NYU Data Science newsletter – February 19, 2016

GROUP CURATION: N/A

It’s taken more than a decade, but a critical oversight board tasked with advising the president on the privacy and civil liberties implications of the NSA’s surveillance programs is finally getting a technology adviser who understands how the government’s surveillance tools actually work.

The government announced last week that respected Columbia University computer scientist Steve Bellovin has been appointed the first technology scholar for the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.

Founded in 2007, WorldWide Telescope (WWT) began as a “dream project” for Jim Gray, Curtis Wong, and myself. In July 2015, WWT was classified as an open source project. Now, in 2016, we marked another milestone for WWT as we moved from our current home at Microsoft Research to become part of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) and a migration to Microsoft Azure. The AAS, formed in 1899, has a mission to enhance and share humanity’s scientific understanding of the universe. With WWT’s new life in this long-established organization, we can work together to inspire scientists, heighten scientific understandings, and enrich our experience of the universe.

A journal published a paper today that reveals a set of folding constraints in the design of RNA molecules. So far, so normal.

Most of the data for the study come from an online game that crowdsources solutions from thousands of nonexpert players—unusual but not unique.

But the lead authors of the paper are the players themselves.

For months, inside the towering Building 29 here at Goddard Space Flight Center, the four scientific instruments at the heart of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST, or Webb) have been sealed in what looks like a house-sized pressure cooker. A rhythmic chirp-chirp-chirp sounds as vacuum pumps keep the interior at a spacelike ten-billionth of an atmosphere while helium cools it to –250°C. Inside, the instruments, bolted to the framework that will hold them in space, are bathed in infrared light—focused and diffuse, in laserlike needles and uniform beams—to test their response.

The pressure cooker is an apt metaphor for the whole project. Webb is the biggest, most complex, and most expensive science mission that NASA has ever attempted, and expectations among astronomers and the public are huge.

Also:

WorldWide Telescope finds a new home at the American Astronomical Society (Microsoft Research Blog, Jonathan Fay, February 17)

Yahoo may not be so excited about selling its core business after all.

According to a note published by SunTrust analyst Robert Peck on Thursday, Yahoo’s frustrating a lot of potential buyers by not actively engaging in talks for the sale of its core business, despite more than 20 parties expressing “significant” interest in it.

Our cross sectional examination of academic medical centers in the United States, including the nation’s most productive research institutions, showed poor performance for disseminating the results of completed clinical trials through publication in peer reviewed biomedical journals or reporting of results on ClinicalTrials.gov. Only 29% (1245/4347) of completed clinical trials conducted by the faculty at major academic institutions were published within two years of study completion and only 13% (547/4347) reported results on ClinicalTrials.gov.

The Data Observation Network for Earth (DataONE) is a virtual organization dedicated to providing open, persistent, robust, and secure access to biodiversity and environmental data, supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation. DataONE is pleased to announce the availability of summer research internships for undergraduates, graduate students and recent postgraduates.

Deadline to apply is Monday, March 14.

Professors Marie-Catherine de Marneffe and Judith Tonhauser from the Department of Linguistics at The Ohio State University are inviting applications for a post-doctoral fellow in the field of computational pragmatics, beginning August 15, 2016. This postdoc is funded through the Postdoctoral Partnership Initiative of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (http://www.acls.org/programs/ppi/) and the Discovery Themes Initiative in the Arts and Humanities at The Ohio State University (https://discovery.osu.edu/about/news/investing-in-our-future.html).

Deadline to apply is Monday, March 21.

Members of Tandon’s data-visualization group, headed by Professor Enrico Bertini, found that graphs created by algorithms, such as scagnostics, do not necessarily correlate with human judgement, as shown when people were asked to group scatter plots based on their similarity.

Google on Thursday said its Cloud Vision API is now in open beta.

First announced in December, the developer toolset can be used to add machine learning and image recognition to applications. Ultimately, the API could be applied to a range of devices — from robots to appliances — giving them the ability to see and understand the context of images.

Apache Arrow establishes a de-facto standard for columnar in-memory analytics which will redefine the performance and interoperability of most Big Data technologies. The lead developers of 13 major open source Big Data projects have joined forces to create Arrow, and additional companies and projects are expected to adopt and leverage the technology in the coming months. Within the next few years, I expect the vast majority of all new data in the world to move through Arrow’s columnar in-memory layer.