Data Science newsletter – January 5, 2017

Newsletter features journalism, research papers, events, tools/software, and jobs for January 5, 2017

GROUP CURATION: N/A

 
 
Data Science News



Data Visualization of the Week

Twitter, Jennifer Johnson


from


Class Breaks

Bruce Schneier, Schneier on Security blog


from

There’s a concept from computer security known as a class break. It’s a particular security vulnerability that breaks not just one system, but an entire class of systems. Examples might be a vulnerability in a particular operating system that allows an attacker to take remote control of every computer that runs on that system’s software. Or a vulnerability in Internet-enabled digital video recorders and webcams that allow an attacker to recruit those devices into a massive botnet.

It’s a particular way computer systems can fail, exacerbated by the characteristics of computers and software. It only takes one smart person to figure out how to attack the system. Once he does that, he can write software that automates his attack. He can do it over the Internet, so he doesn’t have to be near his victim. He can automate his attack so it works while he sleeps. And then he can pass the ability to someone­ — or to lots of people — ­without the skill. This changes the nature of security failures, and completely upends how we need to defend against them.


Semantic Scholar, A New AI Search Engine, Is Changing the Way Neuroscientists Do Their Research

Search Engine Watch, Adam Stetzer


from

A new, free search engine called Semantic Scholar is using AI technology to help these scientists find relevant information much more quickly.

Semantic Scholar has been labeled a game-changer for these professionals, who previously had no way of effectively combing through mountains of dense research. While Google Scholar has a huge database – it has indexed more than 200 million articles to date – it’s lacking in terms of providing access to metadata.


De-identification of patient notes with recurrent neural networks

Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association


from

We introduce the first de-identification system based on artificial neural networks (ANNs), which requires no handcrafted features or rules, unlike existing systems. We compare the performance of the system with state-of-the-art systems on two datasets: the i2b2 2014 de-identification challenge dataset, which is the largest publicly available de-identification dataset, and the MIMIC de-identification dataset, which we assembled and is twice as large as the i2b2 2014 dataset. [free fulltext requires login]


Maps Reveal How Global Consumption Hurts Wildlife

National Geographic, Betsy Mason


from

In a world driven by a globalized economy, the biggest threat to an endangered species is often fueled by consumer demand thousands of miles away. And this makes protection of wildlife and biodiversity an even more daunting task.

Now scientists have traced these economic pressures back to their origins and mapped the spots where major consuming countries are threatening biodiversity around the world.


Data Hoarding and Alternative Data in Finance

Dataconomy, Peter Hafez


from

An increasing number of firms are now embracing the cloud making it easier for vendors to come in and analyse proprietary content on their behalf. This new trend is primarily driven by the more sophisticated hedge funds and assets managers, since banks are often more restricted by their compliance.

But it is challenging to make use of that data. Big data craze inspires firms to save every possible bit of data, with the misconception that the more data you have, the better. Firms must keep data (for compliance purposes) or often aren’t sure what information they need to keep. Having more data is not necessarily a good thing when you are not sure how it is going to accumulate or how to manage the data. There is hope that data hoarding, however, will eventually bear fruits when it comes to alpha generation – with the right help that is!


Four fintech trends we’re watching in 2017

O'Reilly FinTech Newsletter


from

Fintech companies large and small face many of the same disruptive trends as every other kind of tech company—especially the rise of artificial intelligence and uncertain political outlooks in the United States and Europe. Jon Bruner takes a look at what 2017 might hold.

1. The rise of Chinese fintech


Yale study finds that gun violence is a ‘contagious’ social epidemic

Yale University, YaleNews


from

Gun violence is often described as an epidemic or a public health concern, due to its alarmingly high levels in certain populations in the United States. It most often occurs within socially and economically disadvantaged minority urban communities, where rates of gun violence far exceed the national average. A new Yale study has established a model to predict how “contagious” the epidemic really is.

In a study published online on Jan. 3 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the researchers studied the probability of an individual becoming the victim of gun violence using an epidemiological approach.


AI and the future of design: What will the designer of 2025 look like?

O'Reilly Radar, Rob Girling


from

Artefact’s co-founder, Rob Girling, explores the impact of artificial intelligence on design in this three-part series of articles. … In the second installment, What skills do we need to compete against the machines, he outlines criteria that will make some professions more vulnerable to AI automation.


