In short, humanists have spent centuries acquiring a distinctive interpretive expertise, and they are right to feel that research on cultural history would be more meaningful if it were built on that foundation. But there is, alas, another side to this story, less likely to be popular in history and English departments. While scientists usually do a better job if they work in collaboration with humanists, it must be admitted that today they can often make genuine contributions to historical understanding with or without our assistance. “Quantitative Analysis of Culture in Millions of Digitized Books” may not have created a new field called culturomics, but it did (in collaboration with Google) help produce an interactive website that journalists and schoolteachers still use to understand linguistic trends. The project wasn’t led by humanists, but it was nonetheless one of the most consequential public humanities projects of the last decade. And this was only an early, crude example of interdisciplinary interest in the humanities. More recent publications go far beyond graphing the frequencies of words. Sociologists have theorized the function of ambiguity in literary criticism; cognitive scientists have used information theory to describe historical change; the economist Thomas Piketty stormed the best seller list with Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Harvard University Press, 2014), reinterpreting the last two centuries of history with illustrations drawn from Balzac. Humanities departments really are no longer alone.
Princeton University, Center for Internet Technology & Policy, Nathan Matias
from
In 2009, bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakomoto argued that it was “a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust.”
That’s not true, according to today’s CITP’s speaker Kevin Werbach (@kwerb), a professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at the Wharton School at UPenn. Kevin is author of a new book with MIT Press, The Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust.
A Dartmouth grad with undergrad degrees in psychology and chemistry, Aronchick worked at Microsoft for more than six years until the company lost him in 2007. He left the Redmond, Wash. software and cloud behemoth to launch his own Seattle-based startup, an audio clip sharing platform called Hark. From there he led product management for Prime Now restaurants at Amazon, was a senior product marketer at the software company Chef, and then led project management on Google’s Kubernetes Engine where he co-founded Kubeflow.
He’s a guy of many skills and great passion — as quickly becomes clear from perusing his Twitter feed. Aronchick is pumped about open-source Kubernetes. He’s excited for people to use tech to solve big challenges. He’s anxious about climate change and the harmful effects already being felt as the planet keeps warming. Aronchick’s tweeting tone is generally self-effacing and funny, but the long-time Seattle tech innovator is clearly an engineering badass.
And now Microsoft has created a new position that fits Aronchick perfectly: program manager in Cloud and AI and lead of Open Source (OSS) Machine Learning Strategy. He took the role in November.
Hey, didja hear about those scientifically illiterate Americans? People so dumb, they think the sun revolves around the Earth? People who can’t pass a quiz of basic science facts? People who are getting dumber and whose lack of knowledge leads them to have misguided opinions about science policy?
If you’ve somehow missed those stories, you’re likely to see some similar to them Thursday, as journalists and scientists react to the latest Pew Research survey on Americans’ general scientific knowledge. At a quick glance, the data appear to show that this country has, at best, a so-so relationship with science facts.
But the researchers who conducted that survey, as well as outside scientists who study American scientific knowledge, say that’s not the right takeaway.
Customer experience and business growth are also suffering at the hands of lengthy [Know Your Customer] processes. Analysts sort through enormous volumes of internal and external data to identify customers and monitor for risky activity in line with regulators’ expectations. That takes time, requiring up to a shocking three months to onboard a new client — and some applicants aren’t sticking around. In the UK, it is estimated that 25 percent of applications are abandoned due to KYC friction.
Statistics like these are staggering, and more than a bit overwhelming, but there is a way forward to greater efficiency and reduced risk within the financial services industry. Already, artificial intelligence (AI) and automation are becoming the go-to options for addressing the troubles of modern-day AML and KYC, and regulators are encouraging the adoption of innovative solutions. The biggest draw is AI’s ability to interpret, synthesize and correlate vast amounts of data, a game-changing contribution to the ongoing battle against financial crime.
FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb announced in a tweet Wednesday that the agency plans to release hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of previously unpublished injury and malfunction reports tied to about 100 medical devices.
“We’re now prioritizing making ALL of this data available,” Gottlieb tweeted.
The chair will be an opportunity to further explore lingering questions in education through data science.
Dean Bridget Long has announced the creation of the Bluhm Family Assistant/Associate Professorship in Education and Data Science — an exciting new endowed chair focused on transforming K–12 education at scale through effective and efficient use of data.
