Data Science newsletter – September 5, 2018

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For the past year, select Google advertisers have had access to a potent new tool to track whether the ads they ran online led to a sale at a physical store in the U.S. That insight came thanks in part to a stockpile of Mastercard transactions that Google paid for.

But most of the two billion Mastercard holders aren’t aware of this behind-the-scenes tracking. That’s because the companies never told the public about the arrangement.

Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Mastercard Inc. brokered a business partnership during about four years of negotiations, according to four people with knowledge of the deal, three of whom worked on it directly. The alliance gave Google an unprecedented asset for measuring retail spending, part of the search giant’s strategy to fortify its primary business against onslaughts from Amazon.com Inc. and others.

Widespread application of artificial intelligence in health care has been anticipated for half a century. For most of that time, the dominant approach to artificial intelligence was inspired by logic: researchers assumed that the essence of intelligence was manipulating symbolic expressions, using rules of inference. This approach produced expert systems and graphical models that attempted to automate the reasoning processes of experts. In the last decade, however, a radically different approach to artificial intelligence, called deep learning, has produced major breakthroughs and is now used on billions of digital devices for complex tasks such as speech recognition, image interpretation, and language translation. The purpose of this Viewpoint is to give health care professionals an intuitive understanding of the technology underlying deep learning. In an accompanying Viewpoint, Naylor1 outlines some of the factors propelling adoption of this technology in medicine and health care.

With the arrival of the Class of 2022, the College of Engineering now enrolls equal numbers of undergraduate women and men – the first engineering school of its size and stature to achieve this milestone.

Particular gains have been made in computer science, where female students once comprised a fraction of the department. In 2017-18, women accounted for 38 percent of computer science majors, who come from both the College of Engineering and the College of Arts and Sciences. Among this year’s incoming engineering class, 55 percent of students indicating an interest in the field are women.

American workers’ occupational status reflects that of their parents more than previously known, reaffirming more starkly that the lack of mobility in the United States is in large part due to the occupation of our parents.

American workers’ occupational status reflects that of their parents more than previously known, reaffirming more starkly that the lack of mobility in the United States is in large part due to the occupation of our parents, finds a new study by New York University’s Michael Hout.

“A lot of Americans think the U.S. has more social mobility than other western industrialized countries,” explains Hout, a sociology professor. “This makes it abundantly clear that we have less.”

The majority of AI and machine learning is built to bolster the revenue streams of corporations rather than for the interest of human welfare.

That scares me.

Verizon doesn’t sell its mobile phones or wireless plans over Amazon. Nor does it offer Fios, its high-speed internet service. But Verizon does advertise on Amazon.

On Black Friday last year, when millions of online shoppers took to Amazon in search of deals, a Verizon ad for a Google Pixel 2 phone — buy one and get a second one half off — could be seen blazing across Amazon’s home page. And on July 16, what Amazon calls Prime Day, an event with special deals for its Prime customers, Verizon again ran a variety of ads and special offers for Amazon shoppers, like a mix-and-match unlimited service plan.

Amazon, which has already reshaped and dominated the online retail landscape, is quickly gathering momentum in a new, highly profitable arena: online advertising, where it is rapidly emerging as a major competitor to Google and Facebook.

The push by the giant online retailer means consumers — even Prime customers, who pay $119 a year for access to free shipping as well as streaming music, video and discounts — are likely to be confronted by ads in places where they didn’t exist before.

For the past 15 years, I have worked in the foundations of physics, a field which has not seen progress for decades. What happened 40 years ago is that theorists in my discipline became cnvinced the laws of nature must be mathematically beautiful in specific ways. By these standards, which are still used today, a good theory should be simple, and have symmetries, and it should not have numbers that are much larger or smaller than one, the latter referred to as “naturalness.”

Based on such arguments from beauty, they predicted that protons should be able to decay. Experiments have looked for this since the 1980s, but so far not a single proton has been caught in the act. This has ruled out many symmetry-based theories. But it is easy to amend these theories so that they evade experimental constraints, hence papers continue to be written about them.

