NYU Data Science newsletter – August 19, 2015

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Q: You invented ways to put more computing power behind deep learning. Now you lead a lab in Silicon Valley for the Chinese search company Baidu. Why did it need a lab there?

A: They spin up new projects very fast. It’s partly driven by the dynamism in China—tech companies have to go quickly from having nothing to having state-of-the-art something. My lab’s mission is to create technology that will have an impact on at least 100 million people; it is intended to move rapidly, like a startup. We’re recruiting AI researchers and many people in Silicon Valley who have amazing skills from working on products and haven’t thought they could use that to make progress on artificial intelligence.

You could call “wellness” — healthy lifestyle, better diet — the art of not getting sick. Dr. Lee Hood thinks a lot about this so-called art. He’s a pioneer in the study of the human genome, having contributed to the creation of five instruments critical for modern genetics.

Hood is now the chair of the scientific advisory board of a company he helped create called Arivale, which just raised $36 million dollars in venture capital to assess and promote wellness at the genetic and molecular levels.

He thinks physicians should embrace this new technology, as it is a growing market that he believes will likely develop in parallel to traditional medicine. “I think in a 10-to-15-year period, the scientific wellness industry will far exceed market cap of the current disease industry or the healthcare industry,” Hood says. [audio, 2:48]

Datameer, the only proven big data analytics platform for everyone, today announced it has closed a $40 million round of financing. ST Telemedia (STT) led the round, joined by Top Tier Capital Partners (TTCP) and participation from Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers (KCPB), Redpoint, Next World Capital, Software AG and Citi Ventures. These funds more than double Datameer’s previous investments to over $76 million.

Datameer will use the additional capital to strategically develop its teams across all business units and to accelerate its global expansion. Nikhil Eapen, chief strategy & investment officer and executive vice president with ST Telemedia, will also join Datameer’s board, bringing with him extensive knowledge of the communications, media and technology landscape in Asia.

… For a country like the United States, which was the leader for decades in numerical weather prediction modeling and weather systems operation, investments like these dwindled due to lack of leadership, funding, and misalignment with the research community—all of which compounded in some spectacular failures. The most obvious sign of reduced investments in critical forecasting infrastructure is in the computing investments, argues Dr. Cliff Mass, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington, and prolific writer on all things weather-related, including some detailed pieces on the need for sustained supercomputing investments for global and regional weather prediction and how the U.S. edge has dulled.

Mass says that until three years ago, the United States had fallen so far behind in its computational investments in weather forecasting that it had one-tenth the computing power of the European center. This was an embarrassing place to be overall, but it came to full light during Hurricane Sandy when the Europeans saw the storm, but the U.S. models, which were much lower-resolution, could not come to the same conclusions.

Hi community,

I am working on a project where I am using the Twitter API through the Tweepy API. Since I am needing to consume more data than the rate limits allow, I am creating multiple twitter developer accounts and using the different sets of credentials (consumer and access tokens) in parallel.

It is an absolute pain to create many new emails addresses and fake temporary phone numbers.

Any suggestions?

The creation of a new activity in universities to support RDM [research data management], creates a number of new areas of work. Some seem to relate to existing roles; some are wholly new. There is plenty of evidence that different institutions organise this work quite differently. But we can probably outline what the main roles are. The question is: how is each role going to be filled?

From talking to people and reading I suggest the table below gives a rough idea of the main areas of activity. I have indicated which professional services might be involved in each.

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston now has five years of data on what happens when patients have access to their doctor’s notes. And from that data, it appears that not only is the arrangement beneficial to patients, but also to doctors — and to the accuracy and quality of the notes.

Researchers at the hospital, led by Dr. Sigall Bell, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, recently published a study in The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety looking back at five years of notes, encompassing 100 doctors and more than 2,000 patients.

Enterprises that are capable of gaining a unified view of their customer data can achieve added business enhancements and user opportunities. Capturing customer data, however, can be a difficult task, as most systems rely on traditional “top-down” approaches to standardizing data. In a recent O’Reilly webcast, Integrating Customer Data at Scale, Tamr field engineer Alan Wagner hosts a Q&A session with Matt Stevens, the general manager at Toyota Motor Europe, to demonstrate how a leading enterprise uses a third-generation system like Tamr to simplify the process of unifying customer data.

In the webcast, Stevens explains how Toyota Motor Europe has gained a 360-degree view of their customers through the Tamr Data Unification Platform, which takes a machine learning and expert-sourcing “human guided workflow” approach to data unification. Wagner provides a demo of the Tamr platform, applied within a Salesforce application, to demonstrate the ability to capture and unify customer data. [audio, 42:10]

New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) teamed up with the National League of Cities (NLC) to host the Data Analytics and City Services Summit. Held August 6-7 in New York City, this first-of-its-kind event brought together thought leaders with chief data officers and performance management staff from 12 cities across the nation to accelerate city data analytics efforts and develop methods to improve decision-making and operational efficiency.

“Twelve cities came together to share ideas, best practices and lessons learnt on using data and analytics to improve cities,” said Tom Schenk, chief data officer for the City of Chicago. “When we share these ideas, we can be sure to implement the best ideas at the lowest cost. It is important that the nascent chief data officers, directors of analytics, performance managers and others who are leading the charge for data-driven decisions come together as a community.”