Data Science newsletter – October 26, 2018

GROUP CURATION: N/A

… A shortcut to reliable psychiatric diagnoses would therefore be desirable. Justin Baker, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, and Louis-Philippe Morency, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, think they have one. As they told the International Conference on Multimodal Interaction in Boulder, Colorado, on October 19th, they believe they can extract a lot of relevant information from patients’ speech patterns.

Rather than tackle all mental illness at once, Dr Baker and Dr Morency focused on psychosis. This is the experience by a patient of hallucinations or delusions—in other words of a “reality” at variance with the general consensus of other people.

Chattanooga is the test city for new Department of Energy-funded project that leverages expertise of Vanderbilt engineers and widespread availability of 1-gigabyte Internet connection to revolutionize energy efficiency of transit providers.

Advancements in data sensors, data collection and machine learning will fuel the project, which aims to optimize schedules of bus routes, decrease stop-and-go bus driving and reduce energy consumption at a system-wide level.

Creating reusable tools that can benefit other mid-size cities is a key goal of the two-year project with the Chattanooga Area Regional Transportation Authority. Chattanooga’s existing Internet capabilities and multi-modal public transit options made the metropolitan area attractive for the research, the DOE said.

Drone swarm technology—the ability of drones to autonomously make decisions based on shared information—has the potential to revolutionize the dynamics of conflict. And we’re inching ever closer to seeing this potential unleashed. In fact, swarms will have significant applications to almost every area of national and homeland security. Swarms of drones could search the oceans for adversary submarines. Drones could disperse over large areas to identify and eliminate hostile surface-to-air missiles and other air defenses. Drone swarms could potentially even serve as novel missile defenses, blocking incoming hypersonic missiles. On the homeland security front, security swarms equipped with chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) detectors, facial recognition, anti-drone weapons, and other capabilities offer defenses against a range of threats.

But while drones swarms represent a major technological advancement, unlocking their full potential will require developing capabilities centered around four key areas: swarm size, customization, diversity, and hardening.

In the course of a single generation, Amazon has grown from fledgling online bookseller to one of the most valuable and powerful corporations in modern history. The empire of CEO Jeff Bezos has grown so vast that critics, overseas regulators, and Washington politicians are all now wondering whether the company has become an unstoppable force, and what, if anything, is capable of reining in its reach. A recent spat with Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) resulted in a minimum wage hike for tens of thousands of employees, but Amazon still operates largely without any meaningful checks on its power even as it aggressively expands into physical retail, the smart home, and warehouse and aviation robotics.

Yet despite having a hand in so many different industries, consumers largely trust Amazon with everything from their personal information and buying habits to the literal conversations they have in their own homes. According to a study The Verge conducted in partnership with consulting firm Reticle Research last year, Amazon is the most-liked and trusted technology brand by a wide margin. One likely explanation there is that the company has a strong relationship with its customers, thanks in part to its zealous commitment to low prices and a seemingly never-ending quest to make modern life more convenient.

The University of Rhode Island has opened a new lab, the school announced.

Launched at the end of September, the school’s Artificial Intelligence Lab is a “cross-disciplinary facility” housed in the Robert L. Carothers Library and Learning Commons. It utilizes an artificial intelligence supercomputer and boasts six specialized laptops for running open-source software and unwieldily data sets; a conference room, and a space with a viewing window are also a part of the new area. Additionally, it incorporates technology from the library that hosts it, such as 3D printers and other virtual reality tools.

Both funding from the University and a Champlain Foundation grant helped establish the lab.

Medical records can be hard for patients to get, even in this digital information age. But they shouldn’t be: Federal law guarantees that people have a right to see and obtain a copy of their medical records.

New evidence of barriers to exercising this right comes from a study of 83 leading hospitals by researchers at Yale University. Late last year, researchers collected forms that patients use to request records from each hospital. Then, researchers called the hospitals and asked how to get records, the cost of doing so, how long it would take, the format in which information would be sent and whether the entire record would be available.

