Data Science newsletter – April 30, 2019

Newsletter features journalism, research papers, events, tools/software, and jobs for April 30, 2019

GROUP CURATION: N/A

 
 
Data Science News



A machine learning device, meant to monitor the chronically ill, moves into homes

STAT, Casey Ross


from

A wearable device that uses machine learning to remotely track and analyze multiple vital signs has been cleared by the Food and Drug Administration, expanding the scope of home monitoring systems intended to keep chronically ill patients out of the hospital.

Current Health, based in Edinburgh, Scotland, announced Wednesday it received clearance for an upper-arm wearable that measures a patient’s respiration, pulse, oxygen saturation, temperature and mobility. The product is capable of delivering continual updates on a patient so doctors can intervene quickly if the data signal an emerging problem.


What does it take to lose faith in your politician?

Northeastern University, News @ Northeastern


from

When you discover that someone has told a lie, does the discovery change your feeling about that person? If that person is a politician you support, the answer is: probably not.

Briony Swire-Thompson, who is a postdoctoral researcher at Northeastern, was part of a team that conducted a study to test whether people would lose faith in politicians who appeared to tell more lies than truths. Swire-Thompson and her colleagues found that, overall, people’s faith was eroded, but only by an “extremely small” amount.

“People’s feelings toward the candidate didn’t shift hardly at all,” Swire-Thompson says. “That was surprising.”


Will Artificial Intelligence Enhance or Hack Humanity?

WIRED, Business, Nicholas Thompson


from

This week, I interviewed Yuval Noah Harari, the author of three best-selling books about the history and future of our species, and Fei-Fei Li, one of the pioneers in the field of artificial intelligence. The event was hosted by the Stanford Center for Ethics and Society, the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, and the Stanford Humanities Center. A transcript of the event follows, and a video is posted below.


Voices From the Open Science Movement

Medium, Voices from the Open Source Movement, Sage Bionetworks, Lara Mangravite and John Wilbanks


from

We have a well-established system of peer-review that uses independent evaluation to assess the appropriateness of research conclusions. To this aim, we as a community, are meant to evaluate the evidence presented, determine the validity of an experiment, and understand how that experiment may support the general hypothesis. The task of turning an individual observation into general knowledge may be led by an individual scientific team, but it is the responsibility of the entire field.


Insurers Know Exactly How Often American Drivers Touch Their Phones

Bloomberg, Hyperdrive, Kyle Stock


from

With distracted driving on the rise, phone-tracking startups try to show us we’re the problem. It’s not quite working.


How Microsoft learned from the past to redesign its future

The Verge, Tom Warren


from

I’ve heard and read many stories about how Microsoft’s culture has changed in recent years and how product teams are working more closely together. It’s such a vast shift at Microsoft that I wanted to see for myself how the company is doing things differently now. So I spent three days at the company’s Redmond, Washington-based headquarters earlier this month, speaking to designers and engineers, sitting in illustration planning meetings, and talking to the leaders involved in this new design approach.

One thing is clear from my visit: Microsoft has truly learned from its messy mistakes of the past. But reshaping a 44-year-old company to focus on redesigning its future isn’t going to be easy.


Dealing realistically with the artificial intelligence revolution

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, John Mecklin


from

The world is engaged in a competition for leadership in the array of technologies and applications often grouped under the umbrella of artificial intelligence. This competition has often been compared to the nuclear arms race of the Cold War, but the comparison is misleading on many fronts. Artificial intelligence is not one technology but many, and those technologies may be used in a wide variety of classifying, optimizing, and predictive applications, many and probably most not military in nature. Unlike the US Manhattan Project and the Soviet Union’s equally secretive early nuclear program, AI research is done in both the private and public sectors; information about private sector research is regularly shared among participants in the field and, therefore, among countries. Progress is rapid, and knowledge about that progress is seldom contained to one country alone.


High Tech Pool Protector Uses AI to Prevent Drownings

KTLA, Rich DeMuro


from

A look at a smart underwater camera that uses Artificial Intelligence to monitor what’s happening in your pool in an effort to prevent drownings.

Pools are a fantastic backyard addition, but they can also be deadly. We took a look at a connected product called the Coral Manta 3000, which aims to protect pools 24/7/ with an added layer of surveillance.


