NYU Data Science newsletter – June 23, 2015

GROUP CURATION: N/A

Algorithmic wizardry is easier to teach and easier to blog about than organizational skill, so we teach and blog about it instead. A one-hour class, or a blog post, can showcase a clever algorithm. But how do you present a clever bit of organization?

The Nature Index is a unique database that tracks affiliations in research publications in a select group of scientific journals. The Index can provide an indicator of high-quality research contributions from institutions, countries, regions and disciplines. In this Global Nature Index supplement, we present a snapshot of the Index for the calendar year 2014.

Personalized or precision medicine maintains that medical care and public health will be radically transformed by prevention and treatment programs more closely targeted to the individual patient. These interventions will be developed by sequencing more genomes, creating bigger biobanks, and linking biological information to health data in electronic medical records (EMRs) or obtained by monitoring technologies. Yet the assumptions underpinning personalized medicine have largely escaped questioning. In this Viewpoint, we seek to stimulate a more balanced debate by posing 7 questions for the advocates of personalized medicine.

Thanks to the latest advances in computer vision, we now have machines that can pick you out of a line-up. But what if your face is hidden from view?

An experimental algorithm out of Facebook’s artificial intelligence lab can recognise people in photographs even when it can’t see their faces. Instead it looks for other unique characteristics like your hairdo, clothing, body shape and pose.

CAN it ever be ethical for companies or governments to experiment on their employees, customers or citizens without their consent?

The conventional answer — of course not! — animated public outrage last year after Facebook published a study in which it manipulated how much emotional content more than half a million of its users saw. Similar indignation followed the revelation by the dating site OkCupid that, as an experiment, it briefly told some pairs of users that they were good matches when its algorithm had predicted otherwise.

But this outrage is misguided. Indeed, we believe that it is based on a kind of moral illusion.

… Officials in New Orleans were well aware of the risks posed in homes without smoke detectors, and had a program to give them free to anyone who asked. But that clearly was not working. So after the Broadmoor fire, city officials decided to try to a new approach — targeted outreach to install smoke detectors in the homes most at risk.

To help pick the homes for the installation, they turned to a New York start-up, Enigma.io, a specialist in the field of open data, which involves collecting, curating and mining public government information for insights.

In March 2015, database pioneer Michael Stonebraker was awarded the 2014 ACM Turing Award “for fundamental contributions to the concepts and practices underlying modern database systems.” In this week’s Radar Podcast, O’Reilly’s Mike Hendrickson sits down with Stonebraker to talk about winning the award, the future of data science, and the importance — and difficulty — of data curation. [audio, 31:54]

In this paper we introduce a generative parametric model capable of producing high quality samples of natural images. Our approach uses a cascade of convolutional networks within a Laplacian pyramid framework to generate images in a coarse-to-fine fashion. At each level of the pyramid, a separate generative convnet model is trained using the Generative Adversarial Nets (GAN) approach (Goodfellow et al.). Samples drawn from our model are of significantly higher quality than alternate approaches. In a quantitative assessment by human evaluators, our CIFAR10 samples were mistaken for real images around 40% of the time, compared to 10% for samples drawn from a GAN baseline model. We also show samples from models trained on the higher resolution images of the LSUN scene dataset.

… New York University psychological scientist John Jost and his colleagues decided to conduct a massive Twitter analysis in order to address these important questions. Making use of an innovative method, they estimated the ideological preferences for 3.8 million Twitter users. Then, analyzing 150 million tweets concerning 12 political and non-political issues, they explored whether online communication is more conversational or more polarizing.

First, former presidential candidate and longtime consumer advocate, Ralph Nader. His new book, “Return To Sender: Unanswered Letters to the President, 2003-2014” reveals Nader’s letters on a host of issues over the years, addressed to two presidents.

Then, the coming robot revolution. To explain the potential and the limits of thinking computers, Facebook’s first director of artificial intelligence research, Yann Lecun.