NYU Data Science newsletter – March 10, 2016

GROUP CURATION: N/A

As Zika continues to spread rapidly across Latin America, a US Centers for Disease Control doctor says there “isn’t any question” the virus is linked to microcephaly, a condition where a baby is born with an abnormally small head.

“The link between the Zika virus and microcephaly is extremely strong,” said Dr. Lyle Petersen, the director of the division of vector-borne diseases at the CDC, during a press conference Wednesday. “There are numerous lines of evidence now that link Zika with microcephaly, so I don’t think there’s any question about that any longer.”

More than 60 research institutes and companies are working on products to combat the spread of the Zika virus, the World Health Organization said Wednesday, but a vaccine is likely to take years to develop and may come too late for the outbreak now sweeping across Latin America and the Caribbean.

… What, then, can and should be done? I agree with the ASA statement’s final paragraph, which emphasizes the importance of design, understanding, and context—and I would also add measurement to that list.

What went wrong? How is it that we know that design, data collection, and interpretation of results in context are so important—and yet the practice of statistics is so associated with p-values, a typically misused and misunderstood data summary that is problematic even in the rare cases where it can be mathematically interpreted?

I put much of the blame on statistical education.

In a 2014 report, the White House noted the immense potential of information available in large, public datasets to improve people’s lives. But these data are far too complex to use unless they’re filtered, curated, and presented in way that’s easy to grasp. To that end, the White House just kicked off its Opportunity Project, which offers several user-friendly data-based tools to help Americans gain knowledge they need to climb the economic ladder.

“Using this data, we can put transit stops where they’re needed, draw school boundaries more inclusively, invest in long-neglected sidewalks and streets, and ensure that all cities working on fair housing are investing their resources in closing opportunity gaps,” Luke Tate, the special assistant to the president on economic mobility, said at the project’s launch on Monday. “The Opportunity Project is about moving from information to action.”

Associate Professor Julian Togelius works at the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and games—a largely unexplored juncture that he has shown can be the site of visionary and mind-expanding research. Could games provide a better AI test bed than robots, which—despite the way they excite public imagination—can be slow, unwieldy and expensive? According to him, the answer is resoundingly yes. Could an artificially intelligent operating system exhibit more originality than a human game designer? Togelius thinks so. “I’m teaching computers to be more creative than humans,” he says.

The Artist Archives Project develops information resources for the display and conservation of contemporary art. The initiative responds to a growing need for museum and archive professionals to work with artists in documenting their production methods, and building knowledge for future treatment and re-activation of their work. The first undertaking of the Artist Archives Project is to create an information resource devoted to the multidisciplinary artist/activist David Wojnarowicz. The resource will contain technical and historical information about the artist’s films, video, photography, paintings, drawings, and performance work. The artist’s personal archive in the Fales Downtown Collection at NYU serves as a primary source for research.

The project takes a digital humanities approach by assigning equal emphasis to the content and the database / web portal design.

We’re excited to announce that we’re joining the Open Compute Project (OCP) to help drive standardization in IT infrastructure. More specifically, Google will contribute a new rack specification that includes 48V power distribution and a new form factor to allow OCP racks to fit into our data centers.

Last month, the BBC explained how love has changed over the years. “It was easier in the olden days. Future spouses could be found living around the corner. Or at least in your part of town,” the piece said, directing attention to a series of charts. There was one about how close to one another people who ended up together used to live (the answer is very close). Another about how the average age at which people get married has evolved (it has, as you probably know, been creeping upwards for some time).

… I’m a second year ESIP Student Fellow working with the Disaster Lifecycle Cluster. I’m currently working at the University of Alaska Fairbanks where in the past month I completed a Masters in Geospatial Data Science with a focus on Unmanned Aircraft Systems. I’ve been very fortunate to be able to work for the Alaska Center for Unmanned Aircraft here at the University, one of the six FAA Unmanned Aircraft test sites in the nation.

My work is scattered over several projects but there are two consistent themes: drones and data.

While we’ve recently seen great strides in robotic capability, the gap between human and robot motor skills remains vast. Machines still have a very long way to go to match human proficiency even at basic sensorimotor skills like grasping. However, by linking learning with continuous feedback and control, we might begin to bridge that gap, and in so doing make it possible for robots to intelligently and reliably handle the complexities of the real world.

Anyone can follow the pregnancy of a monkey infected with Zika virus in real time, thanks to an experiment in data sharing that’s unusual for biology.

Researchers in Wisconsin injected Zika virus into a pregnant rhesus macaque monkey on Monday, to start exploring how this virus can affect the brain of a developing fetus. Over the course of the coming weeks, the team will be posting the infected monkey’s ultrasounds and blood tests, as well as other data such as the amount of virus in the amniotic fluid.

The study is being led by Dave O’Connor, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who is also writing a running commentary on the laboratory’s website that frankly discusses things like the emotional impact of looking at this primate’s ultrasounds.

We are calling for speed session abstracts from senior, mid-level, and junior stars representing the industrial, academic, and government communities who would like to present their life’s work or share their perspectives on the role of women in today’s statistics and data science fields.

Deadline to submit abstracts is Thursday, March 24.

The successful candidate will work closely with faculty members of Humanities subjects (History, Literature, Global Studies and Languages, and Comparative Media Studies/Writing) to produce a comprehensive assessment of the needs, current capacity, and future uses of digital humanities at MIT. … It is expected also that the Fellow will make contact with other Digital Humanities Centers in the Boston area and beyond.

Review of applications will begin on Thursday, March 31, and will continue until the position is filled.

At the end of last year we released code that allows a user to classify images with TensorFlow models. This code demonstrated how to build an image classification system by employing a deep learning model that we had previously trained. This model was known to classify an image across 1000 categories supplied by the ImageNet academic competition with an error rate that approached human performance. After all, what self-respecting computer vision system would fail to recognize a cute puppy?

In this article I want to talk about negative aspects of the programming community, regarding beginner programmers. This is a touchy topic. I will try to explain both sides to the best of my ability, but I’m not endorsing either side. My only hope is that some readers will gain more empathy for the people they are communicating with, and hopefully use that knowledge to make friendlier communities.