University of Virginia, The Cavalier Daily student newspaper, Alex Maniatis
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Here at Virginia, the football and women’s soccer teams are pioneers in the collegiate landscape. Director of Football Analytics Matt Edwards and Eilidh Thomson, director of analytics and operations for women’s soccer, both saw an opportunity to leverage data on their respective teams and forged their own paths by creating analytics positions. Both directors witnessed the positive impacts that could come from data from their previous coaching positions and decided to develop a technical expertise for data analytics. With different experiences and backgrounds, the two directors are changing the way Virginia Athletics approaches decision-making and game preparation.
Is traditional math still important in data science? Or can a new curriculum based on data science replace some of traditional mathematics courses while promoting greater racial equity? These questions are at the heart of a debate that’s heating up in academic circles this month.
The issue of racial disparities in middle school and high school math classes has been a subject of concern for some time. In San Francisco, public school educators have pulled back on the availability of advanced math classes in an attempt to close the performance gap.
San Francisco’s approach is the model for a new math framework proposed by the California Department of Education that has been adopted for K-12 education statewide. Like the San Francisco model, the state framework seeks to alter the traditional pathway that has guided college-bound students for generations, including by encouraging middle schools to drop Algebra 1 (the decision to implement the recommendations is made by individual school districts).
In October, the Board of Regents voted to name the facility the Leinweber Computer Science and Information Building in recognition of a $25 million gift from the Leinweber Foundation. The $145 million Leinweber Computer Science and Information Building is scheduled to be completed in the summer of 2025.
Currently, CSE and UMSI are located on different campuses a few miles apart. Once completed, the new facility will eliminate the need for top talent to choose between working in a CSE or UMSI environment, removing barriers between like-minded colleagues.
The Board of Regents has approved the creation of the Department of Robotics in the College of Engineering, a first among the nation’s top 10 engineering schools.
The new department will define robotics as a discipline, teaching students the skills needed to help drive a rapidly expanding field.
The Robert and Donna Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) is expanding its undergraduate informatics major with a new concentration in Health and Life Sciences (HLS) and is currently accepting applications from current and prospective students for the program.
Informatics majors at CICS study the design, application, use and impact of computational principles and technology with the goal of applying that knowledge to another domain of interest, such as art, social sciences, journalism, business, life sciences, and public health. HLS becomes the second concentration for the informatics program, joining Data Science as a concentration option for students majoring in informatics.
The launch of the HLS concentration at CICS recognizes the myriad ways in which computing is revolutionizing health and life sciences.
Company incentives for growth and the modularity and openness of fitness data are in conflict.
This post tries to argue that if fitness trackers become even more ubiquitous and we adopt them as early as possible in someone’s lifetime, the data has a compounding value in deriving insights, but those insights come with the promise that you’ll stick around with the company for a long time.
Marine protected areas can be a victim of their own success. By banning or restricting fishing within their waters, these reserves can build healthy populations of fish, with some swimming into neighboring waters where they can be caught. But sometimes the brimming schools are too much of a temptation, with poachers furtively darting into the protected zone for an illegal haul. Preventing this poaching is hard, experts say, because at-sea enforcement can be complicated and expensive.
Now, researchers have proposed a provocative and heretical-sounding solution: sell fishing rights within parts of plentiful marine reserves and use the money to guard other parts that remain off-limits. And in what might seem like a paradox, the approach could even end up producing more fish, the researchers reported on 17 November in Environmental Research Letters.
The provosts of the Southeastern Conference‘s 14 member universities have agreed to a broad collaboration centered around artificial intelligence and data science for workforce development.
Believed to be the first athletics conference collaboration to focus on artificial intelligence for workforce development, the SEC Artificial Intelligence Consortium is designed to grow opportunities in the fast‐changing fields of AI and data science, which are expected to be foundational for the future of industry, education and research.
