Data Science newsletter – October 5, 2018

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The University’s Data Science Institute recently incorporated the new Center for Data Ethics and Justice — founded by the University’s Bioethics Chair Jarrett Zigon — in an effort to ramp up its focus on ethics in analysis and interpretation of data. This partnership has created a new course for graduate data science students that specifically addresses ethical issues related to the handling of data and advancement in technology.

The DSI — located in Dell 1 and Dell 2 — is a research and academic institute that offers masters programs in data science as well as dual degrees in partnership with the Darden School of Business, the Medical School and the Nursing School.

Phillip Bourne — director of the DSI and professor of biomedical engineering — regards ethics as a pillar of their graduate program. He said few data scientists have formal training in ethics, and the partnership with the Center will equip students with the tools to make ethical decisions throughout their careers.

Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) believe that the best approach is to focus not only on individual claims, but on the news sources themselves. Using this tack, they’ve demonstrated a new system that uses machine learning to determine if a source is accurate or politically biased.

“If a website has published fake news before, there’s a good chance they’ll do it again,” says postdoc Ramy Baly, the lead author on a new paper about the system. “By automatically scraping data about these sites, the hope is that our system can help figure out which ones are likely to do it in the first place.”

Carnegie Mellon University appointed Tom Mitchell as the interim dean of the school of computer science this week as the university searches for a permanent dean to take over the role.

Mitchell, who worked at CMU for the past 30 years, said he considers the university the most productive place for generating new ideas in computer science. He said he took the temporary role as a way to give back to the university that he said has contributed so much to his career.

During his time as interim dean, Mitchell said he hopes to keep a strong focus on the new undergraduate artificial intelligence program.

Give Boston University this: The school’s new data sciences center on Commonwealth Avenue isn’t going to resemble the many glassy, boxy buildings that have gone up across town in recent years.

Not at all.

When the university this week released images of the 17-story tower it wants to build on a parking lot west of Kenmore Square, people took notice. And then quickly formed an opinion. It’s safe to say that almost no one is going to be neutral on the BU center.

For journalists, researchers and the general public, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention serves as an authoritative source of information about Americans’ health, including estimates of how many people are killed or injured by guns. The agency’s most recent figures include a worrying uptick: Between 2015 and 2016, the number of Americans nonfatally injured by a firearm jumped by 37 percent, rising from about 85,000 to more than 116,000. It was the largest single-year increase recorded in more than 15 years.

But the gun injury estimate is one of several categories of CDC data flagged with an asterisk indicating that, according to the agency’s own standards, it should be treated as “unstable and potentially unreliable.” In fact, the agency’s 2016 estimate of gun injuries is more uncertain than nearly every other type of injury it tracks. Even its estimates of BB gun injuries are more reliable than its calculations for the number of Americans wounded by actual guns.

An analysis performed by FiveThirtyEight and The Trace, a nonprofit news organization covering gun violence in America,1 found that the CDC’s report of a steady increase in nonfatal gun injuries is out of step with a downward trend we found using data from multiple independent public health and criminal justice databases. That casts doubt on the CDC’s figures and the narrative suggested by the way those numbers have changed over time.

A coalition of the four largest U.S. wireless providers calling itself the Mobile Authentication Taskforce recently announced an initiative named Project Verify. This project would let users log in to apps and websites with their phone instead of a password, or serve as an alternative to multi-factor authentication methods such as SMS or hardware tokens.

Any work to find a more secure and user-friendly solution than passwords is worthwhile. However, the devil is always in the details—and this project is the work of many devils we already know well. The companies behind this initiative are the same ones responsible for the infrastructure behind security failures like SIM-swapping attacks, neutrality failures like unadvertised throttling, and privacy failures like supercookies and NSA surveillance.

Research on moving user-friendly security and authentication forward must be open and vendor- and platform-neutral, not tied to any one product, platform, or industry group. It must allow users to take control of our identities, not leave them in the hands of the very same ISP companies that have repeatedly subverted our trust.

The attack by Chinese spies reached almost 30 U.S. companies, including Amazon and Apple, by compromising America’s technology supply chain, according to extensive interviews with government and corporate sources.

A few spectators for the US Open finals in New York’s Flushing Meadows last month probably weren’t smiling for the cameras.

Why not?

