NYU Data Science newsletter – October 1, 2015

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Scientists first sequenced the human genome in 2000. That experiment, of course, wasn’t representative of everybody; it was just one sequence, stitched together from the DNA of a handful of volunteers. Consider the diversity of humankind. There was no way it could be encompassed by this small-scale “human genome” project.

That’s why, in 2010, an international consortium of hundreds of scientists announced a new plan: They were going to sequence the genomes of 2,500 people from all over the world. Five years later, the group is releasing the last batch of results from the un-aptly named 1,000 Genomes Project, quantifying how people’s DNA vary from one another. The scientists are publishing their data freely, which future researchers could use to study inherited diseases.

Asserting that the utmost precaution was being taken to safeguard the future of humanity, leading scientists and engineers said Tuesday that they were confident in their ability to program artificially intelligent machines to be lenient slave masters. [satire]

Rendering and animating a lot of objects while maintaining the interactivity we want to deliver is one challenge we sometimes face as creators of data visualizations. Dominikus Baur explores the axis of performance vs. developer pain in his OpenVis 2015 talk. In summary, higher level APIs such as the DOM and SVG offer a rich API for interaction but have a lower performance ceiling when compared to rendering APIs such as Canvas or WebGL. However, when we use the more performant rendering technologies, all the burden of handling interaction falls on the creators’ shoulders.

A recent conversation around this trade-off with another developer brought to mind a technique for implementing mouse interaction when using HTML5 Canvas. In this post, I will demonstrate this technique and provide some code snippets you can adapt to your visualizations if you are in a similar situation where you want to render lots of points in a visualization without sacrificing performance.

As you might have seen from our previous blogposts, BinaryEdge gathers many types of data from multiple sources and tries to apply different methodologies for analysis.

Today, we are going to take a look at the exposure of the VNC service to the internet and how we use Data Science to help us identify points of interest on screenshots and images.

For decades, venture capital firms followed a standard playbook: target promising startups as they hit their stride and invest up to $10 million or so for a series A round. But the rules were changing in 2009, when Sequoia Capital helped raise $2 million for use by Y Combinator, a seed funder gaining a high-profile reputation for making small $20,000 bets on startups such as Dropbox and Scribd, both of which were conceived of by college kids.

To identify other promising investments, VCs began paying attention to the earliest point in the tech life cycle: the moment when company founders were still developing ideas in dorm rooms.

The Rock Health Summit in San Francisco draws some of the biggest names in technology and health care, including geneticist Craig Venter, Chief Data Scientist at the White House DJ Patil and Fitbit CEO James Park. Rock Health is a fund for early-stage digital health startups. … In case you’re missing it, here are some of the highlights.

You can already rate restaurants, hotels, movies, college classes, government agencies and bowel movements online.

So the most surprising thing about Peeple — basically Yelp, but for humans — may be the fact that no one has yet had the gall to launch something like it.

Microsoft announced the third installment of its Microsoft Ventures Seattle Accelerator on Wednesday, this time focusing on data science and machine learning.

In a world where we’re creating more data then ever before and 90 percent of it is unstructured, the company says we’re about to enter a heyday for data-focused startups.

And Microsoft wants to be there to help them get off the ground.

… many companies that do not have a strict data science focus are now taking on employees in the data science area as data becomes intrinsically linked with all facets of business.

Below are listed just some of the top employers hiring for data science roles right now.

From transgender equality to precision medicine, U.S. Chief Data Scientist DJ Patil has a plan for making data work for us.

Last week, our software paper on khmer 2.0 was published on F1000Research. We intend this paper to be a citation marker, but it also represents and recognizes some significant software engineering work done between khmer 1.x and khmer 2.0.

As part of the paper process, we offered authorship to everyone who has contributed to the khmer git repository – anyone who contributed to the repo was invited to sign on to the paper.

A major advance reveals deep connections between the classes of problems that computers can — and can’t — possibly do.

The spread of an infection on a real-world social network is determined by the interplay of two processes – the dynamics of the network, whose structure changes over time according to the encounters between individuals, and the dynamics on the network, whose nodes can infect each other after an encounter. Physical encounter is the most common vehicle for the spread of infectious diseases, but detailed information about said encounters is often unavailable because expensive, unpractical to collect or privacy sensitive. The present work asks whether the friendship ties between the individuals in a social network successfully predict who is at risk. Using a dataset from a popular online review service, we build a time-varying network that is a proxy of physical encounter between users and a static network based on their reported friendship. Through computer simulation, we compare infection processes on the resulting networks and show that friendship provides a poor identification of the individuals at risk if the infection is driven by physical encounter. Our analyses suggest that such limit is not due to the randomness of the infection process, but to the structural differences of the two networks. In addition, we argue that our results are not driven by the static nature of the friendship network as opposed to the time-varying nature of the encounter network. In contrast to the macroscopic similarity between processes spreading on different networks – confirmed by our simulations, the differences in local connectivity determined by the two definitions of edges result in striking differences between the dynamics at a microscopic level, preventing the identification of the nodes at risk.

The Islamic State is an Internet phenomenon as much as a military one. Counteracting it will require better tactics on the battlefield of social media.

In keeping with this year’s theme of “My Day Job: Politics and Pedagogy in Academia,” the Digital Sociology Mini-Conference seeks papers that address the many digital ways of knowing, particularly as those impinge on the work we do as scholars, both within and outside the academy. We seek abstracts, and wholly constituted panels, on a wide range of topics.

Deadline for Submissions: Monday, October 19