Smart watches that track health, websites that anticipate purchases, and voice-recognition systems that respond to commands are a few of the ways machine learning has transformed daily living.

Yet many economists haven’t embraced the artificial intelligence technology because the predictive algorithms that make Siri smarter over time can’t answer questions about correlation and causation yet. However, Stanford University Graduate School of Business professor Susan Athey recently told MIT Sloan’s Andrew McAfee, the co-director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, she believes economists are gradually acknowledging machine learning’s potential to transform the way they work. [audio, 1:01:30]

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has joined the chorus of voices warning that data itself is being weaponized against people and societies — arguing that the trade in digital data has exploded into a “data industrial complex”.

Cook did not namecheck the adtech elephants in the room: Google, Facebook and other background data brokers that profit from privacy-hostile business models. But his target was clear.

“Our own information — from the everyday to the deeply personal — is being weaponized against us with military efficiency,” warned Cook. “These scraps of data, each one harmless enough on its own, are carefully assembled, synthesized, traded and sold.

Studies that fail to find a positive result are often filed away, never to see the light of day, which leads to a publication bias that compromises the credibility of scientific literature1.

An analysis now suggests that registering and peer-reviewing study protocols before research is conducted could improve this ‘file-drawer problem’, and help to correct the existing publication bias towards positive findings.

Researchers from Cardiff University, UK, report what they say is the first analysis of whether the practice is effective. They find that studies for which protocols were pre-registered are much more likely than the general scientific literature to report null findings2. The analysis was posted on 17 October to the PsyArXiv repository.

A few days ago, MongoDB, Inc changed the license of its widely-used database software to the “Server Side Public License” or SSPL. They also submitted the SSPL for review by the Open Source Initiative, where it is under active discussion.

The key concept in the SSPL is that it is a “super AGPL,” designed to make it difficult for commercial entities to build services around the underlying software. This goal was made explicit by Eliot Horowitz, the CTO of MongoDB.

Baylor University today announced a gift of $3.5 million from Mark and Jennifer McCollum of Houston to create the McCollum Family Chair in Data Sciences within Baylor’s nationally ranked School of Engineering and Computer Science (ECS).

The $3.5 million gift is part of a larger $11.5 million commitment from the McCollums to Give Light, the University’s upcoming comprehensive philanthropy campaign.

Manufacturing technology, the various devices and systems that enable the production of manufactured goods, is evolving rapidly. Due to its digital nature, the accelerated pace at which manufacturing technology advances often makes it difficult for engineers to incorporate the latest technology and production processes into product designs.

Researchers at Penn State have received a $424,743 grant from the National Science Foundation to investigate how the size and quality of datasets created by digital models relate to machine learning and how this impacts the support provided to engineering designers.

It happens all too often each summer: Yet another litany of weekend shootings in Chicago appears in the news.

A new Arizona State University and Purdue University research study examines this phenomenon. In it, the authors sifted through data on almost 6 million reported crimes in Chicago between 2001 to 2014 to try to tease out factors that might promote or suppress various types of crime.

“The results were interesting,” said Sherry Towers, a research professor with the Simon A. Levin Mathematical, Computational and Modeling Sciences Center at ASU. “We found that most types of crime in Chicago had very distinct patterns by time of year, time of day, weekday and even holidays.”

San Francisco, CA October 29, starting at 5 p.m., Pinterest Labs (651 Brannan Street). [registration required]

San Francisco, CA November 5, starting at 6 p.m., University of California, San Francisco (550 16th Street, Mission Hall 1407). “Open mHealth is excited to host a meetup to discuss how the Open mHealth data standard is evolving towards improving interoperability as well as partnerships with the FHIR community.” [free, registration required]

Los Angeles, CA March 17-20. “ACM IUI 2019 is the 24th annual meeting of the intelligent interfaces community and serves as a premier international forum for reporting outstanding research and development on intelligent user interfaces.” [registration required]