Data Science newsletter – March 22, 2019

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Forensic genealogists at Parabon NanoLabs are using DNA databases to solve cold cases faster than anyone could have imagined. But how will their techniques hold up in court?

I and my fellow moderators are seeing more and more of this behavior. It wastes our time and the time of your colleagues

Laws like Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, which require companies to obtain consumers’ opt-in consent before using their data for targeted ads, could benefit large, consumer-facing businesses while harming smaller ad-tech companies, Federal Trade Commission Chairman Joseph Simons suggested Wednesday.

Speaking at an Association of National Advertisers conference, Simons said the agency had told Congress it was “conceivable” that tougher privacy laws governing targeted advertising would result in less competition.

After years of criticism, Facebook announced on Tuesday that it would stop allowing advertisers in key categories to show their messages only to people of a certain race, gender or age group.

The company said that anyone advertising housing, jobs or credit — three areas where federal law prohibits discrimination in ads — would no longer have the option of explicitly aiming ads at people on the basis of those characteristics.

The New York Police Department (NYPD) recently unveiled a new digital tool that it says can sift through police reports to help officers spot patterns of crimes potentially committed by the same criminals.

The NYPD says the program, dubbed Patternizr, can save time and help its investigators detect patterns in burglaries, robberies, and grand larcenies they might not have noticed by manually combing through the tens of thousands of reports the department receives every year. While the NYPD employs civilian crime analysts who focus on such tasks, it’s still a laborious task, and it can be hard for analysts to familiarize themselves with reports produced in different precincts from the ones where they work.

Computer science undergraduate seniors studying in the United States outperform similar students in China, India and Russia, according to new Stanford-led research.

Graduate students at the University of Dayton will soon be able to earn a certificate in autonomous systems.

The university announced the new certificate program March 19, and students are now able to enroll in classes for the program for the fall 2019 semester. The Graduate Certificate in Autonomous Systems will “prepare industry professionals and master’s degree students to meet the growing demand for expertise in automated decision-making systems and artificial intelligence,” according to a release from UD.

Advanced registration began on Monday, and the availability of CIS classes continues to be a hot-button topic among students.

In the past few years, the number of CIS majors at Penn has risen from 400 to about 1,000 students. But at the same time, the number of seats available in many of the Computer and Information Science Department’s most popular courses has remained constant or only slightly increased.

Researchers at New York University are investigating an AI-driven technique that promises much higher precision than today’s tests. In a newly published paper on Arxiv.org (“Deep Neural Networks Improve Radiologists’ Performance in Breast Cancer Screening“), they describe a deep convolutional neural network — a class of machine learning algorithm commonly used in image classification — that notches an area under the ROC curve (AUC) of 0.895 in predicting the presence of a cancerous breast tumor. Moreover, they claim that when averaged with the probability of malignancy predicted by a radiologist from the AI system’s results, the AUC is higher than either method achieves separately.

The company behind the WeWork real-estate empire is starting a “future cities” initiative and has hired former Waze and Google executive Di-Ann Eisnor to run it. According to the We Company, Eisnor and her team of engineers, architects, data scientists, biologists, and economists will create products and partner with local groups around the world to help address problems spurred by globalization, urbanization, and climate change.

If the concept sounds a bit abstract and more than a tad ambitious, consider its source. We Company CEO Adam Neumann unveiled the company’s new brand in January with a mission to “elevate the world’s consciousness.” WeLive, its co-living arm, wants to “build a world where no one feels alone.” And WeGrow, its education group, has a stated mission to “unleash every human’s superpowers.”

The hyperscalers and cloud builders of the world build things that often look and feel like supercomputers if you squint your eyes a little, but if you look closely, you can often see some pretty big differences. And one of them is that their machines are not engineered for maximum performance at all costs, but rather with an optimal balance between performance and cost.

That, in a nutshell, is why social networking giant Facebook, one of the largest AI users in the world, does not just put in a massive order for HGX-1 and HGX-2 systems from Nvidia – the hyperscale versions of the DGX family of systems from the GPU accelerator maker – for its machine learning training and call it a day.

Organic things can carry coded messages about their home environments. Tree rings can tell scientists what the atmosphere was like when the tree was young. Lichens can reveal local air pollution levels. Now, scientists in Canada report that honey carries a message, too.

A survey of urban beehives around Vancouver, which was published last week in Nature Sustainability, showed that the hives’ honey contained minute levels of lead, especially downtown and near the city’s port. The readings suggest that honey can be a sensitive indicator of air quality.

Fei-Fei Li heard the crackle of a cat’s brain cells a couple of decades ago and has never forgotten it. Researchers had inserted electrodes into the animal’s brain and connected them to a loudspeaker, filling a lab at Princeton with the eerie sound of firing neurons. “They played the symphony of a mammalian visual system,” she told an audience Monday at Stanford, where she is now a professor.

The music of the brain helped convince Li to dedicate herself to studying intelligence—a path that led the physics undergraduate to specializing in artificial intelligence, and helping catalyze the recent flourishing of AI technology and use cases like self-driving cars. These days, though, Li is concerned that the technology she helped bring to prominence may not always make the world better.

Her Stanford speech marked the opening of the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, or HAI, which will work on topics such as how to ensure algorithms make fair decisions in government or finance, and what new regulations may be required on AI applications.

“The average age of a gunshot victim in Chicago is about 27 years old. Everybody thinks it’s younger, and that means that gun violence prevention efforts are not nearly as targeted and effective as they could be.”

Sociology professor Andrew Papachristos has been interested in criminal justice ever since childhood, when his Greek immigrant parents were the victims of gang violence on Chicago’s North Side. Now, his research applies public health concepts and network science to map gun violence in U.S. cities, in an effort to save lives and craft more effective long-term prevention policies.

Future Cities Canada, a national initiative aiming to accelerate the transformation of open smart cities, has launched The Community Solutions Network, a new platform for communities across Canada to connect and promote excellence in the creation of smart cities.

The network is being led by Evergreen, a national non-profit and Future Cities’ Canada’s spearhead. Evergreen is collaborating with technical partners like OpenNorth, a company that builds websites to promote government transparency and public participation. Evergreen intends to help municipal and community leaders traverse the open smart cities landscape with consultative services and event-based programs.

University Park, PA March 29, starting at 11:15 a.m. “Penn State alumnus Jay Yonamine, head of data science and global patents at Google, will deliver a lecture titled ‘A History of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.'” [free]

Pittsburgh, PA April 4-6 at Carnegie Mellon University. “This year WiDS Pittsburgh @CMU will be a three-day event, starting with a CMU New York panel on Data Science in the Finance Industry – Trends and Opportunities, continuing with a social kickoff, and finishing with a day of engaging, broadly accessible talks on current work in data science.” [$$]

We present a benchmark for studying generalization in deep reinforcement learning (RL). Systematic empirical evaluation shows that vanilla deep RL algorithms generalize better than specialized deep RL algorithms designed specifically for generalization. In other words, simply training on varied environments is so far the most effective strategy for generalization. The code can be found at https://github.com/sunblaze-ucb/rl-generalization and the full paper is at https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.12282.

This document aims to track the progress in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and give an overview of the state-of-the-art (SOTA) across the most common NLP tasks and their corresponding datasets.