Data Science newsletter – October 29, 2021

Newsletter features journalism, research papers and tools/software for October 29, 2021

 

UC Berkeley scientists to lead NASA’s newest space telescope

University of California-Berkeley, Berkeley News


from

University of California, Berkeley, space scientists have been tapped by NASA to lead the development of a new orbiting space telescope dedicated to studying the evolution of our Milky Way galaxy.

In an announcement last week, NASA selected the Compton Spectrometer and Imager (COSI) mission, which is led by UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL), to advance toward a scheduled launch in 2025. The mission budget is estimated at $145 million, not including launch costs.


Mount Sinai Awarded Prestigious $4 Million Grant to Launch Skin Biology and Diseases Resource-based Center

OncLive, Mount Sinai Tisch Cancer Center


from

The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai is establishing a Skin Biology and Diseases Resource-based Center (SBDRC), funded by a $4 million, five-year P30 grant from the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS). The Mount Sinai SBDRC will serve as a hub for research in skin biology and skin diseases throughout the Mount Sinai Health System, New York City, and the entire tri-state region—one of only six SBDRCs nationwide supported by a NIAMS grant. … The Center will use technical innovations, high-end infrastructure, and computing power available at Mount Sinai to advance and support skin research, and will embed experts in gene editing, genomics, and bioinformatics within skin research labs to break down interdisciplinary communication barriers.


$2.1 Million Gift Launches Comprehensive Breast Cancer Database

University of California, San Diego, UC San Diego Health


from

In an important step that could help answer research questions about breast cancer and develop more personalized solutions for patients, philanthropists Richard and Carol Dean Hertzberg have committed $2.1 million to develop and maintain the Dean-Hertzberg Breast Cancer Database System (BCDS) at Moores Cancer Center at UC San Diego Health. The gift will support the work of Anne Wallace, MD, director of the Comprehensive Breast Health Center at UC San Diego Health and her collaborators at Moores Cancer Center.

The interactive database will further UC San Diego Health’s efforts to advance the understanding of breast disease and develop new treatments. The BCDS will combine biological, biographical and demographic data in novel ways that will allow researchers to study breast cancers with similar clinical features, as well as rare subtypes.


Computer scientists developed method for identifying disease biomarkers with high accuracy

University of Waterloo (Canada), Waterloo News


from

Researchers are developing a deep learning network capable of detecting disease biomarkers with a much higher degree of accuracy.

Experts at the University of Waterloo’s Cheriton School of Computer Science have created a deep neural network that achieves 98 per cent detection of peptide features in a dataset. That means scientists and medical practitioners have a greater chance of discovering possible diseases through tissue sample analysis.


MIT to discuss academic freedom after canceling prestigious lecture over professor’s views

The Boston Globe, Hiawatha Bray


from

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was set to hold a faculty forum on Wednesday in an effort to resolve an intense dispute over academic freedom after the cancellation of a speech by a prominent scientist over his political views.


“In this pivotal AI moment, society has never needed the Liberal Arts—the path to wise, responsible citizenship—more than it does now.” — Rafael Reif, MIT President.

Twitter, MIT School of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences


from

Relevant Reading: “Computing & AI: Humanistic Perspectives from MIT”


AI Generates Hypotheses Human Scientists Have Not Thought Of

Scientific American, Robin Blades


from

Electric vehicles have the potential to substantially reduce carbon emissions, but car companies are running out of materials to make batteries. One crucial component, nickel, is projected to cause supply shortages as early as the end of this year. Scientists recently discovered four new materials that could potentially help—and what may be even more intriguing is how they found these materials: the researchers relied on artificial intelligence to pick out useful chemicals from a list of more than 300 options. And they are not the only humans turning to A.I. for scientific inspiration.

Creating hypotheses has long been a purely human domain. Now, though, scientists are beginning to ask machine learning to produce original insights. They are designing neural networks (a type of machine-learning setup with a structure inspired by the human brain) that suggest new hypotheses based on patterns the networks find in data instead of relying on human assumptions. Many fields may soon turn to the muse of machine learning in an attempt to speed up the scientific process and reduce human biases.


You can now play ancient board games thanks to artificial intelligence

Input magazine, Adam Paul


from

Before an AI can beat the pants off of you, it must first understand the rules of the game. That may not be the point of the Digital Ludeme Project, per se, but it certainly is the logical conclusion to its years-long goals. Per a new rundown from Wired, researchers and anthropologists have teamed up to help fill in the blanks to countless ancient board games whose rules have been lost to the ages with the help of artificial intelligence programming… and it is badass.


