researchers employ it to scan the scientific literature for chemical compounds that may generate new medical treatments. E-commerce sites deploy algorithms to make product recommendations for consumers based on their areas of interest.[1]

But one of the most important growth areas lies in finance and operations. Both public and private sector organizations have large budgets to manage and it is important to operate efficiently and effectively. Accusations of budget inefficiencies or wasteful spending decrease public confidence and make it important to figure out how to manage resources in fair ways.

To help with budgetary oversight, AI is being used for financial management and fraud detection. Advanced algorithms can spot abnormalities and outliers that can be referred to human investigators to determine if fraud actually has taken place. It is a way to use technology to improve budget audits, personnel performance, and organizational activities.

A majority of the vice president’s trip to Hampton focused on the intersection of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics educations and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). The White House, which is in the midst of its 2021 National HBCU Week, has been heavily driving initiatives to create more opportunities for HBCU students who are seeking entry into STEM industries.

While Harris is an alumna of another HBCU, Howard University, she praised students of the Home by the Sea who are participating in partnerships with federal agencies.

Vice President Harris contends that “historically, presently and in the future” the partnership of Black students and agencies like NASA, NOAA and other STEM related organizations is vital.

Such resources are a bit like signposts. They can point you in a direction, but whether that direction makes sense for you or your organization depends on your goals and priorities — and where you are starting from. And whether you arrive at your goal given a direction of travel depends in part on whether you actually get started — as well as how much effort you put into learning to deal with specific challenges along the way, and then acting on that learning. … This list was discussed on Hacker News on 2021-09-13.

Kathryn Sullivan—former NASA astronaut, former chief scientist at NOAA, and president and CEO of the COSI Science Center—recently spoke about the discipline of communication and framing conversation, deeming it “the new social technology” and “the most important human technology.” As data scientists, we must think beyond communicating with our scientific colleagues to effectively communicating with leaders and decision-makers, as well as the media and public. Making your point in these settings often does not fit the traditional communication paradigm found in academic research talks. Perhaps we, as statisticians and data scientists, should aim to reframe our conversations and shift that paradigm.

Let’s take a look at how we may flip the traditional paradigm for engaging in impactful and effective communication within our discipline and across scientific boundaries.

There are a lot of projects currently going on in PyTorch core and it can be difficult to keep track of all of them or how they relate with each other. Here is my personal understanding of all the things that are going on, organized around the people who are working on these projects, and how I think about how they relate to each other.

A style guide can be a localization lifesaver. This living document is what translators use to fully understand the job and create brand-specific localized content. Without one, your translators may not grasp the context, brand style and company terms, which can lead to frustrating back-and-forths and unsuccessful final copy.

A localization style guide is your language team’s roadmap. Here’s why you need one and what to include in yours to make it an effective guide for your translators.

TL;DR: This document contains a practical and comprehensive introduction of everything related to deep learning in the context of physical simulations. As much as possible, all topics come with hands-on code examples in the form of Jupyter notebooks to quickly get started. Beyond standard supervised learning from data, we’ll look at physical loss constraints, more tightly coupled learning algorithms with differentiable simulations, as well as reinforcement learning and uncertainty modeling. We live in exciting times: these methods have a huge potential to fundamentally change what computer simulations can achieve.