Data Science newsletter – October 7, 2016

Activity trackers like Fitbits and Jawbones help fitness enthusiasts log the calories they burn, their heart rates, and even how many flights of stairs they climb in a day. Biologist Cory Williams of Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff is using similar technology to track the energy consumption of arctic ground squirrels in Alaska—insight that may reveal how the animals efficiently forage for food while avoiding being picked off by golden eagles.

Amazon wants to give more University of Washington students a chance to study computer science — and hopes some of them ultimately decide to work at its company, too.

The Seattle-based tech giant on Thursday announced a $10 million donation toward a second building for the UW’s Computer Science & Engineering program, providing a substantial boost to the $110 million fundraising campaign for the building.

When the engineers had at last finished their work, Eugenia Kuyda opened a console on her laptop and began to type.

“Roman,” she wrote. “This is your digital monument.”

It had been three months since Roman Mazurenko, Kuyda’s closest friend, had died. Kuyda had spent that time gathering up his old text messages, setting aside the ones that felt too personal, and feeding the rest into a neural network built by developers at her artificial intelligence startup. She had struggled with whether she was doing the right thing by bringing him back this way. At times it had even given her nightmares. But ever since Mazurenko’s death, Kuyda had wanted one more chance to speak with him.

“Minority teachers may be perceived more favorably by minority students because they can serve as role models and are particularly sensitive to the cultural needs of their students,” said study author Hua-Yu Sebastian Cherng, assistant professor of international education at NYU Steinhardt. “However, in our study, we were surprised to find that minority teachers are not just viewed more highly than White teachers by minority students, but in many cases by White students as well.”

The findings, published in the latest issue of Educational Researcher, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association, underscore the importance of having a diverse workforce of teachers.

Backchannel’s readers have some advice for philanthropy’s first lady

Today the White House is announcing the expansion of the Opportunity Project and the launch of twenty-nine new digital tools built by companies and non-profit organizations to increase access to opportunity in communities across the country.

Although the poverty rate declined more rapidly in 2015 than in nearly fifty years, too many communities still do not have access to the resources and opportunities that residents need to thrive. The unprecedented combination of open data and technological talent that has emerged in recent years can play a critical role in closing that gap, as technologists partner with community leaders to expand access to opportunity in ways that were not previously possible.

… Data science is in its infancy. We are learning as we go. We are building models on the fly. To date, too little work is done to identify and address incorrect inferences and the fact that the categorization of people and activities is often elastic and uncertain, due to ineffective intent modeling. Despite belief in the truthiness of data, in the certainty of “hard” numbers, this is research without clear scientific standards for rigor, and without transparency and the ethical checks and balances that formal research processes require. In economics terms, the farming and manufacturing of data is a primary market, full of promise.

This is where we as HCI researchers can leap in. We need to take a proactive, critical stance when we are asked to design, develop, or evaluate devices and services that incorporate data capture, storage, and analysis.

How close is humanity to creating AI? Machine learning’s remarkable progress in object and speech recognition, video games, and other areas has been broadly covered by news media, and it would seem the AI dream is fast becoming reality. However, are these machines learning to truly think like humans?

Brenden Lake, Moore-Sloan Data Science Fellow at NYU’s Center for Data Science, published in May the paper “Building Machines That Learn and Think Like People.”

On Wednesday, the Center for Data Science’s very own Moore-Sloan Fellow, Michael Gill, showcased his research on how war and conflict impact the economy.

The US Department of Defense outsources most of its military equipment. According to the data gathered about the DoD’s business contracts, they purchase tanks, planes, weapons, and other gear from almost 350,000 businesses and multinational corporations. Since these expenditures account for almost 1% of the global GDP annually, it is unsurprising to assume that military events would affect the economy. But is it possible to be more specific about this correlation?

The Center for Data Science’s own Vasant Dhar has said the problem with data science is no longer collecting data, but finding the right tools to analyze that data. Skytree, a machine learning software presented by Nick Ball and Alexander Gray at the Moore Sloan Data Science Environment, touts itself as making advanced data mining of large datasets available to everyone, not just data scientists.

The PhD in Data Science at New York University’s Center for Data Science provides high-ability students with the knowledge and skill set to succeed in academia and industrial research settings. If you are ready to push the boundaries of the field of data science using machine learning and artificial intelligence, then we encourage you to apply.

No venture capital, no Bay Area presence, no crazy burn rate: MailChimp’s founders
built the company slowly by anticipating customers’ needs and following their instincts.