“This consortium acknowledges the rapid advances and increased applications of AI and data technology in all sectors of society, and it ensures our students are prepared to prosper in a workforce in which AI is expected to play an increasingly important role,” said Jere W. Morehead, president of the Southeastern Conference and the University of Georgia.
ne year ago Google artificial intelligence researcher Timnit Gebru tweeted, “I was fired” and ignited a controversy over the freedom of employees to question the impact of their company’s technology. Thursday, she launched a new research institute to ask questions about responsible use of artificial intelligence that Gebru says Google and other tech companies won’t.
“Instead of fighting from the inside, I want to show a model for an independent institution with a different set of incentive structures,” says Gebru, who is founder and executive director of Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research (DAIR). The first part of the name is a reference to her aim to be more inclusive than most AI labs—which skew white, Western, and male—and to recruit people from parts of the world rarely represented in the tech industry.
This work uses the same methodology applied over eight years to study where Computer Science departments are choosing to invest faculty positions using data obtained from advertised tenure-track searches for the current hiring season. This work also provides an opportunity to continue to understand the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on faculty hiring in Computer Science for hires starting in 2022.
We analyzed ads from 400 institutions seeking to fill hundreds of tenure-track faculty positions in Computer Science. This number is a 70% increase from last year at this time (mid-November) and is a comparable number to the 394 institutions searching for 2020. The number of tenure-track positions sought is doubled from last year and up 6% from two years ago indicating a recovery in demand after a one-year drop due to the pandemic. The number of BS/BA institutions seeking faculty is at an eight-year high with top PhD and private PhD institutions at eight-year highs in the number of positions being sought.
Calling the actions “disrespectful,” the University of Florida Board of Trustees on Friday united in a strongly worded rebuke of professors who criticized the school’s decision to block faculty members from testifying as expert witnesses in a high-profile voting rights lawsuit.
The state’s flagship university became embroiled in controversy after court documents revealed a decision by administrators to prevent three political-science professors from testifying against a new state elections law (SB 90), which included making changes to voting by mail. The measure was passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature this spring and signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis.
“This new degree provides a solid core in mathematics, data manipulation, artificial intelligence, and algorithms, combined with significant depth in the application areas. Students will gain the skills that are desperately needed in today’s society,” said Dr. Christopher Smith, associate professor of computer science, who led the creation of this program. “Data drives the world. My colleagues and I built this program to fit both student interests and global needs.”
To address a growing need for expertise in energy sector data analytics, five major Texas public universities have teamed up with multiple energy industry partners to train the sector’s future workforce. Starting with a five-week data science camp next summer, the new program will focus on skills needed to optimize efficiency in conventional-energy models, as well as lead the energy transition toward a more sustainable and cleaner environment.
Funded through 2024 by a $1.49 million grant from the National Science Foundation, the “Data Science for Energy Transition” project is led by the University of Houston in collaboration with the University of Houston-Downtown, University of Houston-Victoria, University of Houston-Clear Lake and Sam Houston State University.
The Allen School revealed this week that Microsoft’s Peter Lee and Google’s Jeff Dean (a UW CSE alumnus) have joined with Microsoft President Brad Smith and Microsoft emeritus researcher Harry Shum to give a combined $1 million to establish an endowed professorship in Lazowska’s name.
They surprised Lazowska by telling him about the gift on his 70th birthday last year, bringing him to tears.
Computer science and English can be found at most universities, but Pitt has created a special major that combines both for students looking to create immersive media experiences in a wide variety of fields.
Students interested in computer programming, while sharing a passion for writing composition and narrative, now have the option to pursue both, with Pitt’s Digital Narrative and Interactive Design major. Students could officially start declaring this major last year after a few prerequisite courses.
The 40-credit DNID major is one of four majors jointly offered between the School of Computing and Information and the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences.
In this article, I will challenge this myth and offer an alternative version of XAI, one that is sociotechnically informed and human-centered. I will use my prior work as well as my experience with the aforementioned cybersecurity project to share the journey to the Human-Centered XAI perspective. This human-centered stance emerges from two key observations.
Between 2018 and 2021, more than one in 33 U.S. residents were potentially subject to police patrol decisions directed by crime prediction software called PredPol.
