Data Science newsletter – December 1, 2017

GROUP CURATION: N/A

When the analysis of individuals’ personal information has value to an institution, but it compromises privacy, should individuals be compensated? We describe the foundations of a market in which those seeking access to data must pay for it and individuals are compensated for the loss of privacy they may suffer.

“Genome sequencing is changing the nature of disease diagnosis, and we saw an opportunity with rare hair diseases, since these disorders tend to be poorly annotated in catalogs of genetic diseases,” says Lynn Petukhova, an assistant professor in the Department of Dermatology at the College of Physicians & Surgeons and an affiliate of the Data Science Institute, where she’s a member of the Health Analytics Center. “We thus started to organize genetic data for diagnostic sequencing in patients with rare diseases involving hair and were excited by what we discovered.”

The holidays are a time when there are constant reminders of how much Amazon dominates online shopping — the boxes stacking up on front porches, for example.

It’s also when Amazon puffs its chest out to say how big it is becoming in a different and much more profitable market: technology used by businesses.

The company’s self-confidence was on display on Wednesday at an annual conference in Las Vegas dedicated to Amazon Web Services, its cloud computing business. Amazon boasted of its leading cloud share, which analysts estimate is more than 44 percent of the market. And it showed a parade of big companies, like Expedia and Walt Disney, that run its software inside Amazon data centers.

One of the customers that Amazon revealed, the National Football League, illustrated how cloud computing is moving beyond basic capabilities like online storage. Those abilities first attracted start-ups and large corporations to the concept of renting computing services from an internet company, rather than running it all themselves.

One of the goals — and challenges — of “Internet Cultures,” a new teaching and learning initiative on campus, is to explore the unknown and unknowable. In fact, the term “internet cultures” often ends up in quotation marks because it is so malleable, according to Yale faculty members Marijeta Bozovic and Marta Figlerowicz, the co-organizers of the initiative.

The initiative, explain the organizers, is a three-pronged project that seeks to explore the internet from the perspective of the humanities. It consists of a flagship undergraduate course, “Internet Cultures: Histories, Networks, Practices,” a Whitney Humanities Center working group, and an educational outreach component.

When it comes to developing self-driving cars, experience is key to making the technology safe and ready for the road. That’s why we’ve been working to make Waymo the world’s most experienced driver. Now, Waymo’s fleet of vehicles has officially reached more than 4 million self-driving miles on public roads (for comparison, that would take the average American driver nearly 300 years to complete). These millions of miles of experience have been crucial to reaching our latest milestone: putting the world’s first fully self-driving cars on public roads without anyone in the driver’s seat.

With these 4 million miles of experience, we’ve been able to focus on varied and complex driving scenarios. For every situation we encounter on the road, we’re able to amplify and multiply the experience in simulation and on our private test track.

H2O.AI started almost six years ago with a mission to simplify and democratize artificial intelligence. Today the company announced a $40M Series C round.

Nvidia and Wells Fargo led the round with participation from New York Life, Crane Venture Partners, Nexus Venture Partners and Transamerica Ventures. Today’s investment brings the total raised so far to $75 million. The last round was for $20M almost exactly two years ago.

A new $250 million venture fund from Optum, the health services and analytics arm of UnitedHealthcare, will offer innovative big data and artificial intelligence start-ups the opportunity to grow quickly in a crowded, highly competitive market, the company announced this week.

Optum Ventures will invest in promising entrepreneurs focused on improving the healthcare system in measurable ways while leveraging big data analytics and emerging technologies like machine learning and AI.

Researchers at Columbia University and the New York Genome Center have developed a method to quickly and accurately identify people and cell lines from their DNA. The technology could have multiple applications, from identifying victims in a mass disaster to analyzing crime scenes. But its most immediate use could be to flag mislabeled or contaminated cell lines in cancer experiments, a major reason that studies are later invalidated. The discovery is described in the latest issue of the journal eLife.

“Our method opens up new ways to use off-the-shelf technology to benefit society,” said the study’s senior author Yaniv Erlich, a computer science professor at Columbia Engineering, an adjunct core member at NYGC, and a member of Columbia’s Data Science Institute. “We’re especially excited about the potential to improve cell-authentication in cancer research and potentially speed up the discovery of new treatments.”

Prognos, the healthcare AI company that was known as Medivo until a major pivot in January, has raised $20.5 million in new funding according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. Cigna, Guardian Life Insurance, Hermed, Hikma Pharmaceuticals, Maywic, Merck Global Health Innovation Fund, and Safeguard Scientifics all contributed to the round, which brings the company’s total funding to $42 million.

