NYU Data Science newsletter – October 28, 2015

GROUP CURATION: N/A

Terahertz waves, a frequency band squeezed in between the far infrared and the very short-wave radio frequency region of the electromagnetic spectrum, are not only difficult to create but also difficult to detect. So making a good imager for them is quite a difficult task. Still, in 2012 researchers reported an experimental 1000-pixel CMOS terahertz camera.

The SwissFEL laser team led by Christoph Hauri at the Paul Scherrer Institute near Zurich has now shown that you can use a common megapixel CCD device, as found in electronic cameras or in smartphones, to capture images produced by terahertz waves.

… Somewhere in the foothills of Oregon’s Cascade Mountains, an astrophysicist and his son are working, with the backing of an outspoken billionaire, to bring us just such a glimpse. Armed only with a camera, a laptop and their custom code, they’re working on a system that calls a 3-pointer a swish or a brick, a volleyball serve in or out, a soccer shot over the bar or in the goal, all before the ball completes its flight. If the system works — and that’s a big “if” — it would be equivalent to a minor superpower: flash precognition. The sports fan would become, if only for a second or two, a superhero.

And the system is almost done. This, right here, could be the future of sports.

The Internet is awash in user generated content (UGC)—from blogs, reviews, and Q&As, to wikis, tweets, and Facebook posts. And let’s not forget photo- and video-sharing sites: every second, one hour of video is uploaded to YouTube, and an average of more than 80 million photos get added to Instagram every day. It seems we can’t get enough of posting our own content and reading or viewing other people’s. With technological advances making it ever easier to create UGC, the phenomenon is only getting bigger. Also getting bigger is the task of navigating all that UGC. With so much content to sift through, how can people find quality UCG? Conversely, how can UCG creators attract more eyeballs to their content?

Toshihiko Yamasaki, an associate professor of information and communication engineering at the University of Tokyo, has been researching the challenges posed by the UGC deluge and how people can generate better, more popular content.

U.K. grocer Morrisons, ad-buying behemoth GroupM and other marketers and agencies are testing never-before-available data from cellphone carriers that connects device location and other information with telcos’ real-world files on subscribers. Some services offer real-time heat maps showing the neighborhoods where store visitors go home at night, lists the sites they visited on mobile browsers recently and more.

Under the radar, Verizon, Sprint, Telefonica and other carriers have partnered with firms including SAP, IBM, HP and AirSage to manage, package and sell various levels of data to marketers and other clients. It’s all part of a push by the world’s largest phone operators to counteract diminishing subscriber growth through new business ventures that tap into the data that showers from consumers’ mobile web surfing, text messaging and phone calls.

During the course of their careers, many scientists criticize the work of others—pointing out flaws, inconsistencies, or contradictions—in the literature. This is part of scientific progress. A proof-of-concept study now describes a research tool for recognizing these so-called negative citations, making it possible to contextualize and study them on a larger scale than possible before.

According to the results, published today (October 26) in PNAS, papers pay only a slight long-term penalty in the total number of citations they receive after a negative one. That criticized papers continue to garner citations over time suggests that it’s better to receive negative attention than none at all.

IEEE VIS 2015 started today. The first sessions included network visualization and projections, as well as a panel on the use of color in visualization.

As usual, this is very selective: only the things I happened to see, and of those only the ones I felt strongly enough to mention here. You can follow the conference under the #IEEEVIS hashtag on Twitter, though that is also biased towards InfoVis and VAST. I haven’t heard a peep from the SciVis cave.

Pizza is one of the most common and craving dish here in the US. The Pizza segment showed a 4.28% and 6.42% estimated sales per unit growth in the Top 100 and Top 200, respectively, according to NRN. A number of new and emerging pizza chains have taken center stage recently, like Marco’s Pizza posting a 41% year-over-year sales growth, to Blaze signing Lebron James to an endorsement deal, stealing him away from McDonalds.

With the release of Postmates 3.0, I had the opportunity to apply [machine learning] tools to one such problem. I would like to share with you some insights I gained from the development process for Estimated Delivery Time, and hopefully illustrate how powerful the proper application of some simple and accessible Machine Learning techniques can be when applied to the right problem.

UW CSE’s Center for Game Science has invited players of its popular protein folding game, Foldit, to engage in a little friendly competition with students at the University of Michigan.

After crystallographers in Michigan’s Bardwell Lab solved the structure of a protein, they put off publishing the results in order to give a class of undergraduate biochemistry students a chance to do the same. Knowing the Foldit community loves a good challenge, the Bardwell Lab invited our players to try their hand at the puzzle, as well.

Earlier this month, Kipp Teague of the Project Apollo Archive uploaded more than 8,400 high-res photos of NASA’s lunar missions to Flickr, and they are of course totally awesome. No less awesome is what people are doing with all those photos.

The Social Science Research Council hosts a twenty-year program of biannual grants from the Mark Family Fund for the Rachel Tanur Memorial Prize for Visual Sociology.

The prize recognizes students in the social sciences who incorporate visual analysis in their work.

Deadline for Submissions: Monday, January 25, 2016