Data Science newsletter – December 21, 2018

Newsletter features journalism, research papers, events, tools/software, and jobs for December 21, 2018

GROUP CURATION: N/A

 
 
Data Science News



Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night, and They’re Not Keeping It Secret

The New York Times; Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Natasha Singer, Michael H. Keller and Aaron Krolik


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Dozens of companies use smartphone locations to help advertisers and even hedge funds. They say it’s anonymous, but the data shows how personal it is.


An Intel Breakthrough Rethinks How Chips Are Made

WIRED, Gear, Brian Barrett


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The companies that make processors have a long-held obsession with getting smaller. The famous—and increasingly obsolete—Moore’s Law dictated the regular shrinking of chips for decades. But what happens when downsizing no longer does the trick like it once did? Rather than simply narrowing in, Intel has found a way to build up.

On Wednesday, the chip giant demonstrated its new 3-D packaging technology, called Foveros, which allows it to stack logic chips atop one another. Various methods of going vertical have boosted memory chips recently, but after years of research, Intel will be the first to bring 3-D stacking to CPU, graphics, and AI processors at scale. It’s not exactly what Gordon Moore had in mind—but it may prove even better.


Apple to build new campus in Austin and add jobs across the US

Apple


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Apple today announced a major expansion of its operations in Austin, including an investment of $1 billion to build a new campus in North Austin. The company also announced plans to establish new sites in Seattle, San Diego and Culver City and expand in cities across the United States including Pittsburgh, New York and Boulder, Colorado over the next three years, with the potential for additional expansion elsewhere in the US over time.


NIH Launches Program to Enhance Quantitative Training

American Statistical Association, Stattrack


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The Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR) was created by Congress in 1993 in recognition of the importance of behavioral and social sciences to the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) mission. Over more than two decades, the OBSSR has been instrumental in advancing and coordinating the behavioral and social sciences at the NIH.


Two IURTC venture funds invest $400,000 in marketing data technology company

Indiana University, News at IU


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The Indiana University Philanthropic Venture Fund and the Innovate Indiana Fund have invested $400,000 in Indianapolis-based Zio Inc.

Zio has created its Customer Insight Marketing Platform for brands in the retail sector. The company was co-founded by CEO Angel Morales and IU graduate Reuben Vandeventer, who is its chief data scientist. Morales said the platform creates insights into customer relationships that predict and extend a customer’s lifetime value.


Google to open artificial intelligence lab in Princeton and collaborate with University researchers

Princeton University, Office of Engineering Communications


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Two Princeton University computer science professors will lead a new Google AI lab opening in January in the town of Princeton. The lab is expected to expand New Jersey’s burgeoning innovation ecosystem by building a collaborative effort to advance research in artificial intelligence.


Amazon stares down grassroots uprising over HQ2

Axios, David McCabe and Erica Pandey


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Amazon is caught in a surprise grassroots battle with local critics who are furious that it’s been promised billions of taxpayer dollars to put jobs in New York, Arlington and Nashville, the winners of its search for a second headquarters.

Why it matters: Amazon won the top-down battle, with support from governors, mayors and economic development organizations. But it’s now confronting bottom-up outrage from activists and local lawmakers who were cut out of the bidding process.


Amazon’s vision for the future of health care is becoming clear

CNBC, Christina Farr


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Amazon made some bold first steps into health care this year.

We asked health-care experts to help us figure out where the company is going next.


Here’s How Much Money You Can Make by Selling Your Own Data

WIRED, Business, Gregory Barber


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On a recent Tuesday night, during a session of rash bedtime scrolling, I sold my Facebook data to a stranger in Buenos Aires. Reckless, maybe, but such was my newfound life as a digital vigilante. My tipping point was the Facebook hack, exposed in September, in which I—along with some 90 million other potential victims—was temporarily locked out of my account. I imagined my identity rippling across the internet, thanks to the single sign-in convenience of Facebook Connect. After a long season of leaks, hacks, and shady data pillaging, I’d had enough. I considered simply deleting my account. But then I landed on a different strategy: making a profit.

If my data is already being hawked to marketing firms, third-party apps, and political propagandists without my knowledge, I reasoned, why not benefit from the racket? Thus began an experiment in turning my personal data into crypto dough.

Appealing to people indignant over their data being abused, a new wave of companies is peddling an alluring message: Users should own their data and get a cut of its value.