Raúl Rojas, an artificial-intelligence researcher at the Free University of Berlin, came to Germany from Mexico more than 35 years ago. “I wanted to study in Europe, and Germany seemed like an interesting place, especially Berlin,” he says. “I came to do my PhD at the Free University but never planned to stay here.” However, before even completing his doctorate, Rojas was hired by the GMD National Research Center for Information Technology to work on machine learning. “One contract led to another, and before you realize, you’ve built your career in another country.”
A lot has changed since Rojas arrived in West Germany in 1982, a country that would exist only for another seven years until the fall of the Berlin Wall. “There were not many researchers from other countries [back then]; that has changed now,” he says.
Our ability to collect data far outpaces our ability to fully utilize it—yet those data may hold the key to solving some of the biggest global challenges facing us today.
Take, for instance, the frequent outbreaks of waterborne illnesses as a consequence of war or natural disasters. The most recent example can be found in Yemen, where roughly 10,000 new suspected cases of cholera are reported each week—and history is riddled with similar stories. What if we could better understand the environmental factors that contributed to the disease, predict which communities are at higher risk, and put in place protective measures to stem the spread?
NumFOCUS is pleased to announce Facebook as our newest Platinum Corporate Sponsor.
Facebook believes in the value of open source technology to achieve a shared goal of improving tools and frameworks used by the entire community. As such, Facebook is committed to supporting the developer community through their contributions to open source tools.
The European Parliament on Tuesday voted in favor of a controversial new law that will bring sweeping reforms to how copyrighted content posted online is governed. The legislation was adopted with 348 votes in favor and 274 against.
For proponents of digital rights, the decision comes as a huge blow after over a year of campaigning to uphold what they see as the integrity of the internet. Member of the European Parliament Julia Reda, one of the most vocal critics of the directive, said on Twitter that the vote signals a “dark day for internet freedom.”
A group of faculty members across a range of academic disciplines has received more than $150,000 in funding from the National Science Foundation to install a high-performance computing (HPC) cluster at Middlebury College.
John P. Wilson, Professor and Founding Director of the Spatial Sciences Institute (SSI) at the USC Dornsife College of Letters Arts and Sciences, has announced the launch of its Master of Science in Spatial Economics and Data Analysis,a two-year graduate degree offered in conjunction with USC’s internationally renowned Dornsife Department of Economics. This program is the second inter-disciplinary M.S. program for SSI; the first is the Master of Science in Spatial Data Science, a two-year graduate degree offered in conjunction with the Viterbi School of Engineering Department of Computer Science, which is set to graduate its third class in the spring of 2019.
University of British Columbia, Data Science Institute
from
Vancouver, BC, Canada April 10, starting at 12 p.m. “The BC Centre for Disease Control (BCCDC) is organizing a special seminar series of Machine Learning for Precision Public Health as part of our large effort to incorporate more data science into our work. These presentations and workshops will cover topics of data-driven decision making, machine learning algorithms, data visualization, and big data ethics.” Sessions will be held in Hardwick Hall of the UBC Medical Student & Alumni Centre (2750 Heather St).
San Francisco, CA April 15-17. “QCon.ai is a practical AI and machine learning conference bringing together software teams working on all aspects of AI and machine learning.” [$$$$]
University Park, PA April 5-7. “Each individual participating in DataFest™ must submit a registration. If you form your own team, each member of your team must register separately and include the team name on the form. If you have not formed a team, you will have the chance on the registration form to request placement onto a team. Registration is limited to the first 300 people to register!”
“The Bell Labs Prize is a competition for innovators from participating countries around the globe that seeks to recognize proposals that ‘change the game’ in the field of information and communications technologies by a factor of 10, and provides selected innovators the unique opportunity to collaborate with Bell Labs researchers to help realize their vision.” Deadline for nominations is April 26.
This cookbook is intended as a resource for organizers of conferences and events to support and encourage diversity and inclusion at those events. This cookbook is not intended to provide general instructions on how to run a successful conference or event.
With the integration of scholarly works from PubMed, CrossRef and Microsoft Academic into the Lens, we have been working hard to leverage modern open-source tools, such as Elasticsearch, to enable real-time discovery and analysis across the entire corpus of 197M+ scholarly works. … Today we’re excited to introduce the new Lens scholarly analytic facility developed using yet another open-source project, Vega Lite. This technology allowed us to release the new suite of visualisations that we hope will make exploration of our scholarly works more insightful.