The company that makes it sent more than 5.9 million of these crime predictions to law enforcement agencies across the country—from California to Florida, Texas to New Jersey—and we found those reports on an unsecured server.
The Markup and Gizmodo analyzed them and found persistent patterns.
Nvidia has been trying to buy Arm for $40 billion for over a year now — but this week, the acquisition was hit with its biggest roadblock yet. On Monday, the Federal Trade Commission laid out the case to stop the merger from going through, arguing that the deal would “stifle competing next-generation technologies.”
It’s the most significant attempt to reign in Big Tech yet under Lina Khan’s term as FTC chair, so there’s a lot at stake, both for the FTC and the electronics industry at large. Arm is a hugely important company; the company’s chip designs touch hundreds of billions of devices, including CPUs and ISPs for modern cars, embedded chipsets for wearable and medical devices, smart home gadgets like thermostats and routers, and of course, smartphone and laptop processors. The question of who controls it will have massive implications for all of them — and the FTC’s case now seems like it’ll be the biggest barrier to the acquisition going through.
The Maryland Stadium Authority said Tuesday that it will be a test site for Hexwave, a walk-through, contactless portal that can screen 1,000 people per hour. The technology was developed by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology lab and licensed by Liberty Defense Holdings, which is aiming to launch the product on the commercial market late next year.
The Defense Department will hire its first chief digital and artificial intelligence officer and formally establish a new office under their purview—by next summer—via an organizational restructure it deems necessary to advance data and technology integration and innovation across its massive enterprise.
That to-be-selected executive, the CDAO, will report directly to Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks, according to a memo published on Wednesday.
Once the office is formed, the senior official will supervise and support the meshing of all data-centered and AI-aligned work led by the Defense Department’s Joint AI Center, office of the chief data officer and Defense Digital Service.
The University of North Carolina system is leveraging $97 million in pandemic recovery funding to launch a nonprofit ed-tech start-up intended to bolster adult online education in a state with a looming need for more skilled workers.
Project Kitty Hawk is named after the North Carolina beach town the Wright brothers returned to repeatedly before achieving their dream of flight, an apt metaphor for an undertaking that UNC leaders herald as a transformative effort to reach the state’s estimated one million working adults who have some college education but no degree. Sweeping in its ambition, Project Kitty Hawk’s five-year financial plan projects 120 new online program launches and 24,000 net new enrollments across the system’s 16 university campuses by the 2026–27 academic year, according to working papers project leaders shared with Inside Higher Ed.
Nature; Valerie C. Bradley, Shiro Kuriwaki, Michael Isakov, Dino Sejdinovic, Xiao-Li Meng & Seth Flaxman
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Surveys are a crucial tool for understanding public opinion and behaviour, and their accuracy depends on maintaining statistical representativeness of their target populations by minimizing biases from all sources. Increasing data size shrinks confidence intervals but magnifies the effect of survey bias: an instance of the Big Data Paradox1. Here we demonstrate this paradox in estimates of first-dose COVID-19 vaccine uptake in US adults from 9 January to 19 May 2021 from two large surveys: Delphi–Facebook2,3 (about 250,000 responses per week) and Census Household Pulse4 (about 75,000 every two weeks). In May 2021, Delphi–Facebook overestimated uptake by 17 percentage points (14–20 percentage points with 5% benchmark imprecision) and Census Household Pulse by 14 (11–17 percentage points with 5% benchmark imprecision), compared to a retroactively updated benchmark the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published on 26 May 2021. Moreover, their large sample sizes led to miniscule margins of error on the incorrect estimates. By contrast, an Axios–Ipsos online panel5 with about 1,000 responses per week following survey research best practices6 provided reliable estimates and uncertainty quantification. We decompose observed error using a recent analytic framework1 to explain the inaccuracy in the three surveys. We then analyse the implications for vaccine hesitancy and willingness. We show how a survey of 250,000 respondents can produce an estimate of the population mean that is no more accurate than an estimate from a simple random sample of size 10. Our central message is that data quality matters more than data quantity, and that compensating the former with the latter is a mathematically provable losing proposition.
