Data Science newsletter – March 19, 2018

Newsletter features journalism, research papers, events, tools/software, and jobs for March 19, 2018

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Data Science News



There’s No Scientific Basis for Race—It’s a Made-Up Label

National Geographic, Elizabeth Kolbert


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Over the past few decades, genetic research has revealed two deep truths about people. The first is that all humans are closely related—more closely related than all chimps, even though there are many more humans around today. Everyone has the same collection of genes, but with the exception of identical twins, everyone has slightly different versions of some of them. Studies of this genetic diversity have allowed scientists to reconstruct a kind of family tree of human populations. That has revealed the second deep truth: In a very real sense, all people alive today are Africans.

Our species, Homo sapiens, evolved in Africa—no one is sure of the exact time or place. The most recent fossil find, from Morocco, suggests that anatomically modern human features began appearing as long as 300,000 years ago. For the next 200,000 years or so, we remained in Africa, but already during that period, groups began to move to different parts of the continent and become isolated from one another—in effect founding new populations.


Facebook’s Role in Data Misuse Sets Off Storms on Two Continents

The New York Times, Matthew Rosenberg and Sheera Frenkel


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Facebook on Sunday faced a backlash about how it protects user data, as American and British lawmakers demanded that it explain how a political data firm with links to President Trump’s 2016 campaign was able to harvest private information from more than 50 million Facebook profiles without the social network’s alerting users.

Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, a Democratic member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, went so far as to press for Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, to appear before the panel to explain what the social network knew about the misuse of its data “to target political advertising and manipulate voters.”

The calls for greater scrutiny followed reports on Saturday in The New York Times and The Observer of London that Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm founded by Stephen K. Bannon and Robert Mercer, the wealthy Republican donor, had used the Facebook data to develop methods that it claimed could identify the personalities of individual American voters and influence their behavior. The firm’s so-called psychographic modeling underpinned its work for the Trump campaign in 2016, though many have questioned the effectiveness of its techniques.


Spotify Will Skip a Lot of IPO Essentials

Bloomberg View, Matt Levine


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What makes Spotify Ltd.’s direct listing different from a regular initial public offering? One difference is that, unlike in a typical IPO, Spotify will not be raising any money: It is listing its stock publicly so that its current shareholders can sell, but Spotify itself won’t sell any stock on the first day. This is a difference from most IPOs, but it is not an essential one. There are plenty of IPOs where the company doesn’t really need the money and insiders sell more shares than the company does. There is a lot of money in private markets, and big tech companies are staying private longer, and the result is that the pressure on companies to go public is increasingly likely to come from private investors who want to cash out rather than from the company’s own need to raise money.

Another difference is that, unlike in an IPO, Spotify won’t have bankers who build a book of demand and then set the initial price of the shares at a level that clears that demand. Instead, it will have a designated market maker on the New York Stock Exchange that will build a book of orders to buy and sell the stock, and then set the initial price of the shares at a level that clears that market.


YouTube Is Realizing It May Be Bad for All of Us

Slate, Will Oremus


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Now a series of controversies is forcing YouTube to address its responsibilities more directly and candidly than it has in the past. At the South by Southwest Interactive conference this week in Austin, Texas, an appearance by YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki made it clear that the platform is finally giving serious thought to the quality and veracity of information its users are getting. It also made clear that the company has a lot of catching up to do.


Senator Wyden Asks NSA Director Nominee the Right Questions

Electronic Frontier Foundation, David Ruiz


from

Lt. Gen. Paul Nakasone, the new nominee to direct the NSA, faced questions Thursday from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence about how he would lead the spy agency. One committee member, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), asked the nominee if he and his agency could avoid the mistakes of the past, and refuse to participate in any new, proposed spying programs that would skirt the law and violate Americans’ constitutional rights.


University of Oregon Erecting a $1-Billion Science Center

The Scientist Magazine®, Jim Daley


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The University of Oregon broke ground on a $1-billion, state-of-the-art science center earlier this month. The Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact will initially concentrate on hiring faculty in the life sciences and computational and data science, according to the university’s website. It will be funded in part by a $500-million commitment by the Nike cofounder, an alumnus of the university, and his wife.

The Knights’ gift is the largest private donation ever given to a public university. Albeit a whopper, the donation leaves the university responsible for $500 million. With the state’s Legislative Assembly having approved $70 million as of March 3, it’s unclear how the university will make up the $430-million shortfall.


Plan approved for Harvard Enterprise Research Campus

Harvard Gazette


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Harvard’s initial regulatory document for an Enterprise Research Campus (ERC), located a stone’s throw from the rising Allston home of the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, was approved by the Boston Planning and Development Agency (BPDA) board on Thursday evening.

The planned development area master plan approved by the city agency includes details for new infrastructure, streets, and open space supporting an initial 900,000-square-foot, mixed-use development of office and lab space, residential units, and a hotel and conference center.

“Harvard’s longstanding commitment to shaping the future by driving the expansion of knowledge and the work of discovery is reflected in our plans for the Enterprise Research Campus,” said Harvard President Drew Faust. “New spaces will encourage and enhance collaboration inside and outside of Harvard, and our students and faculty will have additional avenues to make direct and meaningful contributions to the world. At the same time, we look forward to seeing the ways in which bringing other organizations in close proximity to campus will strengthen the University — and the entire region — in exciting and unexpected ways.”


Yejin Choi: Trying to give AI some common sense

Axios, Alison Snyder


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Artificial intelligence researchers have tried unsuccessfully for decades to give machines the common sense needed to converse with humans and seamlessly navigate our always-changing world. Last month, Paul Allen announced he is investing another $125 million into his Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) in a renewed effort to solve one of the field’s grand challenges.

