Data Science newsletter – January 20, 2022

Newsletter features journalism, research papers and tools/software for January 20, 2022

 

Microsoft’s Surface Laptop SE Teardown Video Is a Major Win for Right to Repair

Gizmodo, Phillip Tracy


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When Microsoft released its first Surface devices 10 years ago, people were quick to make comparisons to Apple products not only because of their minimalist aesthetic, but also because they were impossible to repair at home. For years, these machines were so difficult to crack open that attempting to do so was as dangerous as playing Operation blindfolded.

We knew to not even bother with replacing or swapping out parts thanks to third-party repair site iFixit, which methodically tears down products into their individual parts and gives them a repairability score. Microsoft scored ones and zeros for several years, until it eventually listened to enthusiast customers and added an easily accessible SSD door to the Surface Laptop 3. While it stopped short of making its Surface products officially user-upgradeable (self-servicing is done at the risk of voiding warranty), the surprising changes were welcomed.


EFF Asks Appeals Court to Rule DMCA Anti-Circumvention Provisions Violate First Amendment

Electronic Frontier Foundation, Press Release


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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) asked a federal appeals court to block enforcement of onerous copyright rules that violate the First Amendment and criminalize certain speech about technology, preventing researchers, tech innovators, filmmakers, educators, and others from creating and sharing their work.

EFF, with co-counsel Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia yesterday to reverse a district court decision in Green v. DOJ, a lawsuit we filed in 2016 challenging the anti-circumvention and anti-trafficking provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) on behalf of security researcher Matt Green and technologist Andrew “bunnie” Huang. Both are pursuing projects highly beneficial to the public and perfectly lawful except for DMCA’s anti-speech provisions.

These provisions—contained in Section 1201 of the DMCA—make it unlawful for people to get around the software that restricts access to lawfully-purchased copyrighted material, such as films, songs, and the computer code that controls vehicles, devices, and appliances.


John Deere Hit With Class Action Lawsuit for Alleged Tractor Repair MonopolyVICEVICE

VICE, Motherboard, Matthew Gault and Jason Koebler


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A class action lawsuit filed in Chicago has accused John Deere of running an illegal repair monopoly. The lawsuit alleged that John Deere has used software locks and restricted access to repair documentation and tools, making it very difficult for farmers to fix their own agricultural equipment, a problem that Motherboard has documented for years and that lawmakers, the FTC, and even the Biden administration have acknowledged.


Building machines that work for everyone – how diversity of test subjects is a technology blind spot, and what to do about it

The Conversation, Tahira Reid and James Gibert


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As an interdisciplinary researcher who thinks holistically about engineering and design and an expert in dynamics and smart materials with interests in policy, we have examined the lack of inclusion in technology design, the negative consequences and possible solutions.


This crumb-sized camera uses artificial intelligence to get big results

Science News for Students, Kendra Redmond


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Lenses are traditionally made by stacking curved pieces of glass or plastic. A curved surface bends light passing through. How the light bends depends on the curvature. A lens can be a single piece of glass. To bend light in more ways, you can stack several of them together.

[Felix] Heide’s team took a totally different approach. They made a lens from a metasurface. These surfaces are super thin, human-made materials patterned with tiny structures. The structures are so small they’re measured in billionths of a meter (nanometers). Similar but slightly thicker materials are called metamaterials.


He receives grant to improve performance of deep learning models

University of Illinois, School of Information Sciences


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“For example, in fraud detection, the number of known fraudulent transactions is usually very small compared to the total number of transactions, hence the lack of labeled data. Most existing GNN models tend to suffer from such label scarcity. In my new project, we aim to address this issue by leveraging weak supervision or additional information (besides the limited label information), such as labeled data from other related applications and/or access to a domain expert, in order to compensate for the lack of labeled data,” said He.

In addition to fraud detection, areas such as agriculture and cancer diagnosis could also benefit from this research. He’s project will lead to a suite of new models, algorithms, and theories for constructing high-performing GNNs with weak supervision, and for understanding the benefits of weak supervision with respect to the model generalization performance and sample complexity.


Former Google CEO invests in computing help for university scientists

Science, Adrian Cho


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Scientists at universities perform much of the world’s cutting-edge scientific research—often while relying on shaky, homemade computer software written by students and postdocs. Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic initiative founded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Wendy Schmidt, his spouse, hopes to remedy that situation by investing $40 million over the next 5 years to establish a Virtual Institute for Scientific Software, the organization announced today. The institute will help scientists obtain more robust, flexible, and scalable “open-source” software that can be easily shared.

The institute will include centers at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), Johns Hopkins University, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Washington (UW). Each university will hire software engineers who will help meet the needs of scientists, explains Eric Braverman, CEO of Schmidt Futures. “We believe that a network of people developing software will be essential to the onward development of so many areas in the scientific enterprise,” he says.


Census 2020 Gets Its First Challenges

The Pew Charitable Trusts, Stateline, Tim Henderson


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Three small Georgia municipalities are the first to file formal challenges to their 2020 census counts, while some bigger cities are pressuring the U.S. Census Bureau to correct tallies that city officials say came in too low amid the pandemic chaos surrounding the count.

The congressional House Oversight Committee asked the Census Bureau for more information on what could be done to correct apparently undercounted cities such as Detroit, calling for a briefing on the subject by Jan. 27.

