NYU Data Science newsletter – July 27, 2016

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I have recently suggested a global “statement for reproducibility” (Research papers: Journals should drive data reproducibility. Nature 2016;535:355). One of the strong points of this proposed statement is represented by the ban of “point-and-click” statistical software. For papers with a “Statistical analysis” section, only original studies carried out by using source code-based statistical environments should be admitted to peer review. In any case, the current policies adopted by scholarly journals seem to be moving towards stringent criteria to ensure more reproducible research. In the next future, the space for “point-and-click” statistical software will progressively shrink, and a cross-platform/open source language/environment such as R will be destined to play a key role.

Using mobile apps, “virtual doctors,” data collection and analysis systems, world-class diagnostic and wearable sensors coupled with experiential design and engaging, expert patient health information, the VCC delivers wireless, on-demand access to Keck Medicine of USC experts while doctors go beyond telemedicine models for remote management and care of patients regardless of location.

More on health, technology & data:

Inside Genomics Pioneer Craig Venter’s Latest Production (July 25, MIT Technology Review, Business Report on Precision Medicine)

Better Screening Using Big Data (July 05, Journal of Oncology Practice, Debra Patt)

Academic Medical Orgs Leap into Precision Medicine Initiative (July 27, HealthIT Analytics)

The Genomics Inflection Point: Implications for Healthcare (July 25, Rock Health; Lauren Devos, Teresa Wang, Sandya Iyer)

Government scientists are seeking a million volunteers willing to share the innermost secrets of their genes and daily lives as part of an ambitious 10-year research project to understand the causes and cures of disease.

Those selected to be members of the “precision medicine cohort” will be asked to provide a detailed medical history and blood samples so researchers can extract DNA. They will also be asked to report information about themselves — including their age, race, income, education, sexual orientation and gender identity, officials said.

But the project involves much more than statistics and laboratory work.

At B12, our mission is to help people accomplish more as they work. We are fascinated by the rise of artificial intelligences (AIs) and automation technologies that are becoming increasingly capable of performing narrow human tasks. The next couple of decades will bring unprecedented changes and challenges in the way we work. We are interested in how we can use this moment to build a brighter future of work.

The government is using artificial intelligence in tasks ranging from planning space missions to forecasting job growth. Given the potential effects of these technologies on culture and economy, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith says the government’s larger challenge is to bring “humanity’s greatest talent” to bear on the development and direction of AI. To hear more, watch her talk at the 2016 Global Entrepreneurship Summit partner event, “The Future of Artificial Intelligence.”

We just received details from NVIDIA regarding an upcoming ultra-powerful, Pascal-based Titan X, featuring a 12 billion transistor GPU, codenamed GP102. The email’s subject began with “SURPRISE” and the body started with, “It began with a bet”.

Sunshine laws establishing government transparency are ubiquitous in the United States; however, the intended degree of openness is often unclear or unrealized. Although researchers have identified characteristics of government organizations or officials that affect the fulfillment of public records requests, they have not considered the influence that government organizations have on one another. This picture of independently acting organizations does not accord with the literature on diffusion in public policy and administration. This article presents a field experiment testing whether a county government’s fulfillment of a public records request is influenced by the knowledge that its peers have already complied. The authors propose that knowledge of peer compliance should induce competitive pressures to comply and resolve legal ambiguity in favor of compliance. Findings indicate peer conformity affects both in the time to initial response and in the rate of complete request fulfillment.

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Preprints have become a popular topic of conversation among publishers, researchers, funders, librarians, technology builders, and service providers. Their attention is spurring explorations into building technology that will accommodate the uptake of preprints by the researcher community. I propose that the attention that preprints are currently receiving provides us with a rare opportunity to build technology that will facilitate a new era of research communication.

Every U.S. Army soldier in 2040 may have a personal robot. It also is possible that autonomous systems will carry heavy loads, establish ad hoc mesh networks, act as communications retransmission stations, file spot reports on enemy forces and be the first to engage adversaries on the battlefield.

Army officials already are examining the possibility of equipping unmanned systems with weapons such as a .50-caliber machine gun. While the vehicle will need to have a degree of autonomy, the weapon itself will be controlled by a remote operator, points out Robert Sadowski, the robotics senior research scientist, Research, Technology and Integration Directorate, U.S. Army Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center, Warren, Michigan.

