Newsletter features journalism, research papers, events, tools/software, and jobs for September 12, 2017
GROUP CURATION: N/A
Data Science News
University Data Science News
Harvard offered Chelsea Manning a visiting fellowship as part of the Kennedy School’s commitment to engage “with people with fundamentally different worldviews…to become better public leaders”. Then Kennedy School Dean Douglas Elmendorf wrote, “I now think that designating Chelsea Manning as a Visiting Fellow was a mistake” since some people find her actions “abhorrent” and some people believe that being a Visiting Fellow is an honor. Note that he took pains to clarify, “we do not view the title of ‘Fellow’ as conveying a special honor”. If you ever need an example of a text that threads the needle, this is it.
University of Michigan is incubating Mcity, a project that will allow bicycles to communicate with cars and trucks to prevent fatalities. It’s a new project so details haven’t been worked out, but it is an excellent example of using new technology for positive impact. It’s the good news of the week.
University of Vermont researchers estimate that by 2050, climate change could reduce the amount of territory suitable for growing coffee in Latin America by up to 88 percent. Yikes. The bees that pollinate coffee plants, which makes the beans more uniform, won’t tolerate higher temperatures even where the plants will. This ecological approach to studying climate change demonstrates how complicated understanding these impacts is. Please, send more funding those of you who can afford to do so.
Cornell-Technion is having its big, splashy debut after operating a little under the radar for several years. What I find most watch-worthy – besides the fact that I’m always watching for great research – is the way they structured their masters program. According to Dean Huttenlocher they, “have this tightly integrated Studio curriculum, where students in engineering and computer and information science, business and law spend a quarter to a third of their curriculum together.” Sounds smart to break down the intellectual silos.
UC-Davis engineers have built an electronic chip “potentially” capable of transmitting tens of gigabits of data per second. Omeed Momeni, and phd student Hossein Jalili are using a phased array antenna system that works well in high frequencies. This type of technology is hugely important for internet of things applications, including drones and autonomous vehicles.
David Brumley is taking a leave of absence from Carnegie Mellon University’s CyLab to work on a startup. In his absence, Doug Sickerwill take over. He is already Head of the Department of Engineering and Public Policy and Thomas Lord Chair of Engineering. I feel like this might have been a time to let someone without several heavy existing commitments step in, but I have absolutely no eyes on the ground at CMU. Maybe there was nobody available less committed than Sicker.
Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory won an NSF grant (in collaboration with Anaconda) to build an open source suite of tools for storing data, serving data, and efficiently computing climate change models called Pangeo.
University of Rochester announced creation of the Rochester Data Science Consortium in partnership with the Harris Corp. and $20 million support from the Wegman Foundation.
Last week I announced the PERVADE grant from the NSF to the University of Maryland to work on data science ethics. I should have noted the grant went to five other universities, too: Princeton, UC-Irvine, University of Colorado-Boulder, Data & Society Research Institute, and UW-Milwaukee. Thank you, Katie Shilton, for sending in the correction.
UC-Berkeley robotics researchers including Jeff Mahler in Ken Goldberg’s lab are using neural networks to give their bots the ability to grasp and lift objects they haven’t seen before, no matter what their shape. Commercializing this technology will likely reduce the number of jobs held by humans in certain types of work, especially in warehouses and packing.
Extra Extra
Cambridge University examiners can no longer read students’ messy hand-writing and are considering moving to allow students to submit exams via laptop. Personally, I have seen students go incredible lengths to cheat so I would not allow these computers to have bluetooth or wifi capacity, but that’s just me.
Mike Place has a nice explainer on what it takes to be a data scientist after getting a PhD in a science field. Git is not enough.
Swiss molecular biologist Gianpaolo Rando is bringing fast DNA testing to all kinds of questionable food situations, asking, for instance, What’s really in that tuna roll?
Princeton CITP, Freedom to Tinker blog, Harry Kalodner
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The Bitcoin blockchain — currently 140GB and growing — contains a massive amount of data that can give us insights into the Bitcoin ecosystem, including how users, businesses, and miners operate. Today we’re announcing BlockSci, an open-source software tool that enables fast and expressive analysis of Bitcoin’s and many other blockchains, and an accompanying working paper that explains its design and applications. Our Jupyter notebook demonstrates some of BlockSci’s capabilities.
Despite his protestations to the contrary, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been acting like someone planning to run for office. He hired a pollster, visited a Detroit auto plant and other swing-state locations, and gave a high-profile commencement speech.