In response to complaints about miscounts in college dorms and other institutions, the Census Bureau proposed a review of institutional counts. Jan. 18 was the last day for cities to comment about it.


Deserts, demographics and diet: UW and Stanford researchers reveal findings of nationwide study of the relationship between food environment and healthy eating

University of Washington, Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering


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“Our findings indicate that higher access to grocery stores, lower access to fast food, higher income and college education are independently associated with higher consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables, lower consumption of fast food and soda, and less likelihood of being classified as overweight or obese,” explained lead author Tim Althoff, professor and director of the Behavioral Data Science Group at the Allen School. “While these results probably come as no surprise, until now our ability to gauge the relationship between environment, socioeconomic factors and diet has been challenged by small sample sizes, single locations, and non-uniform design across studies. Different from traditional epidemiological studies, our quasi-experimental methodology enabled us to explore the impact on a nationwide scale and identify which factors matter the most.”

Althoff ‘s involvement in the study dates from when he was a Ph.D. student at Stanford working with professor and senior author Jure Leskovec and fellow student and co-author Hamed Nilforoshan. Together with co-author Dr. Jenna Hua, a former postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University School of Medicine and founder and CEO of Million Marker Wellness, Inc., the team analyzed data from more than 1.1 million users of the MyFitnessPal app — spanning roughly 2.3 billion food entries and encompassing more than 9,800 U.S. zip codes — to gain insights into how factors such as access to grocery stores and fast food, family income level, and educational attainment contribute to people’s food consumption and overall dietary health.


When should someone trust an AI assistant’s predictions? Researchers have created a method to help workers collaborate with artificial intelligence systems.

MIT News


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To help people better understand when to trust an AI “teammate,” MIT researchers created an onboarding technique that guides humans to develop a more accurate understanding of those situations in which a machine makes correct predictions and those in which it makes incorrect predictions.

By showing people how the AI complements their abilities, the training technique could help humans make better decisions or come to conclusions faster when working with AI agents.

“We propose a teaching phase where we gradually introduce the human to this AI model so they can, for themselves, see its weaknesses and strengths,” says Hussein Mozannar, a graduate student in the Social and Engineering Systems doctoral program within the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS).


UT Austin No. 1 in NSF Funding in United States

University of Texas at Austin,UT News


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The University of Texas at Austin is ranked No. 1 among U.S. universities in research financed by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in fiscal year 2020, according to the annual Higher Education Research and Development (HERD) Survey. The university had NSF research expenditures totaling more than $144 million, topping other institutions such as the University of Washington, Texas A&M University and the University of Michigan.


The pandemic’s true death toll: millions more than official counts

Nature, News Feature, David Adam


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Last year’s Day of the Dead marked a grim milestone. On 1 November, the global death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic passed 5 million, official data suggested. It has now reached 5.5 million. But that figure is a significant underestimate. Records of excess mortality — a metric that involves comparing all deaths recorded with those expected to occur — show many more people than this have died in the pandemic.

Working out how many more is a complex research challenge. It is not as simple as just counting up each country’s excess mortality figures. Some official data in this regard are flawed, scientists have found. And more than 100 countries do not collect reliable statistics on expected or actual deaths at all, or do not release them in a timely manner.

Demographers, data scientists and public-health experts are striving to narrow the uncertainties for a global estimate of pandemic deaths. These efforts, from both academics and journalists, use methods ranging from satellite images of cemeteries to door-to-door surveys and machine-learning computer models that try to extrapolate global estimates from available data.


A new use for AI: summarizing scientific research for seven-year-olds

The Verge, James Vincent


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Academic writing often has a reputation for being hard to follow, but what if you could use machine learning to summarize arguments in scientific papers so that even a seven-year-old could understand them? That’s the idea behind tl;dr papers — a project that leverages recent advances in AI language processing to simplify science.


Okay, this thread basically sums up every thought I’ve ever had about data science/AI. Thanks for capturing it so well @nyuaischool !

Twitter, NYU AI School


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“What’s your high and low point in AI research?”

@jonesrooy saw data science as a multi-disciplinary field that allowed her to explore a ‘million interests’ beyond expertise in political science! The shocker was when she once heard execs claim “how could AI possibly go wrong”…


Responsibility Key to Broader Understanding and Acceptance of AI in 2022

Georgia Institute of Technology, College of Computing


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For its What’s Next in Tech for 2022 survey the College turned to its faculty leadership team and advisory board to get their educated opinions on potential technology trends and developments that could make headlines in the next 12 to 18 months.

So, what do the experts think could be some of the big technology stories in 2022?

“Cybersecurity is high on the list due to the significant number of large hacking events that have occurred over the last couple of years. Graphics, augmented reality, and VR are others due to the sudden push to create metaverses,” says Olufisayo Omojokun, director of the College’s Division of Computing Instruction.


Deadlines



Consider joining our CHI workshop (to be held virtually 😉 on Investigating Data Work Across Domains: New Perspectives on the Work of Creating Data.

“WS website w call for participation and more info is here: https://web.asu.edu/dataworkworkshopchi2022/home @najaholten
@MilagrosMiceli
@nicksu28
@ginasue” Deadline for submissions is February 21.

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Pew Research Center; Washington, DC

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