Data Science newsletter – May 25, 2017

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California will likely roll out a limited public earthquake early warning system sometime next year, researchers building the network say.

New earthquake sensing stations are being installed in the ground, software is being improved, and operators are being hired to make sure the system is properly staffed, Caltech seismologist Egill Hauksson said at a joint meeting of the Japan Geoscience Union and American Geophysical Union.

Never have so many private eyes looked down at Earth. In the past decade, about a dozen companies have formed to launch Earth-observing satellites. Few have sought to compete with sophisticated government-built instruments, but that is changing.

Private firms have begun to develop satellite radar systems and other advanced technologies in a bid to court scientists and other users, even as the US government is threatening to pare back its stable of satellites. Later this year, for example, the Finnish firm Iceye plans to launch a prototype radar instrument — the first step, the company says, towards a constellation of 20 such probes. Until recently, commercial firms had shied away from pursuing radar satellites because they require heavy instruments and consume a lot of power.

After helping drive many U.S. bookstore chains out of business, Amazon has been opening its own retail stores, starting in Seattle in late 2015.

Its first Amazon Books location in New York City opens Thursday morning in Manhattan’s Shops at Columbus Circle, which was previously home to a pretty large — and now closed — Borders Books and Music.

Grady Weyenberg, a statistical researcher who grew up in Hilo, is the first faculty member hired to create a new data science program at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo.

College grads looking to take the next step in their data science careers will have several new graduate-level data science programs to enroll in this fall, including a new Master’s of Applied Data Science at Syracuse University, a new Doctorate of Data Science at the University of Tennessee, and a new

Demand from students for graduate-level data science degrees, as well as demand from companies for more skilled data scientists to crunch big data, led Syracuse University leaders to create the new 18-month, multi-disciplinary program, says Associate Professor Jeff Saltz.

Tech companies, and increasingly even non-tech companies, are struggling with the fact that there are not enough trained data scientists to fill market demand. Every company has their own strategy for hiring and training, but Airbnb has taken things a step further — running its own university-style program, complete with a custom course-numbering system.

Data University is Airbnb’s attempt to make its entire workforce more data literate. Traditional online programs like Coursera and Udacity just weren’t getting the job done because they were not tailored to Airbnb’s internal data and tools. So the company decided to design a bunch of courses of its own around three levels of instruction for different employee needs.

Jan Tore Sanner, Norway’s Minister for Local Government and Modernisation, visited the College to explore how data science can be used by governments.

The Norwegian delegation visited Imperial’s Data Science Institute to see first-hand the possibilities of AI and data science for the public sector.

Yann LeCun, the deep learning expert and recently appointed director of artificial intelligence research at Facebook, held an Ask Me Anything session on Reddit last week. He went deep into the methodologies of AI and deep learning, the best academic training for excelling in the field and even touched on how to deal with the ethical issues that will arise from the advent of advanced AI. The most interesting exchange, however, might have been about the role of emotions in AI systems.

Essentially, LeCun argued that a system like the one popularized in the recent film Her is nowhere near the realm of possibility right now because of its deep understanding of human emotions, but that understanding of emotions is critical to truly useful systems. “Science fiction often depicts AI systems as devoid of emotions,” he wrote, “but I don’t think real AI is possible without emotions.“

Striving for perfection in mind, body and spirit is a Korean way of life, and the cult of endless self-improvement begins as early as the hagwons, the cram schools that keep the nation’s children miserable and sleep-deprived, and sends a sizable portion of the population under the plastic surgeon’s knife. If The Great Gatsby were written today, the hero’s last name would be Kim or Park. And as though human competition isn’t enough, when I land in Seoul I learn that Korea’s top Go champion—Go is a mind-bendingly complex strategic board game played in East Asia—has been roundly beaten by a computer program called AlphaGo, designed by Google DeepMind, based in London, one of the world’s leading developers of artificial intelligence.

The country I encounter is in a mild state of shock.

The chemical database of today is inextricably linked to several historical threads, not all of them chemical, that began a long time before the modern computational world existed. Understanding these origins provides a deeper understanding of the modern chemical database and yields perspective on the paths that brought us here.

It’s often said that airline mergers lead to more headaches for travelers, including more flight delays, late arrivals and missed connections. But an analysis of 15 years of U.S. Department of Transportation statistics found that airline consolidation has had little negative impact on on-time performance.

In fact, two Indiana University researchers found evidence that mergers lead to long-term improvements, likely due to improved efficiencies. The research is forthcoming in the Journal of Industrial Economics.

Scientists can routinely track the activity of hundreds — sometimes even thousands — of neurons in the brain of awake animals. But how many cells do they need to monitor to truly understand how the brain functions? That question has become a hot topic among researchers doing large-scale neural recordings. The answer could shape the future of the field, influencing how scientists design experiments and new technologies.