Maths shows how we lose interest

Nature, Nature Behavior,


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Researchers had previously thought that the decline in the popularity of such cultural objects followed a smooth, steep curve. But analysis of the new study data revealed that a better fit was a shape called a biexponential function, which has two phases. It shows that collective memory dropped quickly, but that the subsequent decline in attention slowed considerably, and went down a much gentler slope. Although the shape was the same for each feature studied, the actual length of each phase was different. Music showed the shortest and sharpest initial decline in attention (taking 6 years) and the online biographies of the sports stars the longest (20–30 years).


Better than Ronaldo — Do we really need robots that play football?

DW, Natalia Smolentceva


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They may have failed at the World Cup this year, but Germans are still football champions — at least with robots. But why teach robots to play soccer? DW went to the University of Bonn to find out.


Inside the Raspberry Pi: The story of the $35 computer that changed the world – TechRepublic

TechRepublic, Nick Heath


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The co-creators of the credit-card-sized board reveal the many challenges they overcame to build the breakthrough machine.


This Graduate School Helped Make New York Appealing to Amazon

The New York Times, Winnie Hu


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In the rush to get to class, Eliza Harkins used to forget the things she needed most: notebooks, eyeglasses, phone charger and lunch.

So Ms. Harkins teamed up with a classmate, Sarah Le Cam, to do something about it. They came up with a device that slips inside a bag, backpack or suitcase and keeps track of items using radio-frequency identification technology. If a wallet is not returned to the bag, the device sends a cellphone alert. If the cellphone is missing, the device beeps.

The women are part of a new generation of technology whizzes emerging from Cornell Tech, a graduate school on Roosevelt Island in the East River that started with just seven students in 2013. Since then, Cornell Tech has become one of the most visible symbols of New York City’s booming technology sector — and a major selling point in the bid to persuade Amazon to build a headquarters in Queens.

 
Deadlines



RDA 13th Plenary Meeting Call for Sessions: Don’t miss the 5 January 2019 deadline

Philadelphia, PA April 2-4, 2019. Deadline for submissions is January 5, 2019.

Widening NLP Workshop 2019

Florence, Italy July 28, 2019. “The third WiNLP Workshop will be held in conjunction with ACL 2019.” Deadline for submissions is February 1, 2019.
 
Tools & Resources



[1812.04990] Causal inference, social networks, and chain graphs

arXiv, Statistics > Methodology; Elizabeth L. Ogburn, Ilya Shpitser, Youjin Lee


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Traditionally, statistical and causal inference on human subjects relies on the assumption that individuals are independently affected by treatments or exposures. However, recently there has been increasing interest in settings, such as social networks, where treatments may spill over from the treated individual to his or her social contacts and outcomes may be contagious. Existing models proposed for causal inference using observational data from networks have two major shortcomings. First, they often require a level of granularity in the data that is not often practically infeasible to collect, and second, the models are generally high-dimensional and often too big to fit to the available data. In this paper we propose and justify a parsimonious parameterization for social network data with interference and contagion. Our parameterization corresponds to a particular family of graphical models known as chain graphs. We demonstrate that, in some settings, chain graph models approximate the observed marginal distribution, which is missing most of the time points from the full data. We illustrate the use of chain graphs for causal inference about collective decision making in social networks using data from U.S. Supreme Court decisions between 1994 and 2004.


Implementing the Netflix Media Database

Medium, Netflix TechBlog; Shinjan Tiwary, Sreeram Chakrovorthy, Subbu Venkatrav, Arsen Kostenko, Yi Guo and Rohit Puri


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In the previous blog posts in this series, we introduced the Netflix Media DataBase (NMDB) and its salient “Media Document” data model. In this post we will provide details of the NMDB system architecture beginning with the system requirements — these will serve as the necessary motivation for the architectural choices we made.


Bullet Journal tips from founder Ryder Carroll

Fast Company, Ryder Carroll


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The goal when designing Collections–notes and tasks organized under a specific theme–is to maximize their functionality, legibility, and sustainability. Here’s how.


Twitter Has Finally Made It Easy to Set Your Timeline to Reverse-Chronological

Slate, Will Oremus


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Starting Tuesday, they’ll be able to toggle with a single tap between the ranked timeline—which Twitter is now calling the “home” timeline—and an unfiltered, reverse-chronological one. You’ll do that by using a “sparkle” icon that appears to the top right of your timeline. Tap it once, and your timeline will switch to reverse-chron. Tap it again, and the algorithm is back. The home timeline will appear by default when you refresh or log back in after being away for a while.

Twitter’s product lead, Keith Coleman, announced and explained the change in a Twitter thread Tuesday. The company says it should be available on platforms other than iOS in January.

 
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