Cornell is launching a bold new initiative in artificial intelligence that will expand faculty working both in core areas and the nearly unlimited domains affected by advances in AI.
The initiative, a new Radical Collaboration laid out by AI scholars from across the university, seeks to advance Cornell’s reputation as a leader in AI research, and encompasses AI development, education and ethics. It will deepen universitywide collaborations in AI’s development, application and implications across related and AI-influenced fields.
“We want to build a community around AI because we believe strong collaborations across the university are going to be incredibly valuable over the next decade of development in this space,” said Kavita Bala, dean of the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science and the initiative’s lead dean, at a Cornell faculty AI Town Hall held virtually on Nov. 22.
If you asked, most people would probably say they don’t get to the gym enough.
Motivation may start high but frequently fizzles quickly, and with it goes the regular workouts. That’s the problem researchers sought to solve with a new study released Wednesday.
They call it a megastudy: a new take on behavioral studies that looked at the gym attendance of over 60,000 people to discern the best ways to increase gym attendance.
Harvard University on Tuesday launched the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence, a new University-wide initiative standing at the intersection of neuroscience and artificial intelligence, seeking fundamental principles that underlie both human and machine intelligence. The fruits of discoveries will flow in both directions, enhancing understanding of how humans think, perceive the world around them, make decisions, and learn, thereby advancing the rapidly evolving field of AI.
The institute will be funded by a $500 million gift from Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, which was announced Tuesday by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The gift will support 10 new faculty appointments, significant new computing infrastructure, and resources to allow students to flow between labs in pursuit of ideas and knowledge. The institute’s name honors Zuckerberg’s mother, Karen Kempner Zuckerberg, and her parents — Zuckerberg’s grandparents — Sidney and Gertrude Kempner. Chan and Zuckerberg have given generously to Harvard in the past, supporting students, faculty, and researchers in a range of areas, including around public service, literacy, and cures.
The next computer revolution might be a new kind of hardware, called processing-in-memory (PIM), an emerging computing paradigm that merges the memory and processing unit and does its computations using the physical properties of the machine — no 1s or 0s needed to do the processing digitally.
At Washington University in St. Louis, researchers from the lab of Xuan “Silvia” Zhang, associate professor in the Preston M. Green Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering, have designed a new PIM circuit, which brings the flexibility of neural networks to bear on PIM computing. The circuit has the potential to increase PIM computing’s performance by orders of magnitude beyond its current theoretical capabilities.
Big Ten Conference Commissioner Kevin Warren announced the formation of the Sports Data and Analytics Department, which will focus on collecting, synthesizing, and utilizing data and analytics for all areas of the organization. This department is charged with generating insights and driving new opportunities for the conference.
Jessica Palermo, a 13-year veteran of the Big Ten Conference, has been promoted to Vice President, Sports Data Management & Analytics and will lead this emerging initiative. Palermo will be tasked with building the vision and strategy for the business verticals associated with the conference.
Can the shape of a city promote physical activity? The question of why individuals engage in physical activity has been widely researched, but that research has predominantly focused on socio-demographic characteristics (e.g., age, gender, economic status) and coarse-grained spatial characteristics (e.g., population density), overlooking key urban characteristics of, say, whether a city is navigable or, as urban theorist Kevin Lynch put it, whether it is ‘imageable’ (whether its spatial configuration is economic of mental effort). That is mainly because, at scale, it is neither easy to model imageability nor feasible to measure physical activity. We modeled urban imageability with a single scalable metric of entropy, and then measured physical activity from 233K wearable devices over three years, and did so across 19 major cities in the developed world. We found that, after controlling for greenery, wealth, walkability, presence of landmarks, and weather conditions, the legibility hypothesis still holds: the more imageable a city, the more its dwellers engage in physical activity. Interestingly, wealth (GDP per capita) has a positive association with physical activity only in cities with inclement climate, effectively acting as a compensation mechanism for bad weather. [full text]
Through the Innovation in Data Engineering and Science Initiative, Penn aims to become a leader in data-driven approaches that can transform scientific discovery, engineering research, and technological innovation.