Elisabeth Pähtz: Why chess players can’t win against artificial intelligence

ChessBase, Chess News, Adam Silver


from

Top German player, IM Elisabeth Pähtz, was recently invited to speak at the Digital Demo Day in Germany, in English, where she was asked to discuss the application of quantum computing on chess. She was later interviewed about her life as a chess player with questions on how it compares to Queen’s Gambit, but the key question she was asked was: can quantum computing solve chess?


Making this album with AI ‘felt like wandering in an enormous labyrinth’

The Verge, James Vincent


from

The scare is over and the fun can begin. That’s how I tend to think of creative endeavors involving artificial intelligence these days. We’ve moved past, I think, hyperbolic claims about AI making human art redundant and can now enjoy all the possibilities this technology affords. In that light, Shadow Planet — a new album made as a three-way collaboration between two humans and AI — shows exactly what sort fun can be had.

Shadow Planet is the creation of writer Robin Sloan, musician Jesse Solomon Clark, and Jukebox, a machine learning music program made by OpenAI. After an off-the-cuff Instagram conversation between Sloan and Clark about starting a band (named The Cotton Modules), the two began exchanging tapes of music. A seasoned composer, Clark sent seeds of songs to Sloan who fed them into Jukebox, which is trained on a huge dataset of 1.2 million songs and tries to autocomplete any audio it hears. The AI program, steered by Sloan, then built on Clark’s ideas, which Sloan sent back to him to develop further.


On eve of climate summit, researchers sharpen emissions tracking

Science, Warren Cornwall


from

While nations step up their pledges, some scientists and policymakers are focused on making sure they stick to them. They are nurturing rapidly emerging technologies—including satellites, sensors, and software—that promise a quick and accurate assessment of greenhouse gas emissions such as carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane. “It’s just a revolution in what’s possible,” says Steven Hamburg, a biogeochemist and chief scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), which is leading an effort to launch a methane-tracking satellite into orbit next year.

Such systems would not only provide a clear and timely picture of emissions trends, but would also help hold governments accountable by independently verifying any pledges made in Glasgow. The first such accounting could come as soon as 2023, when the world is scheduled for its first “stocktake”—a provision in the Paris accords that calls for reviewing the state of global emissions every 5 years.


Contrary to Popular Belief, College Students Do Care About Their Data

Campus Technology, Dian Schaffhauser


from

The idea that college students don’t care about the privacy of their data may be a myth. These digital natives are increasingly aware of the importance of data privacy, especially when it involves the protection of information about their academic or professional prospects. Students are also concerned about how unchangeable identifiers, such as biometric information, are protected by their schools. And they have more confidence in educational institutions and government than in technology companies for protecting their privacy.

These broad findings were shared in a new report produced by the Future of Privacy Forum for its Student Privacy Compass website, after analyzing publicly available research studies done in the last decade by Gallup Poll, Pew Research Center, Educause, Kaplan and other organizations, on the data privacy preferences, attitudes and behaviors of college and university students.


This Program Can Give AI a Sense of Ethics—Sometimes

WIRED, Business, Will Knight


from

Artificial intelligence has made it possible for machines to do all sorts of useful new things. But they still don’t know right from wrong.

A new program called Delphi, developed by researchers at the University of Washington and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai2) in Seattle, aims to teach AI about human values—an increasingly important task as AI is used more often and in more ways.

You can pose ethical questions of Delphi, and often it will respond sensibly enough


Purdue University and physIQ partner to develop a smartwatch-based algorithm to detect early signs of viral infections, including COVID-19

Purdue University, Research Foundation News


from

Purdue University and physIQ, a leader in digital medicine, announced Thursday (Oct. 28) the co-development of a viral detection algorithm for smartwatches. This innovation will be the result of a collaboration between physIQ and university engineers. The algorithm will be commercialized by physIQ, which develops solutions designed to improve health care outcomes by applying artificial intelligence to real-time physiological data from wearable sensors.

The research was led by Craig Goergen, Purdue’s Leslie A. Geddes Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering.


