Over the past 100 years, social science has generated a tremendous number of theories on the topics of individual and collective human behaviour. However, it has been much less successful at reconciling the innumerable inconsistencies and contradictions among these competing explanations, a situation that has not been resolved by recent advances in ‘computational social science’. In this Perspective, I argue that this ‘incoherency problem’ has been perpetuated by an historical emphasis in social science on the advancement of theories over the solution of practical problems. I argue that one way for social science to make progress is to adopt a more solution-oriented approach, starting first with a practical problem and then asking what theories (and methods) must be brought to bear to solve it. Finally, I conclude with a few suggestions regarding the sort of problems on which progress might be made and how we might organize ourselves to solve them.
As a sociologist who spends a lot of time in the company of physicists, computer scientists and other outsiders to my field, I am often asked a question of the sort: “What is the social science perspective on X?”, where X is some topic of interest. To a social scientist, the question sounds hopelessly naïve: for any topic X, social science has dozens, if not hundreds, of perspectives, but no single perspective on which there is anything close to universal agreement. Nevertheless, I would argue that it is worth taking the question seriously, if only because it highlights an important difference between the social and physical/engineering sciences.
The AI revolution has clearly arrived, and it’s here to stay. Just like past revolutions, the entrepreneurs who go all in will become tomorrow’s giants. Henry Ford of the Industrial Revolution and Jeff Bezos of the Internet Revolution grew their companies because they envisioned a future that was very different from their present. They lived in the future.
There is a growing realization that we cannot start deploying and using A.I. systems if their reasoning is opaque. We need to know what they are thinking.
Computing Research Association, Computing Research News
from
We analyzed ads from 347 institutions seeking to fill hundreds of tenure-track faculty positions in Computer Science. There is a 30% one-year (and 56% two-year) increase in the number of institutions searching for tenure-track faculty in Computer Science and a 35% one-year (and 71% two-year) increase in the number of positions being searched for. The number of institutions searching and positions seeking to be filled has increased even more for non-PhD-granting institutions.
Will artificial intelligence improve our lives, or will it bring on the robot apocalypse? Absent an understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) – its evolution, its potential, and its limitations – it’s hard for citizens and policy makers to construct an informed opinion. Social Machines: The coming collision of artificial intelligence, social networks and humanity (Apress, 2016), a new book by scholars James Hendler and Alice Mulvehill, helps readers critically evaluate the burgeoning partnership between humans and AI.
These are big, real issues that affect any scientific software that relies on any code written outside their project (which is everyone – see “Linux operating system” and/or “firmware” above.)
My conclusion is that, on a decadal time scale, we cannot rely on software to run repeatably.
Illumina’s CEO Francis deSouza showed off the machine, called the NovaSeq, onstage at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in downtown San Francisco today, telling the crowd the machine’s scanning speed could decipher an entire human genome in less than an hour.
CB Insights unveiled the AI 100—a list of 100 of the most promising private companies applying artificial intelligence algorithms across industries, from healthcare to auto to fintech—at the Innovation Summit today.
OpenNMT should become for neural machine translation (NMT) what Moses is to phrase-based statistical machine translation. So hope the creators of OpenNMT from Harvard and Systran as they launch an NMT toolkit for what they describe is a “widely-applied technique for machine translation.” The release of the paper outlining the toolkit follows Harvard NLP’s December announcement of the OpenNMT system.
Controlling the Aedes aegypti mosquito is key to controlling risk. The mosquito breeds in standing water, often in manmade containers like gutters and discarded tires, and prefers feeding on humans. These traits attract Aedes aegypti to cities and demand a community-centered response: while aerial insecticide spraying may be necessary to halt a large-scale urban outbreak, “the only long-term solution” is sustained, community-based efforts to clean up potential breeding sites.
With artificial intelligence all the rage these days, market trackers are attempting to gauge just where the technology is headed and which industry sectors will lead development for specific big data and other enterprise use cases.
The latest attempt comes from Evans Data Corp. in the form of an AI and big data survey released on Wednesday (Jan. 11). The survey of 440 AI developers found that more than one-third of respondents are focusing on deep learning techniques, with most targeting the financial and insurance sectors.
Chris Lattner, Apple’s head of developer tools and the creator of its uber-popular programming language, Swift, this week announced plans to join Tesla. … “He always felt constrained at Apple in terms of what he could discuss publicly — resorting to off-the-record chats, surprise presentations, and the like,” the person told us. “Similarly, I know he was constrained in recruiting and other areas. Eventually I know that can really wear people down.”
The Georgia Institute of Technology has announced a new online master of science degree that will be offered at a quarter of the cost of its on-campus program. The Institute’s top 10-ranked program in analytics will be delivered in collaboration with edX, the leading nonprofit MOOC provider.
University of Washington, Human-Centered Design & Engineering
from
Cecilia Aragon, professor of Human Centered Design & Engineering, is the recent recipient of a Fulbright scholarship award from the U.S. Department of State, one of the most prestigious programs in the world focused on international educational exchange.
The Fulbright award will send Dr. Aragon to the Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María in Valparaiso, Chile, where she will teach visual analytics in 2018, and conduct research on human-centered data science and social media analysis with Chilean scholars.
HealthTap, which calls itself the “world’s first global health practice,” is moving deeper into virtual care by introducing an artificial-intelligence engine to triage cases automatically.
Tuesday, Palo Alto, California-based HealthTap is launching Doctor A.I. It’s an AI-powered system that has been trained by clinical knowledge collected from the 104,000 physicians and millions of patients on the HealthTap network.
In a brief interview at Rock Health’s reception during the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco this week, Roger Pellegrini, who handles marketing at Benchling, noted that one reason behind the software issues in life science R&D was the frenetic pace of change.
“The big issue in our industry is that the science has moved faster than the software has,” Pellegrini said. “The pain point we solve is that we combine a lot of the tools that are traditionally separate onto one platform…It makes researchers more productive.”
Dan Bricklin changed the world forever when he codeveloped VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet and grandfather of programs you probably use every day like Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets. Join the software engineer and computing legend as he explores the tangled web of first jobs, daydreams and homework problems that led to his transformational invention. [video, 12:00]
San Francisco, CA Next ’17 is a unique opportunity to hear from the Google leaders who are helping define the future of the cloud. March 8-10 at Moscone Center West. [$$$$]
The University of California, Berkeley, invites nominations and applications for the full-time position of Interim Dean of the newly created Division of Data Science. … Nominations must be tenured Berkeley faculty and must be received by January 23.
MLconf is calling for speakers for 2017 events! Events scheduled throughout the year in New York City, Seattle, Atlanta and San Francisco. The deadline for MLconf NYC submissions is Tuesday, January 31.
“DataCamp has created a scikit-learn cheat sheet for those of you who have already started learning about the Python package, but that still want a handy reference sheet.”