NYU Data Science newsletter – May 4, 2015

GROUP CURATION: N/A

The WebDataCommons project extracts the largest publicly available hyperlink graph, large product-, address-, recipe-, and review corpora, as well as millions of HTML tables from the Common Crawl web corpus and provides the extracted data for public download.

Nando de Freitas taught a deep learning course at the University of Oxford. All of the videos are freely available. The playlist is a bit out of order, but starting with Lecture 1 is probably the best technique. [video, 56:04]

An evolving portfolio of REST APIs and SDKs enabling developers to easily add intelligent services into their solutions to leverage the power of Microsoft’s natural data understanding.

I graduated from Stanford in the late 1980s with a dual degree in engineering and economics, and, like so many others of my day, I was drawn to Wall Street. Reaganomics was in full swing, Bloomberg terminals were still in their early days and popular culture was full of colorful characters like Gordon Gekko. … Today, Silicon Valley is the hottest place for quants to be – though people with this skill set are often referred to now as data scientists. A similar confluence of factors — data, technology and algorithms — has combined to enable a new class of transformational opportunities. These opportunities are not limited to just financial services; they are showing up in every sector of the economy.

In January, US President Barack Obama announced a US$215-million national Precision Medicine Initiative. This includes, among other things, the establishment of a national database of the genetic and other data of one million people in the United States. … Studies that focus on a single person — known as N-of-1 trials — will be a crucial part of the mix. Physicians have long done these in an ad hoc way. For instance, a doctor may prescribe one drug for hypertension and monitor its effect on a person’s blood pressure before trying a different one. But few clinicians or researchers have formalized this approach into well-designed trials — usually just a handful of measurements are taken, and only during treatment.

An ambitious effort to replicate 100 research findings in psychology ended last week — and the data look worrying. Results posted online on 24 April, which have not yet been peer-reviewed, suggest that key findings from only 39 of the published studies could be reproduced.

But the situation is more nuanced than the top-line numbers suggest.

Last Friday and Saturday the NY R Conference briefly lit up Manhattan’s Union Square neighborhood as the center of the R world. You may have caught some of the glow on twitter. Jared Lander, volunteers from the New York Open Statistical Programming Meetup along with the staff at Workbench (the conference venue) set the bar pretty darn high for a first time conference.

The list of speakers was impressive (a couple of the presentations approached the sublime), the venue was bright and upscale, the food was good, and some of the best talks ran way over the time limit but somehow the clock slowed down to sync to the schedule.