Meanwhile, Facebook has been under intense criticism for its role as a vector of misinformation in recent elections. This week, Facebook admitted that Russian accounts purchased $100,000 in political ads in 2015 and 2016. This disclosure comes only two months after the platform refused to disclose who is paying for advertising on the platform and where they’re running.
This confluence of events demonstrates the urgent need for greater transparency about how Facebook is already being used for electoral influence, particularly its algorithms and advertising features. Facebook must be regulated like the broadcast medium that it has become. And if Zuckerberg wants to run for office, he should be leading the charge for meaningful transparency.
Created by Benedict Hubener, Stephanie Lee and Kelvyn Marte at the CIID with the help from Andreas Refsgaard and Gene Kogan, ‘The Classyfier’ is a table that detects the beverages people consume around it and chooses music that fits the situation accordingly.
A built in microphone catches characteristic sounds and then compares these sounds to a catalogue of pre-trained examples. The Classyfier identifies it as belonging to one of three classes; hot beverages, wine or beer. Each class has its own playlist that one can navigate through by knocking on the table.
Government Data Science News
NASA is on an upswing. After the announcement that they will get a new head (though one who is skeptical about climate science), they are deploying neural nets to find better landing sites on the moon. Right now they are using the data for lunar rovers, but another moon landing would sure be cool. Maybe it could even be used to inspire collective introspection about the pale blue dot?
The Office of Internet Freedom (OIF), which is part of the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors is looking for vendors who can help the US protect itself against internet censorship by foreign governments. One of their four main objectives is to provide client software that allows users in target countries “to circumvent the censorship of the internet within their country.” All I can say is: 1) who knew there was an Office of Internet Freedom? 2) Why aren’t they doing more to keep the internet operating freely and fairly in this country (e.g. maintain net neutrality and hold companies that want to have the respect and privilege that comes with holding Americans credit histories responsible for their missteps…Equifax!) and 3) What could go wrong when allowing an end run around foreign countries’ laws? I’m all for open access to information, so that’s not my issue. I simply find this a provocative move from a little known agency and I’m pulling out the popcorn to see how this goes down?
Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee is opening a giant new supercomputer next year, called Summit. One thing I respect about Oak Ridge and US governmental agencies in charge of technology is that they don’t engage in any “biggest computer in the world!!!” hyperbolic cheerleadership. (China and Japan may wish to listen up.) It’s far more meaningful to talk about who gets to use it and for what purposes. Projects likely to hit the Summit include climate modeling, genomics, drug discovery, and materials engineering. One reason it’s in Tennessee is to take advantage of the ample supply of electricity from the 19 hydroelectric dams and two nuclear power plants in the area. Cooling Summit takes as much energy as keeping 12,000 households full of Tennesseeans air-conditioned.
Tom Frieden, former head of the CDClaunched a new global public health company, Resolve, that has raised $225 million. It will focus on heart disease and stroke as well as on increasing the network strength of labs in low- and middle-income countries struggling to fight infectious disease. This is a crucial effort as climate change expands the range of vector-born illnesses. Life after government service looks bright, indeed.
The US Federal Government has issued a ban on Kaspersky Lab cybersecurity software, worrying that data from the perpetual scanning could be finding its way into Russian government hands. Kaspersky Lab is based in Russia.
Russian President Vladimir Putin in a somewhat unrelated speech (maybe not so unrelated) said, “Artificial intelligence is the future not only of Russia but of all of mankind … Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.”
Pollinators such as bees play a key part of producing the beans that go into your morning cup of coffee.
In fact, they are responsible for about 20 to 25 percent of coffee production by increasing the plants’ yield, Taylor Ricketts, the director of the University of Vermont’s Gund Institute for Environment, tells The Two-Way. Bees actually increase the quality of the beans by making their size more uniform.
But climate change is threatening both pollinators and the areas where coffee can grow. A new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says it is the first to model the impact of climate change on both coffee and pollinators.
The researchers projected that by 2050, climate change could reduce the amount of ground usable to grow coffee in Latin America by up to 88 percent. That’s significantly higher than previous estimates.
Does Phase 1 make good on the initial promise and vision of “a new kind of university campus” – one that has “broken the mold” in terms of graduate education and curriculum?