Ian Goodfellow is a top machine learning contributor and research scientist at OpenAI. Not only did he invent Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), max-out networks, multi-prediction deep-boltzmann machines, and a fast inference algorithm for spike-and-slab sparse coding while doing his PhD – he also led the development of Pylearn2 (the machine learning library for ML researchers), and contributed greatly to Theano. Cutting his teeth at Google then becoming Senior Research Scientist on the Google Brain team, Ian has now found his way to OpenAI – the non-profit research institution funded in part by Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and is working hard on developing breakthrough Deep learning techniques. Oh, he’s also lead author of a recently launched three part series available online co-written with Yoshua Bengio and Aaron Courville. We catch up with him.

… when Wald’s studies were completed, it was the mid-1930s, Austria was deep in economic distress, and there was no possibility that a foreigner could be hired as a professor in Vienna. Wald was rescued by a job offer from Oskar Morgenstern. Morgenstern would later immigrate to the United States and help invent game theory, but in 1933 he was the director of the Austrian Institute for Economic Research, and he hired Wald at a small salary to do mathematical odd jobs. That turned out to be a good move for Wald: his experience in economics got him a fellowship offer at the Cowles Commission, an economic institute then located in Colorado Springs. Despite the ever-worsening political situation, Wald was reluctant to take a step that would lead him away from pure mathematics for good. But then the Nazis conquered Austria, making Wald’s decision substantially easier. After just a few months in Colorado, he was offered a professorship of statistics at Columbia; he packed up once again and moved to New York.

And that was where he fought the war.

The Statistical Research Group (SRG), where Wald spent much of World War II, was a classified program that yoked the assembled might of American statisticians to the war effort?—?something like the Manhattan Project, except the weapons being developed were equations, not explosives.

At Human Longevity Inc. (HLI) in La Jolla, California, more than two dozen machines work around the clock, sequencing one human genome every 15 minutes at a cost of under $2,000 per genome. The whole operation fits comfortably in three rooms. Back in 2000, when its founder, J. Craig Venter, first sequenced a human genome (his own), it cost $100 million and took a building-size, $50 million computer nine months to complete.

Venter’s goal is to sequence at least one million genomes, something that seems likely to take the better part of a decade, and use the data generated from them—along with information about some of the DNA donors’ health histories and the results of other medical tests—to find better ways to treat and prevent a range of disorders common among aging people, from cancer to heart disease.

When it comes to acceptance of New York City’s rapidly growing network of sidewalk kiosks offering “free super fast Wi-Fi,” some people are Nekeya Browns and some are Alex Padillas.

As soon as the LinkNYC booths were activated in their Washington Heights neighborhood this month, Ms. Brown celebrated by plugging in her headphones and swaying to some Marvin Gaye tunes; Mr. Padilla, in his Yankees jersey, stood a few feet back, reluctant even to touch the keyboard for fear of having his pocket of personal data picked.

Madrid, Spain On October 5th 2016, one day before the International Open Data Conference in Madrid (Spain), the city council of Madrid in alliance with other international institutions will be hosting the Open Cities Summit at Medialab Prado.

The deadline for proposals is Monday, August 15.

As the White House launches its Police Data Initiative, police departments across the country start embracing public data.

My goal is to create a recommendation engine for beer that is actually useful. The recommendations that currently exist on beer rating websites are fairly silly at this point. Generally, if you’re on a beer’s page, you’ll get something like: “Oh you like Sierra Nevada Pale Ale? Well, you’ll love Three Floyds Zombie Dust!” Well, that’s definitely not wrong. Sierra Nevada created the platonic ideal of an American pale ale, and Three Floyds’ Zombie Dust is an amazing interpretation of the style. However, I don’t think I’ll fly halfway across the country to have a bearded man deeply sigh towards me and say “No, everybody knows you can only get that beer at 2:15pm on the third Tuesday of the month.”

Investing in big data infrastructure doesn’t have to be an overwhelming proposition. Here are a few things that you need to know when making the leap from antiquated databases of old to the modern big data platform.

We are now at a point in history when algorithms can learn, like people, about pretty much anything. Facebook is pursuing “computer services that have better perception than people”, while researchers at Google aim to “solve intelligence”. At overlap.ai we’re building artificial intelligence to unite people through their overlapping passions, and here we introduce a framework we call words2map for considering what our users love, like these personal passions of ours.