“The question is whether we can infer something about what the larger network is doing from sampling a subset of its neurons,” says Byron Yu, a neuroscientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and an investigator with the Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain (SCGB). “What can we learn from populations of neurons that would be different from what we learn from one neuron at a time?”

“Now that we can record from 100 or 1,000 neurons at the same time, is this giving us enough of a view of what the brain is doing?” asks John Cunningham, a statistician and computational neuroscientist at Columbia University and an SCGB investigator. “Can we look at 100 neurons and say, ‘I think this is a good summary of brain activity’?”

NCEAS is excited to announce that DataONE, the California Digital Library, and DataCite received a 2-year, $747K grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. This grant will support the collection of usage and citation metrics for data objects, and launch a new service that collates and shares these metrics.

Recent reports show systems already capable of matching specialists when diagnosing skin cancer or identifying a rare eye condition responsible for around 10% of global childhood vision-loss. AI systems can even exceed human doctors in identifying certain types of lung cancer. These successes will continue to grow as the technology matures. Add to this the benefits derived from faster diagnoses, reduced costs, and a more personalized medicine, and it’s easy to see there are compelling reasons to adopt AI throughout medical practice.

Of course, there are downsides. AI raises profound questions regarding medical responsibility. Usually when something goes wrong, it is a fairly straightforward matter to determine blame. A misdiagnosis, for instance, would likely be the responsibility of the presiding physician. A faulty machine or medical device that harms a patient would likely see the manufacturer or operator held to account. What would this mean for an AI?

The dissemination of scientific findings to the wider public is increasingly important to public opinion and policy. We show that this process is influenced by the facial appearance of the scientist. We identify the traits that engender interest in a scientist’s work and the perception that they do high-quality work, and show that these face-based impressions influence both the selection and evaluation of science news. These findings inform theories of person perception and illuminate a potential source of bias in the public’s understanding of science.

Online June 8. This webinar is to highlight the work of the Big Data Center and the Innovation Measurement Initiative at Census, provide a detailed description of the dataset itself, give potential researchers information about how to access the data, and address questions raised by participants. [requires system login]

Sydney, Australia August 6-11 [$$$]

Indianapolis, IN June 20, part of NetSci 2017. [$$$]

Boston, MA August 5-6. Weekend seminar for the benefit of the Jimmy Fund and the Angioma Alliance, puts you up close with some of baseball’s top coaches, statisticians, scouts, doctors, and scientists. [$$$]

Bloomington, IN June 8-9. “Introduces teens to technology-related fields and concepts including computer programming, high performance computing, and networking as they work side by side with IU technology professionals and researchers.” [free, registration required]

“Functions for importing and handling text files and formatted text files with additional meta-data, such including ‘.csv’, ‘.tab’, ‘.json’, ‘.xml’, ‘.pdf’, ‘.doc’, ‘.docx’, ‘.xls’, ‘.xlsx’, and others.”

Recent approaches based on artificial neural networks (ANNs) have shown promising results for named-entity recognition (NER). In order to achieve high performances, ANNs need to be trained on a large labeled dataset. However, labels might be difficult to obtain for the dataset on which the user wants to perform NER: label scarcity is particularly pronounced for patient note de-identification, which is an instance of NER. In this work, we analyze to what extent transfer learning may address this issue. In particular, we demonstrate that transferring an ANN model trained on a large labeled dataset to another dataset with a limited number of labels improves upon the state-of-the-art results on two different datasets for patient note de-identification.

onverged Data Platform that converges the essential data management and application processing technologies on a single, horizontally scalable platform, announced its next major release of the MapR Ecosystem Pack (MEP) program. MEP is a broad set of open source ecosystem projects that enable big data applications running on the MapR Converged Data Platform with inter-project compatibility. Version 3.0 of MEP provides enhanced security for Spark, new Spark connectors for MapR-DB and HBase, significant updates and integrations with Drill, and a faster version of Hive.

“plotnine is a new Python library that implements R’s ggplot2. It is a better implementation than ggpy, which was the best option until now for Python users. In this article I show a few examples comparing plotnine, ggpy, and ggplot2.”

Over 15 million players have contributed millions of drawings playing Quick, Draw! These doodles are a unique data set that can help developers train new neural networks, help researchers see patterns in how people around the world draw, and help artists create things we haven’t begun to think of. That’s why we’re open-sourcing them, for anyone to play with.

Julia Stewart Lowndes, a marine data scientist at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at the University of California at Santa Barbara, published a paper this week laying out the challenges her team faces as they try to share and reuse data on the world’s oceans. Here, some key lessons.