It’s definitely new – I don’t know about “breaking the mold.” That sounds like we set out to break something, which isn’t what we set out to do. Various things about Cornell Tech are different from graduate programs elsewhere. At the master’s level, we have this tightly integrated Studio curriculum, where students in engineering and computer and information science, business and law spend a quarter to a third of their curriculum together. You don’t see that kind of integration at the graduate level in any programs anywhere in the world, that I know of. We also have the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, which has two master’s programs in information science focused on health tech and connective media. These two-year programs allow students to get really technical within the context of a specific industry. We have a global view in our educational programs, and I think at the master’s level, there are a lot of aspects of the campus that are really revolutionary.
arXiv, Computer Science > Social and Information Networks; Tahora H. Nazer, Guoliang Xue, Yusheng Ji, Huan Liu
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The success of a disaster relief and response process is largely dependent on timely and accurate information regarding the status of the disaster, the surrounding environment, and the affected people. This information is primarily provided by first responders on-site and can be enhanced by the firsthand reports posted in real-time on social media. Many tools and methods have been developed to automate disaster relief by extracting, analyzing, and visualizing actionable information from social media. However, these methods are not well integrated in the relief and response processes and the relation between the two requires exposition for further advancement. In this survey, we review the new frontier of intelligent disaster relief and response using social media, show stages of disasters which are reflected on social media, establish a connection between proposed methods based on social media and relief efforts by first responders, and outline pressing challenges and future research directions.
For quite some time, employees at the Cupertino-based firm were not allowed to publish research, while experts at other leading tech companies, such as Google, Microsoft and IBM, have been free to share papers with the scientific community.
“We come from a community where we share ideas and get credit for it and a lot of us would be very unhappy to give that up,” Noah Goodman, a Stanford University professor of computer science told The Wall Street Journal earlier this week. Goodman currently works with a research division of Uber Technologies.
Apple has loosened up as of late — the company launched a public blog in July and recently permitted its researchers to speak at several conferences on artificial intelligence, according to the Journal. Tom Gruber, co-creator of Apple’s Siri, gave a TED talk in April.
In a paper this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr Venter and his colleagues describe the process, which they call “phenotype-based genomic identification”. The group took an ethnically diverse group of 1,061 people of different ages and sequenced their genomes. They also took high-resolution, three-dimensional images of their faces, and measured their eye and skin colour, age, height and weight. This information was used as a “training set” to develop an algorithm capable of working out what people would look like on the basis of their genes.
Applying this algorithm to unknown genomes, the team was able to generate images that could be matched to real photographs for eight out of ten people.
A novel, high-frequency electronic chip potentially capable of transmitting tens of gigabits of data per second — a rate that is orders of magnitude above the fastest internet speeds available today — has been developed by engineers at the University of California, Davis.
Omeed Momeni, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC Davis, and doctoral student Hossein Jalili designed the chip using a phased array antenna system. Phased array systems funnel the energy from multiple sources into a single beam that can be narrowly steered and directed to a specific location.
“Phased arrays are pretty difficult to create, especially at higher frequencies,” Momeni said. “We are the first to achieve this much bandwidth at this frequency.”
The Office of Internet Freedom (OIF), part the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors, is looking for vendors that have systems and software to counter internet censorship by foreign governments, according to a notice published Sept. 6.
New York, NY October 30-31. “Join us for two days of trainings, talks, and panel discussions with leading experts, investors, academics, and entrepreneurs in artificial intelligence (AI).” [$$$]
New York, NY FAT* is an international and interdisciplinary peer-reviewed conference that seeks to publish and present work examining the fairness, accountability, and transparency of algorithmic systems. Conference will take place February 23-24, 2018. Deadline for paper registration is September 29.
The student prize is open to teams of undergraduate students and individual graduate students who have inventions in categories that represent significant sectors of the economy; healthcare, transportation, food and agriculture, or consumer devices. The deadline to apply is September 29.
In this post, we spotlight projects from NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP). In particular, the Urban Science Intensive Capstones, a program led by Professor Constantine Kontokosta, has become a mechanism to connect student teams to local government needs. MetroLab Executive Director Ben Levine sat down with Professor Kontokosta and this year’s two Capstone finalists to talk about the program and the finalists’ projects.
Anaconda is interested in scaling the scientific python ecosystem. My current focus is on out-of-core, parallel, and distributed machine learning. This series of posts will introduce those concepts, explore what we have available today, and track the community’s efforts to push the boundaries.
“To allow the creation of new and useful visualizations, we announce the release of a consistent set of APIs that allows developers to add custom visualization plugins to TensorBoard. We hope that developers use this API to extend TensorBoard and ensure that it covers a wider variety of use cases.”