Data Science newsletter – October 27, 2016

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Earlier this month, at the IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, a team of researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the University of Southern California, and the University of California at San Diego presented a new set of algorithms that can efficiently fit probability distributions to high-dimensional data.

International privacy regulators are increasingly concerned about the need to balance innovation and consumer protection in artificial intelligence and other data driven technologies, global privacy chiefs said Oct. 19.

Data protection officials from more than 60 countries expressed their concerns over challenges posed by the emerging fields of robotics, artificial intelligence and machine learning due to the new tech’s unpredictable outcomes. The global privacy regulators also discussed the difficulties of regulating encryption standards and how to balance law enforcement agency access to information with personal privacy rights.

In our recent paper titled “A Learned Representation for Artistic Style”, we introduce a simple method to allow a single deep convolutional style transfer network to learn multiple styles at the same time. The network, having learned multiple styles, is able to do style interpolation, where the pastiche varies smoothly from one style to another. Our method enables style interpolation in real-time as well, allowing this to be applied not only to static images, but also videos.

It’s not hard to imagine the criminal possibilities of automation, autonomy, and artificial intelligence. But the imaginings are becoming mainstream — and the future isn’t too far off.

Along similar lines, computers are able to predict court verdicts. My guess is that the real use here isn’t to predict actual court verdicts, but for well-paid defense teams to test various defensive tactics.

By 2020, populations of vertebrate species could have fallen by 67 per cent over a 50-year period unless action is taken to reverse the damaging impacts of human activity, the Living Planet report from WWF and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) said.

Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is signaling a strategy shift for one of its most ambitious and costly efforts: bringing blazing-fast web connections to homes across America.

The company said on Tuesday that it was curbing the expansion of its high-speed fiber optic internet network and reducing staff in the unit responsible for the work. Alphabet did not provide an exact number for the jobs that will be cut.

The United States has put artificial intelligence at the center of its defense strategy, with weapons that can identify targets and make decisions.

Scientists starting labs say that they are under historically high pressure to publish, secure funding and earn permanent positions — leaving precious little time for actual research.

The University of Washington’s Population Health Initiative has received a transformative gift from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, advancing our efforts to improve human health and well-being. This $210 million gift will catalyze our work to enhance human health, environmental resiliency, and social & economic equity here in Washington and around the world.

Today MIT President L. Rafael Reif announced the creation of The Engine, a new kind of enterprise designed to support startup companies working on scientific and technological innovation with the potential for transformative societal impact.

President Reif made the announcement at an evening event at The Engine’s Central Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts, headquarters attended by entrepreneurs, business leaders, investors, and members of the MIT community.

The day for driverless cars on city streets is fast approaching, but for former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, this future can’t come soon enough.

On Monday, the billionaire and civic philanthropist announced a partnership between his philanthropy organization and the Aspen Institute to bring together a team of 10 mayors from around the world who will collaborate on how to prepare cities for autonomous cars.

The Arnhold Institute for Global Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai is partnering with satellite imaging and data analytics company DigitalGlobe to create the Health Equity Atlas Initiative (ATLAS), a platform that standardizes and maps population data in order to generate insights that address health inequities.

Pentica Science Center, Serbia Deadline for applications is Sunday, November 20.

Bloomberg invites faculty worldwide to apply for unrestricted gifts that support research in broadly-construed data science, including natural language processing, machine learning, and data mining. Application Deadline: January 3, 2017

We introduce a statistical procedure and easy-to-use software — preText — allowing scholars to examine the sensitivity of their findings under alternate preprocessing regimes. For a range of datasets, we show that while some steps are mostly harmless, researchers should be cautious about others, since they transform the data in ways likely to lead the unwary down different “forking paths” of inference.

Although machines can outperform humans in almost any skill set today, there is still one process that they have yet to master: translation. Several students learning a second or third language in particular will have undoubtedly encountered some of the more hilarious results produced by Google (mis)Translate.

But a fascinating solution was recently proposed by the CDS’s very own Kyunghyun Cho. Together with Yoshua Bengio and Orhan Firat, their innovative model—which is the first to handle multi-way, multilingual translations—clinched the runners-up position for best paper at the 2016 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

HASHKAT is a dynamic network simulation tool designed to model the growth of and information propagation through an online social network. It is an agent-based, Kinetic Monte Carlo engine capable of simulating online networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.

Last month we published a blog post describing our work on using computer vision to detect grocery items in refrigerators. This was achieved by adding object detection capability, based on deep learning, to the Open Source Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, formerly called the Computational Network Toolkit or CNTK.

We are happy to announce that this technology is now a part of the Cognitive Toolkit. We have published a detailed tutorial in which we describe how to bring in your own data and learn your own object detector.

Tableau Software (NYSE: DATA) announced that it has delivered new APIs that make it possible for developers to build new experiences for its customers and extend the possibilities of Tableau. Developers also have access to Tableau’s Developer Portal, Tableau’s community for developers to share, support and engage with fellow developers.

The ML Schema is a simple shared schema that provides a set of classes, properties, and restrictions that can be used to represent and interchange information on data mining and machine learning algorithms, datasets, and experiments. It can be specialized to create new classes and properties. It can be mapped to more complex, specific ontologies on data mining and machine learning, and also used as a basis for markup languages and data exchange standards.

This morning at Spark Summit Europe 2016, Ion Stoica announced during his keynote the Drizzle project, which promises to reduce streaming data latency in Spark to be less than Flink and Storm. Ion announced this in the context of the new RISE Lab at UC Berkeley.