NYU Data Science newsletter – August 4, 2015

GROUP CURATION: N/A

“What’s really going on at Square?” … The industry got part of the answer to this confusion on Friday when reports surfaced that Square had confidentially filed to make a public offering. As Bloomberg reported, Square filed to go public under the JOBS Act, which allows companies with less than $1 billion in revenue to privately file for an IPO. Sources familiar with the company’s plans say that Square expects its IPO to take place this fall but has the option to delay it.

The rich, diverse, free web that I loved?—?and spent years in an Iranian jail for?—?is dying.
Why is nobody stopping it?

IBM’s data crunching service for the healthcare industry, Watson Health, now counts CVS Health as a partner.

The giant pharmacy chain now joins the ranks of other Watson Health partners, including Apple, Johnson & Johnson, and Medtronic, which are using Watson to build their own healthcare services on top of.

Tinderbox is a software uses machine learning and image recognition to automate Tinder, a popular app for single meetings. The author describes his experience and feedback until it started to work too well.

The Internet of Things — the vision of a world brimming with communicating sensors and digital smarts — occupies the peak of Gartner’s most recent “hype cycle.” And a report released two months ago by the McKinsey Global Institute laid out the potential multitrillion-dollar payoff from the emerging technology.

At a two-day workshop last week in San Jose, Calif., hosted by the National Science Foundation and the National Consortium for Data Science, a few dozen academics, corporate technologists and government officials met and mostly wrestled with the thorny technical and policy issues that must be addressed if the potential of the Internet of Things is to be realized. They were working to come up with a research agenda to make practical progress on challenges like security, privacy and standards. A glimpse of the looming security concerns came two weeks ago, when Fiat Chrysler recalled 1.4 million vehicles after two researchers hacked into a Jeep Cherokee and showed they could remotely control its engine, brakes and steering.

I recently interviewed Hadley Wickham the creator of Ggplot2 and a famous R Stats person. He works for RStudio and his job is to work on Open Source software aimed at Data Geeks. Hadley is famous for his contributions to Data Science tooling and inspires a lot of other languages! I include some light edits.

1. What project have you worked on do you wish you could go back to, and do better? ggplot2! ggplot2 is such a heavily used package, and I knew so little about R programming when I wrote it. It works (mostly) and I love it, but the internals are pretty hairy. Even I don’t understand how a lot of works these days. Fortunately, I’ve had the opportunity to spend some more time on it lately, as I’ve been working on the 2nd edition of the ggplot2 book.

The Joint Statistics Meetings starting August 8 is the biggest meetup for statisticians in the world. Navigating the sheer quantity of interesting talks is challenging – there can be up to 50 sessions going on at a time!

To prepare for Seattle, we asked RStudio’s Chief Data Scientist Hadley Wickham for his top session picks. Here are 9 talks, admittedly biased towards R, graphics, and education, that really interested him and might interest you, too.

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) acquired its first artworks in 1929, the year it was established. Today, the Museum’s evolving collection contains almost 200,000 works from around the world spanning the last 150 years. The collection includes an ever-expanding range of visual expression, including painting, sculpture, printmaking, drawing, photography, architecture, design, film, and media and performance art. … At this time, the data is available in CSV format, encoded in UTF-8. While UTF-8 is the standard for multilingual character encodings, it is not correctly interpreted by Excel on a Mac. Users of Excel on a Mac can convert the UTF-8 to UTF-16 so the file can be imported correctly.

Recently named NYU Center for Data Science Professor of the Year, CDS Adjunct Associate Professor David Rosenberg is currently Chief Scientist of YP Mobile Labs at YP and a former Chief Scientist at Sense Networks (acquired by YP in 2014). Dr. Rosenberg specializes in machine learning, artificial intelligence, predictive analytics and statistical modeling.

Dr. Rosenberg earned his Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from Yale University, his Master of Science degree in applied math (computer science focus) from Harvard University, and his Ph.D. in statistics from the University of California, Berkeley. During this year’s spring semester, he taught the CDS course “Machine Learning and Computational Statistics,” which he will again offer in Spring 2016.