When Delphi-Facebook and the U.S. Census Bureau provided estimates of COVID-19 vaccine uptake last spring, their weekly reports drew on responses from as many as 250,000 people.
The data sets boasted statistically tiny margins of error, raising confidence that the numbers were correct. But when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported actual vaccination rates, the two polls were off — by a lot. By the end of May, the Delphi-Facebook study had overestimated vaccine uptake by 17 percentage points — 70 percent versus 53 percent, according to the CDC — and the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey had done the same by 14 percentage points.
A comparative analysis by statisticians and political scientists from Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford universities concludes that the surveys fell victim to the “big data paradox,” a mathematical tendency of big data sets to minimize one type of error — due to small sample size — but magnify another that tends to get less attention: flaws linked to systematic biases that make the sample a poor representation of the larger population.
The big data paradox was identified and coined by one of the study’s authors, Harvard’s Xiao-Li Meng, the Whipple V.N. Jones Professor of Statistics, in his 2018 analysis of polling during the 2016 presidential election. Famous for predicting a Hillary Clinton victory, the polls were skewed by “nonresponse bias,” which in this case was the tendency of Trump voters to either not respond or define themselves as “undecided.”
Yale University, Jackson Institute for Global Affairs
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The Jackson Institute for Global Affairs announced today that it will establish the Schmidt Program on Artificial Intelligence, Emerging Technologies, and National Power. A signature new initiative of International Security Studies (ISS), the Schmidt Program will examine how advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have the potential to alter the fundamental building blocks of world order.
The Schmidt Program was made possible by a $15.3 million gift from the Schwab Charitable Fund through the generosity of Eric and Wendy Schmidt, and by recommendation of Schmidt Futures.
The Schmidt Program will foster research and teaching at Jackson that spans the disciplines of computer science, data science, economics, engineering, history, international relations, law, philosophy, physics, and political science.
The Tepper School of Business will offer a new, full-time resident MSBA degree beginning fall 2022.
The Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University already offers a part-time, online Master’s of Science in Business Analytics, mostly to mid-career professionals looking to deepen their analytical skills and move into senior positions. The two-year program boasts an 89% success rate of students either earning a promotion or finding a new job by graduation. They also earned an average of 21% more than their previous salaries.
Now, the Tepper School is expanding that program for more recent college graduates. It recently announced a new full-time, in-person MSBA that will take nine months to complete. The school is now accepting applications for fall 2022.
The University of Connecticut board of trustees Wednesday morning unanimously approved offering a new Master of Science program in data science that will debut next fall.
The academic affairs committee endorsed the idea and referred it to the university’s full board, which approved it.
The program is aimed at both domestic and international students who have an interest in applied data science and for working professionals looking for a career as a data scientist.
574 forecasters failed to predict what worked
TODAY our results are out in @Nature
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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.
When learning R, it can be tough to figure out how to apply what you’ve learned to your own data. We often learn general skills that are helpful for manipulating our data, but things aren’t always so simple when it comes to your own analysis. Sometimes, we have very specific problems that we need to address but don’t know how.
In this blog post, I’m going to describe a few R forums that are particularly useful when you need specific help with your own project.
A team at UC Riverside led by computer science assistant professor Ahmed Eldawy is collaborating with researchers at Stanford University and Vanderbilt University to develop a dataset that uses data science to study the spread of wildfires. The dataset can be used to simulate the spread of wildfires to help firefighters plan emergency response and conduct evacuation. It can also help simulate how fires might spread in the near future under the effects of deforestation and climate change, and aid risk assessment and planning of new infrastructure development.
The open-source dataset, named WildfireDB, contains over 17 million data points that capture how fires have spread in the contiguous United States over the last decade. The dataset can be used to train machine learning models to predict the spread of wildfires.
