NYU Data Science newsletter – October 14, 2015

GROUP CURATION: N/A

Team Cat & Dog took first place in the Grasp-and-Lift EEG Detection competition ahead of 378 other teams. The pair also comprised 2/3 of the first place team from another recent EEG focused competition on Kaggle, BCI Challenge @ NER 2015. Domain knowledge and a strong collaborative relationship have made Alexandre Barachant (aka Cat) and Rafa? Cyco? (aka Dog) successful in both competitions.

In this blog, they share best practices for working with EEG data, as well as the tools and code that took them to the top of the Grasp-and-Lift EEG Detection leaderboard. They also tip their hat to all the Kagglers who shared scripts during the competition. The code shared and models developed during this challenge were huge contributions to the WAY Consortium’s work in developing prosthetic devices for patients who have lost hand function due to neurological disabilities or amputation.

… Orchestra is an Apache-Licensed workflow management system. Orchestra is our stab at how software-defined work may look in the future. Through Orchestra, users define workflows that combine automation and coordination of expert teams to produce complex creative and analytical projects.

To understand how Orchestra can be used, we’ve thought through a few scenarios. For example, the newsroom brings together folks like reporters, photographers, and editors of various types. In our documentation, we’ve put together an example workflow through which all of these different types of experts work together on a story. More experienced experts mentor less experienced ones, and various tasks like image cropping and resizing are completed automatically

I wanted to share a general framework for thinking about the evolution of a data-driven company, based on my own experiences and conversations with other analytics leaders.

The framework is based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs for human growth.

Amazon AWS for the enterprise has become such the mainstay that Mike Dauber, general partner of early stage venture capital fund Amplify Partners, said that it’s practically become the new OS.

“If you’re starting a company, you need to look at how are you building on top of Amazon and how you partner with the ecosystem,” Dauber said. “You don’t want to run headlong into it. There’s still a place for Google Cloud and [Microsoft] Azure, but Amazon is far in the lead.”

From the scythe to the steam engine, we’ve always used technology to control the world around us. But our ability to shape our environment has been transformed by one machine more than any other – the computer.

What makes computers so powerful is the code they run. It’s incredibly flexible, controlling games one moment and spaceships the next. It came to do this thanks to individual genius, invention driven by necessity, and the power of human imagination.

The School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley invites applications for a full-time, tenure-track faculty position at the assistant-professor level, with an expected start date of July 1, 2016, in the area of Human-Centered Data Science.

This work is emerging in fields such as HCI, CSCW, human computation, and other areas at the intersection of social science and technology.

Facebook is currently working on an artificial intelligence-based object recognition tool to help blind users get an idea of what’s in all of the photos people share on Facebook. King, who started at the company just three months ago, recently showed me how he uses a screen reader to navigate Facebook.

“My view of the page is totally sequential,” King explained to me. “I can’t see the whole thing at one time. I see a little piece.”

… According to Google’s Self-Driving Car Project website, sensors on the car can detect objects up to two football fields away, including people, vehicles, construction zones, birds, cyclists, and more.

But the data collected by each vehicle does more than allow it to respond in the moment. All of the data each car collects is used to constantly improve the software, so that all cars can learn from one vehicle’s experience.

UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center brings together humanists and neuroscientists to explore the workings of the brain.

Computer science has for the first time become the most popular major for female students at Stanford University, a hopeful sign for those trying to build up the thin ranks of women in the technology field.

Based on preliminary declarations by upper-class students, about 214 women are majoring in computer science, accounting for about 30 percent of majors in that department, the California-based university told Reuters on Friday.

The central contribution of Angus Deaton, the latest winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics, has been to shift the gaze of his fellow economists beyond measures of income, to broader measures of well-being.

Much of his research has focused on consumption — measures of the food people eat, the condition of their housing, and the services they consume. And he has been a trailblazer in shifting the attention of economists away from the behavior of economywide aggregates such as gross domestic product, and toward the analysis of individual households.

This is also the first Nobel to acknowledge explicitly the increasingly empirical nature of modern economic research.

I enjoyed reading Andrej Karpathy’s The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks lately – it’s got some fascinating examples and some good explanations. I’ve been playing around with the char-rnn code from that post, and I want to share some of my experiments.