An epidemiological analysis of a network of 138 163 individuals in Chicago, Illinois, determined that social contagion was responsible for 63.1% of the 11 123 gunshot violence episodes that occurred between 2006 and 2014. Models incorporating social contagion and demographics (eg, age, sex, and neighborhood residence) predicted future gunshot subjects better than models based on social contagion or demographics alone.
This talk will discuss the challenges of mining Police data to provide operational intelligence. Rick will introduce the data and systems involved in day-to-day reporting, resource tasking and arresting offenders, including the issues of linking data across systems and the challenges of extracting useful information from free text. Digging into more advanced analytics, Rick will discuss criminal network analysis or CNA, an important tool in crime prevention and detection, and the differences between analysing overt networks (SNA) and covert networks (CNA). Rick will describe how supervised and unsupervised learning methods have been used in the identification of prolific and priority offenders, and how the results are used to solve crimes and target offenders, and to use resources effectively. Finally Rick will describe the EU-funded FP7 project Valcri (www.valcri.org), and its task to provide a Police data set that is suitable for release into the research community.
… There are a few reasons for the gun violence research disparity. First, there are legislative restrictions on gun research. For two decades, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been prevented from allocating funding that could be used to advocate for or promote gun control. Although that doesn’t explicitly exclude all research on gun violence, it is said to have had a chilling effect on funding.
“Precisely what was or was not permitted under the clause was unclear. But no federal employee was willing to risk his or her career or the agency’s funding to find out,” physicians Arthur L. Kellermann and Frederick P. Rivara wrote in an opinion piece in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2013. “Extramural support for firearm injury prevention research quickly dried up.”
Joel Dudley, an Associate Professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York shares how he is developing and applying advanced computational methods to integrate the digital universe of information to build better predictive models of diseases and drug response.
In this memorandum, we: (1) highlight the profound impact President Obama’s leadership has had in
“reaffirming and strengthening America’s role as the world’s engine of scientific discovery and
technological innovation,” 2 as he set out to do at the start of his Administration; (2) offer an overview of
frontiers that the American S&T enterprise will advance in the coming decades; and (3) call for actions
needed in the years ahead to include all Americans in driving continued innovation and progress across
those frontiers.
The bad news: Colorado’s traffic congestion is getting worse and building billions of dollars worth of new roads isn’t going to fix it.
The good news: The Colorado Department of Transportation is trying something new: It’s teaming up with the data scientists at Denver-based Galvanize, a tech educator and startup space for entrepreneurs. In a unique partnership announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Tuesday, CDOT employees are expected to gain data-science skills while Galvanize professors and students pour through state transportation data to figure out better ways to attack Colorado traffic congestion — at no cost to taxpayers.
Ian Swanson, CEO of big data firm DataScience, says platforms, bots and probablistic programming will help data scientists provide “real, clear value” this year.
Overfishing threatens the sustainability of coastal marine biodiversity, especially in tropical developing countries. To counter this problem, about 200 governments worldwide have committed to protecting 10%–20% of national coastal marine areas. However, associated impacts on fisheries productivity are unclear and could weaken the food security of hundreds of millions of people who depend on diverse and largely unregulated fishing activities. Here, we present a systematic theoretic analysis of the ability of reserves to rebuild fisheries under such complex conditions, and we identify maximum reserve coverages for biodiversity conservation that do not impair long-term fisheries productivity. [full text]
University of Oxford, The Policy and Internet Blog, Vili Lehdonvirta
from
“If data is the new oil, then why aren’t we taxing it like we tax oil?” That was the essence of the provocative brief that set in motion our recent 6-month research project funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. The results are detailed in the new report: Data Financing for Global Good: A Feasibility Study.
Renee M. P. Teate, Becoming A Data Scientist podcast
from
In this audio-only Becoming a Data Scientist Podcast Special Episode, I interview Dr. Ed Felten, Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer, about the Future of Artificial Intelligence (from The White House!). [audio, 40:02]
Social Science Space, Social Science Bites podcast
from
For Alex “Sandy” Pentland, one of the best-known and widely cited computational social scientists in the world, these are halcyon days for his field. One of the creators of the MIT Media Lab and currently the director of the MIT Connection Science and Human Dynamics labs, Pentland studies ‘social physics,’ which takes a data-centric view of culture and society.
In the latest Social Science Bites podcast, available on the Social Science Space website here, he tells interviewer Dave Edmonds about the origins of social physics in the barren days before the advent of widespread good data and solid statistical methods and how it blossomed as both a field and for Pentland’s own research. [audio, 19:37]
As the new year approaches, New York City seems on track to record in 2016 its lowest number of shootings in modern history and the second-lowest homicide total.
Preliminary NYPD data and unofficial records through late Friday showed the city had logged 990 shootings, well below the 1,118 recorded in 2015 through Christmas Day. It was only about a week ago that Chief Dermot Shea told reporters that the city had never seen shootings below the 1,100 mark in the modern CompStat era of record keeping, which began in 1994.
New research that she has conducted alongside Keren Mertens Horn, an economist at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, and Davin Reed, a doctoral student at N.Y.U., finds that when violent crime falls sharply, wealthier and educated people are more likely to move into lower-income and predominantly minority urban neighborhoods.
As we wait patiently for self-driving cars to become viable, self-sailing boats are already a reality. A Californian company, Saildrone, rents self-sailing boats to scientists, environmental groups, commercial fishermen, and other organizations seeking to collect ocean data affordably and efficiently.
Collecting ocean data is typically an expensive and time-consuming practice, and relies on large crews who spend months out on the water.
But, as Salidrone’s founders explain, their self-sailing boats can “cost-effectively and autonomously gather data over large ocean areas in any conditions.”
The College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst offers a 10-week data science summer research program for undergraduates. Deadline for applications is Friday, January 27.
Jena, Germany The spring school will take place at the GIScience department of the Friedrich-Schiller University on March 13-17 2017. Deadline for applicants is January 31. [$$$]
We are pleased to announce the 9th annual competition for the best research papers using the IPUMS microdata collection. The deadline for submitting papers or publications is Monday, February 13.
Santa Barbara, CA Sunday, June 11, to Friday, June 23. Participation is restricted to Ph.D. students, postdoctoral researchers, and untenured faculty within 10 years of the Ph.D. Deadline for completed applications is Monday, February 13. [most costs covered]
The BIGDATA program seeks novel approaches in computer science, statistics, computational science, and mathematics, along with innovative applications in domain science, including social and behavioral sciences, education, biology, the physical sciences, and engineering that lead towards the further development of the interdisciplinary field of data science. Submission window is March 15-22.
In this Request for Information (RFI), NSF encourages community input to inform the Foundation’s strategy and plans for an advanced cyberinfrastructure that will enable the frontiers of science and engineering to continue to advance over the next decade and beyond (NSF CI 2030). Deadline for submissions is Wednesday, April 5.
Vancouver, BC, Canada A new annual workshop that will be co-located with ACL 2017 (July 30-August 4). Deadline for paper submissions is Friday, April 21.
Few aspects of scientific work may be as crucial—and yet as easy to neglect—as reading the literature. Beginning a new research project or writing a grant application can be good opportunities for extensive literature searches, but carving out time to keep abreast of newly published papers on a regular basis is often challenging. The task is all the more daunting today, with the already vast literature continuing to grow at head-spinning speed.
To help you keep track of the literature and avoid feeling too overwhelmed, Science Careers asked scientists in a diverse range of fields to discuss how they integrate searching for papers, and reading them, into their working routine. Their responses have been edited for brevity and clarity.
