NYU Data Science newsletter – June 16, 2015

GROUP CURATION: N/A

MetricsGraphics.js is a library optimized for visualizing and laying out time-series data. At under 60KB (minified), it provides a simple way to produce common types of graphics in a principled and consistent way. The library currently supports line charts, scatterplots, histograms, bar charts and data tables, as well as features like rug plots and basic linear regression.

For anyone who works with financial data and has access to a Bloomberg terminal, there is a new R package to interface to Bloomberg data services: RBlpapi. (If you had searched for an R connection to Bloomberg you wouldn’t have found this one — Bloomberg is happy to have software that connects to its public API, but not to use its name, apparently.)

… While the level of maths and the depth of implementation of mathematical analyses can look scary, I believe there is still one underestimated but critical element in the analysis pipeline, and that is the learning by people of the learning achieved by the machines.

Today Facebook is launching a new standalone app for exchanging photos with friends, called Moments. The app is available on both iOS and Android today.

The new app syncs to your phone’s camera roll and then uses facial recognition and location to group photos and help you share them with the right friends. You can sync with your friends’ Moments and they can sync with yours, so you have each other’s photos.

Epoxide metabolites frequently cause drug toxicity. A deep convolution network accurately predicts the epoxidation of drug-like molecules. This model may guide efforts to modify drug candidates to be less toxic.

This fireside chat took place at the Deep Learning Summit in San Francisco on 29-30 January 2015. https://www.re-work.co/events/deep-learning- sanfrancisco-2015 Dr. Andrew Ng is Chief Scientist at Baidu. He leads Baidu Research, which comprises three interrelated labs: the Silicon Valley AI Lab, the Institute of Deep Learning and the Big Data Lab. The organization brings together global research talent to work on fundamental technologies in areas such as image recognition and image-based search, speech recognition, natural language processing and semantic intelligence. In addition to his role at Baidu, Dr. Ng a faculty member in Stanford University’s Computer Science department, and Chairman of Coursera, an online education platform that he co-founded. Dr. Ng is the author or co-author of over 100 published papers in machine learning, robotics and related fields. He holds degrees from Carnegie Mellon University, MIT and the University of California, Berkeley. Derrick has been a technology journalist since 2003 and has been covering cloud computing, big data and other emerging IT trends for Gigaom since 2009.

… Anmol Rajpurohit: Q1. What are the typical steps involved in the Discovery process at Netflix, i.e. in helping users find the right content for their taste?

Babcock: Optimizing user discovery of content on Netflix, like many machine learning problems, has two major elements: trying to understand the patterns in the customer’s historical activities, and generalizing those patterns to future behavior.

The first part is where ‘Big Data’ processing, aggregation, and analysis are involved. By logging what content customers play, browse, and search for, we construct a profile of their interests, and perform exploratory analyses to examine which signals are more predictive than others for engagement (e.g., choosing to stream a program). We use promising signals from this analysis to prototype models offline and compare their performance against our current systems in an effort to identify potential hypotheses for improvement.

Data and computation drive our world, often without sufficient critical assessment or accountability. Journalism is adapting responsibly—finding and creating new kinds of stories that respond directly to our new societal condition. Join us for a two-day conference exploring the interface between journalism and computing,
October 2-3 at Columbia University.

Deadline for Call for Papers: Papers must be electronically submitted by Friday, August 7, 2015 at 5pm Pacific Daylight Time.