U-M lab awarded $13.2M grant to help thwart substance abuse disorders

University of Michigan, Michigan News


from

A University of Michigan lab focused on developing cutting-edge methods to inform effective interventions for drug abuse, HIV and other chronic conditions has been awarded a $13.2 million grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

The Data Science for Dynamic Intervention Decision-Making Lab, or d3lab, at the Institute for Social Research’s Survey Research Center received a five-year P50 Center of Excellence award from NIDA to launch the Center for Methodologies for Adapting and Personalizing Prevention, Treatment, and Recovery Services for Substance Use Disorder and HIV (MAPS Center).

A key focus of the d3lab is the advancement and development of the science of adaptive interventions which, consistent with the theme of precision health, are designed to address the unique and changing needs of individuals by guiding the sequencing and adaptation of treatment services.


Aga Khan University, U-M data science collaboration garners NIH funding

University of Michigan, Center for Global Health Equity


from

Facilitated by the U-M Center for Global Health Equity, $6.5 million NIH grant will establish a cutting-edge data science hub in east Africa.

The Aga Khan University (AKU) will lead the effort with U-M support. UtiliZing health Information for Meaningful impact in East Africa though Data Science (or UZIMA-DS) will be the first-of its kind initiative in the region, harnessing artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other emerging technologies to improve health and care delivery in local communities.


Higher education responses to COVID-19 in the United States: Evidence for the impacts of university policy

medRxiv; Brennan Klein, Alessandro Vespignani et al.


from

With a dataset of testing and case counts from over 1,400 institutions of higher education (IHEs) in the United States, we analyze the number of infections and deaths from SARS-CoV-2 in the counties surrounding these IHEs during the Fall 2020 semester (August to December, 2020). We used a matching procedure designed to create groups of counties that are aligned along age, race, income, population, and urban/rural categories—socio-demographic variables that have been shown to be correlated with COVID-19 outcomes. We find that counties with IHEs that remained primarily online experienced fewer cases and deaths during the Fall 2020 semester; whereas before and after the semester, these two groups had almost identical COVID-19 incidence. Additionally, we see fewer deaths in counties with IHEs that reported conducting any on-campus testing compared to those that reported none. We complement the statistical analysis with a case study of IHEs in Massachusetts—a rich data state in our dataset—which further highlights the importance of IHE-affiliated testing for the broader community. The results in this work suggest that campus testing can itself be thought of as a mitigation policy and that allocating additional resources to IHEs to support efforts to regularly test students and staff would be beneficial to mitigating the spread of COVID-19 in the general population.

SPONSORED CONTENT

Assets  




The eScience Institute’s Data Science for Social Good program is now accepting applications for student fellows and project leads for the 2021 summer session. Fellows will work with academic researchers, data scientists and public stakeholder groups on data-intensive research projects that will leverage data science approaches to address societal challenges in areas such as public policy, environmental impacts and more. Student applications due 2/15 – learn more and apply here. DSSG is also soliciting project proposals from academic researchers, public agencies, nonprofit entities and industry who are looking for an opportunity to work closely with data science professionals and students on focused, collaborative projects to make better use of their data. Proposal submissions are due 2/22.

 


Tools & Resources



Olga Megorskaya/Toloka: Practical Lessons About Data Labeling

Substack, TheSequence newsletter, Olga Megorskaya


from

At Toloka, we provide an infrastructural platform for engineers to build their optimal pipelines integrated into ML production cycle and pre-set optimal pipelines combining all the three components: experts, crowd, automation to obtain the best result.

Crowdsourced data labeling seems like one of the most obvious models for organizations to systematically build high quality datasets but, at the same time, they could result in challenges to scale. Could you elaborate on some of the challenges and best practices for implementing crowdsourced data labeling pipelines at scale?


So You Want to Write a Technical Book

Eric Lengyel's Blog


from

If you’re knowledgeable in a technical field, writing a book to teach others a few things can be a rewarding experience on many different levels. With the many avenues available for self-publishing these days, an important question to ask yourself is “Do I need a publisher?”. The answer depends on your particular situation and your particular set of skills. In the twenty years that I have been writing books, I have taken both routes, and this post is a collection of the many things I have learned along the way.


Careers


Postdocs

Postdoctoral Researcher Positions



University of Pennsylvania, Computational Social Science Lab; Philadelphia, PA
Full-time positions outside academia

Research Associate, Family Demography



Pew Research Center; Washington, DC
Internships and other temporary positions

Research Intern – Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics



Microsoft Research; New York, NY

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published.