Because facial recognition cameras may have been scanning the seats looking for people transmitting real-time betting data to far-flung international locations, according to a disclosure earlier this year by the United States Tennis Association (USTA), the organization that runs the U.S. Open.

The USTA is “[e]xploring opportunities to utilize facial recognition software to identify known courtsiders at the U.S. Open,” wrote the USTA in an April report about tennis integrity and gambling corruption.

Microsoft is currently running an interesting set of hardware experiments. The company is taking a souped-up shipping container stuffed full of computer servers and submerging it in the ocean. The most recent round is taking place near Scotland’s Orkney Islands, and involves a total of 864 standard Microsoft data-center servers. Many people have impugned the rationality of the company that put Seattle on the high-tech map, but seriously—why is Microsoft doing this?

There are several reasons, but one of the most important is that it is far cheaper to keep computer servers cool when they’re on the seafloor. This cooling is not a trivial expense. Precise estimates vary, but currently about 5 percent of all energy consumption in the U.S. goes just to running computers—a huge cost to the economy as whole. Moreover, all that energy used by those computers ultimately gets converted into heat. This results in a second cost: that of keeping the computers from melting.

The Simons Foundation is delighted to announce the launch of the Center for Computational Mathematics (CCM), the fourth computational center launched as part of the foundation’s new Flatiron Institute. The center, led by mathematician Leslie Greengard, will develop new mathematical approaches, algorithms and software to push the boundaries of scientific computing across many disciplines.

“CCM will be a unique mix of novel mathematics and serious software development,” Greengard says. “Right now, people who do those two things don’t have a natural home, but they will at CCM.”

When former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt launched an effort to limit what kinds of scientific studies could be used to protect public health, he left out some key experts: the Environmental Protection Agency’s own Office of the Science Advisor, according to an email exchange obtained by The Washington Post.

Tom Sinks, director of the office, said in an April 24 email that “Even though OSA and I have not participated in the development of this document and I just this moment obtained it (have yet to read it), I am listed as the point of contact.”

Sinks added, accurately, that “the proposal likely touches upon three aspects of OSA work — public access to EPA funded research, human subjects research protection, and scientific integrity” — all of which fall in his area of responsibility.

Advances in computational and data sciences for data management, integration, mining, classification, filtering, visualization along with engineering innovations in medical devices have prompted demands for more comprehensive and coherent strategies to address the most fundamental questions in health care and medicine. Theory, methods, and models from artificial intelligence (AI) are changing the health care landscape in clinical and community settings and have already shown promising results in multiple applications in healthcare including, integrated health information systems, patient education, geocoding health data, social media analytics, epidemic and syndromic surveillance, predictive modeling and decision support, mobile health, and medical imaging (e.g. radiology and retinal image analyses). Health intelligence uses tools and methods from artificial intelligence and data science to provide better insights, reduce waste and wait time, and increase speed, service efficiencies, level of accuracy, and productivity in health care and medicine.

I felt a sense of déjà vu last month, reading how a prominent nutritionist had resigned from his professorship after other researchers (self-dubbed ‘data thugs’) identified problems in his work that led to more than a dozen retracted papers. Years earlier, I and a colleague, Kevin Coombes, had spent more than 1,500 hours painstakingly checking analyses and raising alarms about work by Anil Potti, a cancer researcher then based at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Our efforts eventually led to retractions, lawsuits and halted clinical trials. It is past time for the scientific community to work out how to ease these kinds of investigations.

University Park, PA Saturday, October 20, starting at 9 a.m., Penn State University (E203 Westgate Building). [registration required]5

Cambridge, MA November 8, starting at 8 a.m. “At MIT, the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and Sloan’s Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE) are joining forces to host a conference which will bring together thought leaders from academia, business leaders, economists and visionaries for an open dialogue about AI’s impact.” [$$$]

The emergence of big data has taught us that information is an extremely valuable commodity. And, as with anything of value, there are people who want to steal it. October is National Cyber Security Month, and the occasion serves as an opportune reminder that our data requires as much protection from would-be thieves as our physical valuables do.

“Let’s face it, everyone is getting hacked. From individuals to large corporations and even governments,” said Kip Bates, associate director of cyber security at UC Santa Barbara. “Our goal is to create a culture of cybersecurity awareness to protect not only our organization but the individuals who work here.”