NYU Data Science newsletter – October 15, 2015

GROUP CURATION: N/A

The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently announced a round of awards to support interdisciplinary cybersecurity research, including a $1.2 million grant whose recipients include Jacobs Institute and Cornell Tech Professors Ari Juels and Tom Ristenpart and University of Florida Professor Tom Shrimpton. The research team will use this award to build better protections for passwords using a technique called “honey encryption,” to create more robust censorship-evasion tools, and to devise techniques for making security systems more resilient to error.

The role of data and analytics in business continues to grow. To make sense of their plethora of data, businesses are looking to data scientists for help. Job site, indeed.com, shows a continued growth in “data scientist” positions. To better understand the field of data science, we studied hundreds of data professionals.

In that study, we found that data scientists are not created equal. That is, data professionals differ with respect to the skills they possess. For example, some professionals are proficient in statistical and mathematical skills while others are proficient in computer science skills. Still others have a strong business acumen. In the current analysis, I want to determine the breadth of talent that data professionals possess to better understand the possibility of finding a single data scientist who is skilled in all areas.

An algorithm can creatively reimagine the Mona Lisa.

Now what?

In the opening keynote of the Grace Hopper Women in Computing Conference 2015 in Houston, Texas, Fast Forward Labs CEO Hilary Mason talked about the burgeoning world of data science and machine intelligence, and several of the considerations for how they will affect the future.

Users of dating apps have expressed concerns about their privacy after their matches appeared as “suggested friends” on Facebook.

… as banks seek further growth, one of the primary means for doing so is through better integration of the front-, middle- and back-office data and insights. Fortunately, advances in cloud computing, machine learning and data analytics are making it easier than ever to tear down the walls dividing the data and unlock the business value that’s hiding inside.

Exhibit A of this technology is the recent release of the Microsoft Azure IoT Suite, Cortana Analytics Suite and Azure Data Lake, all part of the Microsoft Data Platform. With the collective power of these and other offerings, financial services firms gain access to a comprehensive, state-of-the-art data analytics solution that addresses all of their needs, from unifying and managing disparate data stores, to analyzing, computing and creating powerful visualizations that can be more securely collaborated upon across the company

Across Harvard, programs and researchers are mining vast quantities of computerized information, sometimes revolutionizing their fields in the process.

Sometimes the best way to stop a bad machine is with a lot of good machines.

Several companies are applying the techniques of artificial intelligence, or A.I., to the world of security, and they are using a whole bunch of machines strung together in so-called cloud computing networks to do it.

In 2010, I posted a vial of my finest spit to the genetic-testing company 23andme. In return, I got to see what my genes reveal about my ancestry, how they affect my risk of diseases or my responses to medical drugs, and even what they say about the texture of my earwax. (It’s dry.) 23andme now has around a million users, as do other similar companies like Ancestry.com.

But these communities are largely separated from one another, a situation that frustrated Yaniv Erlich from the New York Genome Center and Columbia University. “Tens of millions of people will soon have access to their genomes,” he says. “Are we just going to let these data sit in silos, or can we partner with these large communities to enable some really large science? That’s why we developed DNA.LAND.”

Video thumbnails are often the first things viewers see when they look for something interesting to watch. A strong, vibrant, and relevant thumbnail draws attention, giving viewers a quick preview of the content of the video, and helps them to find content more easily. Better thumbnails lead to more clicks and views for video creators.

Inspired by the recent remarkable advances of deep neural networks (DNNs) in computer vision, such as image and video classification, our team has recently launched an improved automatic YouTube “thumbnailer” in order to help creators showcase their video content.

Two CSS Junior Scientific Awards have been awarded to Bruno Gonçalves, Faculty Member at the Centre Physique Théorique of the Aix­ Marseille Université (for the “significant and crucial contributions to the study of human social behavior from large­scale online attention and behavioral data”) and to Chiara Poletto, Researcher at the INSERM – Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale in Paris (who “has gone from a theoretical physics background to a career in epidemiology, showing a true example of interdisciplinary thinking and using complex systems methods to provide useful information to managing of public health issues”).