The factories of the past are turning into the data centers of the future

The Conversation, Graham Pickren


from

In Chicago, where I teach and do research, I’ve been looking at the transformation of the city’s industrial building stock to serve the needs of the data industry. Buildings where workers once processed checks, baked bread and printed Sears catalogs now stream Netflix and host servers engaged in financial trading.


The internet of wings – Birds of a feather get tracked together

The Economist, World in 2017, Alun Anderson


from

An ambitious project will start in 2017 designed to track from space the movement and behaviour of animals, large and small, anywhere they travel around the world. In June a Russian rocket will carry an array of sensitive dish antennae up to the International Space Station. Orbiting low over Earth, the antennae will be able to decode faint radio signals from tiny solar-powered tracking tags, light enough for migrating songbirds to carry safely. If all goes well, within two years as many as 20,000 animals may be tagged—and further into the future hundreds of thousands more, as the tags become light enough to be carried even by large flying insects such as locusts.

Martin Wikelski, director of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Radolfzell, Germany, sees the ICARUS (International Co-operation for Animal Research Using Space) project as a “transformational point” where “animals teach us about our world”.


23andMe and the Genetics of Depression

JAMA, Jennifer Abbasi


from

Three years ago, a group of more than 100 researchers presented a spectacularly lackluster finding in Molecular Psychiatry: a study of more than 76 000 major depressive disorder (MDD) cases and controls from combined data sets—the largest ever genetic study of the condition—turned up zero genetic associations.

“In most genetic studies in medicine, by the time people collected cohorts of up to about 10 000 cases and controls, there had been at least 1 genome-wide association,” said Roy H. Perlis, MD, director of the Center for Quantitative Health in the division of clinical research at Massachusetts General Hospital and a coauthor of the study. “Depression stood out really as one of the only exceptions to that, not just within psychiatry, but in medicine as a whole.”

 
Events



HackManCity



Manchester, England Deadline for applications is 10am on Monday, January 23. The hack event is February 10-12.

Applied Machine Learning Days



Ecublens, Switzerland EPFL, January 30-31. [$$$]
 
Deadlines



Abstracts | NetSci 2017

Indianapolis, IN International School and Conference on Network Science, June 19-23. Deadline for submissions is Sunday, January 15.

Nonprofits, apply by January 16th for a weekend of pro bono data consulting!

Nonprofits – start 2017 right! Apply by Jan 16 for our North Carolina #DataDive w/@SASsoftware!

EICS 2017

Lisbon, Portugal ACM SIGCHI Symposium on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems, June 26-29. Deadline for paper abstracts is Monday, January 9. Deadline for workshop proposals is Friday, January 27.

R/Finance 2017: Call for Papers

Chicago, IL May 19-20 at University of Illinois at Chicago. Deadline for paper submissions is Tuesday, February 28.
 
Tools & Resources



displaCy Named Entity Visualizer

Explosion AI


from

Visualise spaCy’s guess at the named entities in the document. You can filter the displayed types, to only show the annotations you’re interested in.


TensorKart: self-driving MarioKart with TensorFlow

Kevin Hughes', One more robot learns to see blog


from

This winter break, I decided to try and finish a project I started a few years ago: training an artificial neural network to play MarioKart 64. It had been a few years since I’d done any serious machine learning, and I wanted to try out some of the new hotness (aka TensorFlow) I’d been hearing about. The timing was right.


Google Cloud Platform for data center professionals: what you need to know

Google Cloud Platform Blog, Peter-Mark Verwoerd


from

At Google Cloud, we love seeing customers migrate to our platform. Companies move to us for a variety of reasons, from low costs to our machine learning offerings. Some of our customers, like Spotify and Evernote, have described the various reasons that motivated them to migrate to Google Cloud.

However, we recognize that a migration of any size can be a challenging project, so today we’re happy to announce the first part of a new resource to help our customers as they migrate. Google Cloud Platform for Data Center Professionals is a guide for customers who are looking to move to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and are coming from non-cloud environments.

 
Careers


Internships and other temporary positions

Technology Fellow – Speech, Privacy and Technology Project



American Civil Liberties Union Foundation; New York, NY

FT Visual / Data Journalism Internship



Financial Times; London, England
Tenured and tenure track faculty positions

Assistant Professor (2)



University of Washington, Human-Centered Design & Engineering Department; Seattle, WA
Full-time positions outside academia

Chief Executive Officer



PLOS; San Francisco, CA
Postdocs

2‐Year Post‐doc in Movement Ecology



Movement Ecology Lab, Hebrew University; Jerusalem, Israel

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