The computing directorate at the US National Science Foundation (CISE) has increased its emphasis on broadening participation in computing (BPC). (See quote below and FAQ here.) They had a pilot program where large research grants were required to include a plan to increase the participation of groups or populations underrepresented or under-served in computing. They are now expanding the program to include medium and large scale grants. The idea is to get more computing researchers nationwide focusing on BPC goals.

Uniform Resource Locators are the familiar web addresses you use every day. They are listed in the web’s DNS address book and direct browsers to the right Internet Protocol addresses that identify and differentiate web servers. In short, you navigate to WIRED.com to read WIRED so you don’t have to manage complicated routing protocols and strings of numbers. But over time, URLs have gotten more and more difficult to read and understand. As web functionality has expanded, URLs have increasingly become unintelligible strings of gibberish combining components from third-parties or being masked by link shorteners and redirect schemes. And on mobile devices there isn’t room to display much of a URL at all.

The resulting opacity has been a boon for cyber criminals who build malicious sites to exploit the confusion. They impersonate legitimate institutions, launch phishing schemes, hawk malicious downloads, and run phony web services—all because it’s difficult for web users to keep track of who they’re dealing with. Now the Chrome team says it’s time for a massive change.

Academic biomedical science has had both a long boom in its funding and a subsequent scary bust. From 1970 to 1999, NIH budgets increased 9% per year (1); from 2000 to 2004, they doubled (2, 3). In 2005 came the unmistakable bust: flat-lined NIH budgets converted the doubling into a paltry 14% increase in inflation-corrected (4) dollars over 16 years (1999–2015; Fig. 1A). But during the bust, two stealthier dangers escaped notice, their quantitative details and significance masked or denied. Universities recklessly overbuilt laboratories to fill with more scientists, just when the bust removed funding increases they needed to do science. As diminished NIH dollars made research riskier, universities required principal investigators (PIs) to earn high proportions of salary from grants, transferring much of the risk to PIs: Universities in the 1970s paid PIs about 75% “hard” salary from their own coffers; those coffers in the 21st century pay PIs much less, forcing them to corral most salary as “soft” grant money.

What if the design could instead be captured from a whiteboard and be instantly reflected in a browser? If we could do that, at the end of a design brainstorm session we would have a readymade prototype that’s already been validated by the designer, developer and perhaps even the customer.

Introducing Sketch2Code – a web based solution that uses AI to transform a picture of a hand-drawn user interface into working HTML code.

Two researchers from the University of Washington have found a way to estimate a US city’s obesity level without having to look at its inhabitants.

The duo trained an artificial intelligence algorithm to find the relationship between a city’s infrastructure and obesity levels using satellite and Street View images from Google. By understanding how city planning influences obesity, health campaigns and new construction can be coordinated to improve a city’s health, the researchers wrote in a paper published in JAMA Network Open.

Searching for educational technology (edtech) can be overwhelming. The number of products available is daunting: for example, Apple’s App Store contains more than 80,000 educational apps. And for educators, the decision has high-stakes implications for budgets and student learning.

To assist in their search, some educators turn to online edtech product summaries. But it’s hard for these summaries to keep up with the pace of technology development. Product information can quickly become out-of-date, and it can take time to review new products.

With support from a Small Business Innovation and Research grant from the U.S. Department of Education, EdSurge and SRI International are exploring whether artificial-intelligence technology can help solve this problem. We are working on building an AI-based tool that collects and analyzes information from the web to automatically update existing tool descriptions and add new products to the EdSurge Product Index, a database that helps educators identify edtech products that meet their specific needs.

London, England October 11, starting at 2 p.m., Glaziers Hall
(9 Montague Close London Bridge). “Witness firsthand how AI is impacting every facet of business. Hear from AI users and network with business analysts, data scientists, and other professionals as you discover what AI can do for your business.” [free, registration required]

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