NYU Data Science newsletter – November 19, 2015

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Last year, a curious nonfiction book became a Times best-seller: a dense meditation on artificial intelligence by the philosopher Nick Bostrom, who holds an appointment at Oxford. Titled “Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies,” it argues that true artificial intelligence, if it is realized, might pose a danger that exceeds every previous threat from technology—even nuclear weapons—and that if its development is not managed carefully humanity risks engineering its own extinction. Central to this concern is the prospect of an “intelligence explosion,” a speculative event in which an A.I. gains the ability to improve itself, and in short order exceeds the intellectual potential of the human brain by many orders of magnitude.

Such a system would effectively be a new kind of life, and Bostrom’s fears, in their simplest form, are evolutionary: that humanity will unexpectedly become outmatched by a smarter competitor. He sometimes notes, as a point of comparison, the trajectories of people and gorillas: both primates, but with one species dominating the planet and the other at the edge of annihilation. “Before the prospect of an intelligence explosion, we humans are like small children playing with a bomb,” he concludes. “We have little idea when the detonation will occur, though if we hold the device to our ear we can hear a faint ticking sound.”

Code examples for some popular machine learning algorithms, using TensorFlow library. This tutorial is designed to easily dive into TensorFlow, through examples. It includes both notebook and code with explanations.

The federal privacy law known as HIPAA doesn’t cover home paternity tests, fitness trackers or health apps. When a Florida woman complained after seeing the paternity test results of thousands of people online, federal regulators told her they didn’t have jurisdiction.

At today’s Structure event in San Francisco, Urs Hölze, Google’s senior vice president of technical infrastructure, predicts that within the next five years, Google’s Cloud Platform revenues could surpass its advertising revenue.

“The goal is for us to talk about Google as a cloud company by 2020,” Holze said.

It’s an ambitious plan for a company that is typically thought to be lagging behind Amazon Web Servces (AWS) and Microsoft Azure in the cloud computing market.

The human brain may be the most complex piece of organized matter in the known universe, but Allen Institute researchers have begun to unravel the genetic code underlying its function. Research published this month in Nature Neuroscience identified a surprisingly small set of molecular patterns that dominate gene expression in the human brain and appear to be common to all individuals, providing key insights into the core of the genetic code that makes our brains distinctly human.

Health app maker Azumio has partnered with Stanford University to make deidentified, anonymized data from a cohort of 5 million users available for research purposes. The study will be sponsored by a grant from the National Institutes of Health.

Azumio makes a number of different health tracking apps that track different biometrics including activity, heart rate, sleep, and diet, but the company has been working on integrating them all into one comprehensive tracking app called Argus. Stanford researchers will have data on users’ activity (including break-downs into walking, running, cycling, and working out), heart rate, diet (tracked in different ways including calories, food categories, and photographs of food), and sleep.

“If you eat a bunch of beets, how long will it take for my urine to turn red?”

That’s probably not a question many culinary-school students ask themselves. But for a small group of experimental “data cuisine” cooks, it’s a totally valid subject of inquiry. So during a recent dinner in the Dutch city of Leeuwarden, a daring individual named Didi Lehnhausen set out to answer the mystery with a snaking coil of beetroot hummus and a little cup for each diner.

The purpose of the cup is explained by Moritz Stefaner and Susanne Jaschko, who organized the Leeuwarden meal as well as data-cuisine workshops in Berlin, Barcelona, Helsinki, and elsewhere. “The 8.8-meter line of hummus represents the average length of a human intestine. Before eating the hummus, each participant is provided with a plastic cup for collecting urine,” they email. “The participant should write his/her name and the time of intake on the cup. When the urine turns reddish, the hummus has been fully digested and the participant should note his/her personal time for digestion on the cup.”

In this study, I evaluate some popular deep learning toolkits. The candidates are listed in alphabetical order: TensorFlow, Theano, and Torch [0]. This is a dynamic document and the evaluation, to the best of my knowledge, is based on the current state of their code.

A growing number of graphing tools and libraries allow anyone to make beautiful, interactive web-based graphs. By interactively visualizing our data online, we share complex ideas in an exploratory, visual, open, and collaborative way.

Today, Plotly is announcing that we have open-sourced plotly.js, the core technology and JavaScript graphing library behind Plotly’s products (MIT license). It’s all out there and free. Any developer can now integrate Plotly’s library into their own applications unencumbered. Plotly.js supports 20 chart types, including 3D plots, geographic maps, and statistical charts like density plots, histograms, box plots, and contour plots.

Nick Beauchamp is an Assistant Professor in Northeastern University’s department of Political Science. He recent spoke at the NYU Center for Data Science’s Text as Data conference.