Axios spoke with Yejin Choi, an AI researcher from the University of Washington and AI2 who studies how machines process and generate language. She talked about how they’re defining common sense, their approach to the problem and how it’s connected to bias.


What to expect when a college assigns students to random roommates

The Conversation, Bruce Sacerdote


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Duke University recently announced that first-year students will now be randomly assigned to their dormmates. The goal is to give students a chance to meet and learn from peers from a completely different background. Is this silly social engineering or smart policy?

Social science research is on Duke’s side. I make this argument based on research by myself and others regarding the outcomes of random dormmate assignments.

First, let’s acknowledge that roommates and dormmates matter for students’ social networks. In one study – titled “How Do Friendships Form?” – David Marmaros and I examined email behavior among thousands of college students. First-year roommates exchange 45 times more emails with each other than with a randomly chosen member of the incoming class.


Democratizing science: Researchers make neuroscience experiments easier to share, reproduce

University of Washington, UW News


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Researchers at the University of Washington have developed a set of tools to make one critical area of big data research — that of our central nervous system — easier to share. In a paper published online March 5 in Nature Communications, the UW team describes an open-access browser they developed to display, analyze and share neurological data collected through a type of magnetic resonance imaging study known as diffusion-weighted MRI.

“There has been a lot of talk among researchers about the replication crisis,” said lead author Jason Yeatman. “But we wanted a tool — ready, widely available and easy to use — that would actually help fight the replication crisis.”


New model reveals forgotten influencers and ‘sleeping beauties’ of science

UChicagoNews


from

For centuries, scientists and scholars have measured the influence of individuals and discoveries through citations, a crude statistic subject to biases, politics and other distortions. A new paper led by the Knowledge Lab at the University of Chicago describes a different way to keep score in science—a more direct measure of how influential ideas ripple out across scholarship and culture.

The computational model throws the spotlight onto work that changed the path of science but has remained underappreciated. The same approach also can be adapted to trace influence in other areas where no culture of citation exists, such as literature or music, said the authors of the paper published last week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“We’re measuring how much scientists’ and scholars’ writings influence discussion of ideas in the future,” said James Evans, director of Knowledge Lab and professor of sociology at UChicago. “Influence is a politicized process; those who get the influence, get the credit, and those who get the credit get the capital to do the next big thing. This is the first time we have a tightened ability to identify influence, and also to diagnose social and strategic influences on citing behavior.”


University of Chicago Professors Reach Tentative Deal

Bloomberg Law, Jaclyn Diaz


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Non-tenured professors at the University of Chicago reached a tentative first contract with the administration late March 15, avoiding a planned strike.

The professors, including full- and part-time faculty, will likely vote on the new contract during the first two weeks in April, Dmitry Kondrashov, a senior lecturer and bargaining team member, told Bloomberg Law.

The contract provisions would establish more consistency in teaching assignments, improved pay, and a pathway to full-time promotion.


Army, Struggling to Get Technology in Soldiers’ Hands, Tries the Unconventional

The New York Times, Helene Cooper


from

So on March 26, top Army leaders will travel to Huntsville, Ala., to announce details of their plan for the Futures Command, which will focus solely on developing new weapons and getting them “downrange” faster. The doors of the command are expected to open by the end of July, and it is supposed to be fully operational a year after that.

The Futures Command, Army leaders say, is part of a movement to get the Army, focused for nearly two decades on fighting Islamist militants in Afghanistan and Iraq, in shape to fight a potential great-power land war.

At the Pentagon, the talk inside the military’s biggest service is all about “modernization” and “readiness,” the favorite children of the Army chief of staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley. Besides speeding up the lengthy procurement process, Army leaders want to get rid of layers of bureaucracy that can eat away at the military’s competitive edge.

And they want to enlist the talents of Americans who may not necessarily see themselves as bound for the military, by locating the Futures Command not at a traditional military base like Fort Hood, Tex., or Fort Sill, Okla., but in a city with easy access to big universities and cutting-edge technological research.

 
Deadlines



Astro Hack Week 2018

Leiden, The Netherlands August 6-10. Deadline to apply is April 30.
 
Moore-Sloan Data Science Environment News



5 minutes with Lisa Hellerstein

Medium, NYU Center for Data Science


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“It’s great to have powerful computers, but unless you have good algorithms, the power isn’t useful.” As part of this month’s Women in Data Science series, we catch up with Lisa Hellerstein, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering

 
Tools & Resources



AI Conference Deadlines

GitHub – abhshkdz


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“Countdowns to top CV/NLP/ML/Robotics/AI conference deadlines To add/update a conference, send in a pull request.”


New open-access data resource aims to bolster collaboration in global infectious disease research

University of Pennsylvania, Penn Today


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Population-based epidemiological studies provide new opportunities for innovation and collaboration among researchers addressing pressing global-health concerns. As with the vast quantities of information emerging in other fields, from economic modeling to weather surveillance to genomic medicine, the technical challenges of sharing and mining gigantic datasets can hamper such efforts. A single epidemiological study—tracking the acquisition of functional resistance to malaria, or the relationship of diarrheal disease to developmental outcomes—may involve tens of thousands of clinical observations on thousands of participants from multiple countries.

To overcome these hurdles, an international team of researchers has launched the Clinical Epidemiology Database, an open-access online resource enabling investigators to maximize the utility and reach of their data and to make optimal use of information released by others.


1 million map contributors!

OpenStreetMap Blog, Harry Wood


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We passed a milestone recently which deserves some celebration: OpenStreetMap has now reached 1 million map contributors. Over the lifetime of our project, 1,000,000 different users have created a user account and made edits to the map! 1 million is a big number, and the growth of our community continues apace.

 
Careers


Postdocs

Postdoc. Researcher in Gait Analysis/Wearable Sensing



Carnegie Mellon University; Pittsburgh, PA

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