As Medivo, the company was a participant in StartUp Health’s inaugural class and one of the first serial acquirers in the mobile health space, snapping up WellApps and OnTrack in 2012 and 2013, respectively. The company’s original mission was a patient-facing one: Medivo aimed to make it easier for patients to access and understand their lab results.

Whether they end up in industrial, governmental, business, or academic settings, college graduates need plenty of skills beyond an ability to solve problem sets.

BoF and Google announced a partnership designed to explore and demonstrate the potential applications of artificial intelligence in fashion, and begin a dialogue between the industry and one of the global leaders in machine learning. In its first instance, the partnership has prompted a series of experiments with data sets from BoF’s Fashion Week coverage, the early fruits of which were unveiled before VOICES attendees here in Oxfordshire.

Surge pricing could be coming to every parking meter in San Francisco in 2018 under a plan being considered by the Municipal Transportation Agency.

Under the proposal, each of the city’s 30,200 meters would be subject to hourly rates that vary depending on demand. The charges would fluctuate block by block and by time of day. For example, a neighborhood with a lot of restaurants might see higher meter rates during evenings than during other times of the day.

Work is moving fast and furious in the Livermore Computing Complex at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), where siting and installation for Sierra, the Lab’s next advanced technology high-performance supercomputer, is kicking into high gear.

Trucks began delivering racks and hardware over the summer for what will eventually be a 125-petaFLOPs (floating point operations per second) peak performance machine, projected to provide four to six times the sustained performance of the Lab’s current workhorse system, Sequoia. Sierra is scheduled for acceptance in fiscal year 2018, and has involved the labor of hundreds of Laboratory and vendor employees.

Diane Bryant, the former head of Intel Corp.’s data center business, is joining Alphabet as Google Cloud’s chief operating officer.

Bryant, who was a high profile leader at Intel, is retiring from the chipmaker effective Dec. 1. She’s not been at Intel since taking a leave of absence in May to attend to a personal family matter. At the time, the company said she would return to the chipmaker in a new leadership capacity after six to eight months.

Bryant headed the data business since 2012 and had been with Intel for 32 years. Diane Greene, senior vice president of Google Cloud, announced the move in a blog post.

GE Healthcare has partnered with Nvidia to fast-track artificial intelligence adoption in healthcare and with Intel to boost digital imaging. … GE Healthcare also announced on Sunday a separate partnership with Intel, which is aimed at boosting patient care and reducing costs for hospitals and health systems using digital imaging solutions, deployed via edge and cloud. Together, the companies aim to offer greater hospital efficiency through increased asset performance, reduced patient risk and dosage exposure – with faster image processing – and expedited time to diagnosis and treatment.

Goteborg, Sweden, and Online “On December 9, the world’s leading scientists, experts, and opinion leaders will gather in Gothenberg, Sweden, for thought-provoking conversations on the future of truth as part of the 2017 Nobel Week Dialogue. Robbert Dijkgraaf, Director and Leon Levy Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, will give a lecture on The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge, recently published by Princeton University Press.”

New Haven, CT Mary deBree, head of the content policy team at Facebook, will discuss “Facebook: Building an Informed Community” at the annual YHACK hackathon.
The event will take place at 8 p.m. on Friday, December 1 at Payne Whitney Gym (70 Tower Pky). [free]

“Welcome to the home page of the book “Algorithm Design: Parallel and Sequential” book by Umut A. Acar and Guy E. Blelloch, a book being developed for the course “15-210: Parallel and Sequenctial Data Structures and Algorithms” at Carnegie Mellon University. The book is currently in draft form and is copyrighted by the authors.”

“Win-Vector LLC is proud to introduce two important new tool families (with documentation) in the 0.5.0 version of seplyr (also now available on CRAN)”

“I had a working, short script that took 3 1/2 minutes to run. While this may be fine if you only need to run it once, I needed to run it hundreds of time for simulations. My first attempt to do so ended about four hours after I started the code, with 400 simulations left to go, and I knew I needed to get some help.”

“This post documents the iterative process of improving the performance of the function, culminating in a runtime of .64 seconds for 10,000 iterations, a speed-up of more than 100,000x.”

“Since we released AIY Voice Kit, we’ve been inspired by the thousands of amazing builds coming in from the maker community. Today, the AIY Team is excited to announce our next project: the AIY Vision Kit — an affordable, hackable, intelligent camera.”

“We are undergoing a dramatic increase in the complexity of techniques for analyzing data, doing scientific research, and sharing our work with others. In early 2016, the Binder project was announced, attempting to connect these three components. A blogpost in eLife described a vision where scientists could specify dependencies along with a collection of Jupyter notebooks. Binder builds a Docker image from these dependencies, and provides a URL where any user in the world can instantly recreate this environment.”