NYU Data Science newsletter – May 14, 2015

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Artificial intelligence is creeping into our everyday lives through technology like check-scanning machines and GPS navigation. How far away are we from making intelligent machines that actually have minds of their own? Hari Sreenivasan reports on the ethical considerations of artificial intelligence as part of our Breakthroughs series.

University of Washington Medical Center will be one of IBM Watson Health’s clinical collaborators in applying Watson to accelerate patient DNA analysis and to personalize treatment options for cancer patients. Watson will help clinicians rapidly sift through extensive data on a patient’s genetic profile, then will provide comprehensive information on cancer-causing mutations. Watson will gather pertinent information from published medical and scientific studies to suggest treatment options apropos of the patient’s individual case.

After a bit of a hiatus from posting here about my ongoing work on the future of urban science, which is being supported by the MacArthur Foundation and the Knight Foundation, I’m going to pickup the pace over the next few weeks and share a few things from a major report that is coming together which attempts to lay out the global landscape of new research organizations working in this space.

We call this project “Cities of Data”, and it focuses on the boom in new academic groups that have popped up in the last five years to pursue research and education in what is variously called urban informatics or urban science.

InsightSquared, Paxata, Trifacta, Cloudera, Birst, Sumo Logic, Gainsight, Google, Ayasdi and Visier are the most recommended big data and business analytics companies by employees to friends.

These and other insights are from an analysis completed today comparing Glassdoor ratings by the companies listed in the latest Computer Reseller News Big Data 100.

“What is this a picture of?” Humans can usually answer such questions instantly, but in the past it’s always seemed out of reach for computers to do this. For nearly 40 years I’ve been sure computers would eventually get there—but I’ve wondered when.

I’ve built systems that give computers all sorts of intelligence, much of it far beyond the human level. And for a long time we’ve been integrating all that intelligence into the Wolfram Language.

Now I’m excited to be able to say that we’ve reached a milestone: there’s finally a function called ImageIdentify built into the Wolfram Language that lets you ask, “What is this a picture of?”—and get an answer.

… virtually every aspect of designing faster computers consumes more electricity and generates more heat. Computer engineers now believe that sometime between 2020 and 2023 is a likely arrival date for the next generation of supercomputers.

But Krishna Palem, a computer scientist at Rice University, believes he has found a shortcut.

He has been stirring debate among computer architects by arguing that a counterintuitive computer design approach — one that he originally proposed to give smartphones longer battery life — can also be used to build faster and less power-hungry supercomputers.

The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence has established a new startup incubator at its offices in Seattle, recruiting two high-level researchers who will try to develop technologies in the emerging field.

Joining the Institute’s new incubator program are Prismatic co-founder Aria Haghighi and Johns Hopkins University PhD graduate Xuchen Yao.

“We are quickly building an element of the Seattle tech ecosystem, and we’ve identified cutting-edge folks who are startup minded,” said Oren Etzioni, the former University of Washington computer science professor who now leads the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

The National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) will host a nine-day short course August 19–28, 2015 covering basic principles of using Bayesian models to gain insight from data.

Application Deadline: May 29

The symposium will feature a series of invited presentations by leading data scientists covering visualization in data science. In addition, there will be short paper presentations and a poster session.

Deadline for Submission of Short Papers (4-6 pages) and Posters: Wednesday, July 1