First Grants Announced for Independent Research on Social Media’s Impact on Democracy Using Facebook Data

Social Science One, Gary King and Nathaniel Persily


from

The researchers announced today will gain access to some data immediately, and other datasets in stages when our testing indicates they both are useful for scholarly research and meet appropriate privacy and legal standards. If the system we are building works to make the URLs dataset available, we believe it will then become possible to make available other highly informative datasets to the research community. We are also about to begin giving data access to other researchers on a faster schedule but without funding, and will give details of this new process in another blog post shortly. … As of now, researchers who sign the agreement will receive (1) funding provided by eight charitable foundations (through the SSRC acting as a fiscal agent), and immediate access to the (2) Crowdtangle API and (3) the Ad Library API, all described below.


Online learning startup Coursera picks up $103M, now valued at $1B+

TechCrunch, Ingrid Lunden


from

Coursera, an online learning startup that offers free and paid short courses, skills certifications and complete degrees in partnership with universities and businesses, has raised another $103 million to scale out its business into new geographies, subject areas and products — a Series E led by a strategic investor, the Australian online recruitment and course directory provider SEEK Group, with participation from Future Fund and NEA.


Student Debt Is Stopping U.S. Millennials from Becoming Entrepreneurs

Harvard Business Review, Vadim Revzin and Sergei Revzin


from

When the majority of college graduates (nearly 70%) leave school with an average of $29,800 in debt, the thought of doing anything but getting a well-paying job to try to reduce this burden might seem irresponsible, at best. Even if one does land a job that affords them the luxury of steady loan repayment, they are likely to continue to pay off their loans for many years. Research from Citizens Financial Group suggests that 60% of student debt borrowers expect to be paying off their loans into their 40s.

While normalizing the cost of tuition might be the long term answer, in the short term, the power to reignite innovation and entrepreneurial venture creation lies within the parties that help pay the bills of most individuals and entities: employers and capital providers.


This tool could help detect doctored videos of world leaders

CNN, Business, Rachel Metz


from

In hopes of stopping deepfake-related misinformation from circulating, Hany Farid, a professor and image-forensics expert at Dartmouth College, is building software that can spot political deepfakes, and perhaps authenticate genuine videos called out as fakes as well.

With this new breed of falsified videos, it’s more difficult than ever to trust that what we see is real. Farid told CNN Business he is concerned that such videos could cause harm to citizens or democracies.

“The stakes have gotten really high all of a sudden,” he said.


Designing the CWRU-Cleveland Clinic Health Education Campus: Q & A with architect Norman Foster

Cleveland Plain Dealer, Steven Litt


from

Foster visited Cleveland recently for the April 9 dedication of the Samson Pavilion. Next day, he discussed his life’s work, and how he hopes his new building will change medical education, and Cleveland.


AI triage tools won’t empower consumers without mastering convenient, personalized service

MobiHealthNews, Dave Muoio


from

Healthcare has long had an access issue. While some patients might have the knowledge, experience and opportunity to pursue optimal care when they’re ill, countless others are unaware of the whens, whys and hows of seeking and receiving relief for their condition. … The consequences of uninformed patients also extend beyond an individual’s poor clinical outcomes. Unnecessary healthcare encounters or preventable emergency admissions rack up bills that drain patients’ savings accounts, and place substantial strain on the health systems tasked to treat them. For health systems, payers and startups alike, consumer-friendly AI triage tools could mitigate these issues.

 
Events



Public Release of” Reproducibility and Replicability in Science

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine


from

Online May 7, starting at 1 p.m. EDT. “Please join us for a public webinar to learn about the new National Academies’ report Reproducibility and Replicability in Science. The webinar will include an overview of the study process and discussion of the report’s conclusions, recommendations, and key messages.” [registration required]


AD community, the May 9 MODEL-AD Annual #Alzheimers Symposium

MODEL-AD, Sage Bionetworks


from


Rocky Mountain Genomics HackCon

University of Colorado, BioFrontiers Institute


from

Boulder, CO June 17-21 at BioFrontiers Institute, University of Colorado. “All attendees will be offered a selection of one-day, hands-on technical workshops leading up to a one-day plenary, poster, and exhibitor session. Interested parties are also highly encouraged to apply for placement in the final three days of the event which will feature a collaborative NCBI-style genomics hackathon.”


Dutch Data Science Week 2019

Go Data Driven, Xebia Group


from

Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Nieuwegein, The Netherlands June 3-7. [registration required]


SmallBusinessWeek Hackathon – Developers for Disaster Relief

VISA, U.S. Small Business Administration


from

Washington, DC May 3-5. “Come develop concepts that would help business owners prepare and/or recover from major natural disasters such as hurricanes, flooding, wildfires, tornados, snow storms or earthquakes. Make use of API’s from Visa, the U.S. Government, and third parties to build an impactful new tool.” First prize: $25,000.


Automating The News: How Algorithms are Rewriting the Media

NYC Entrepreneurial Journalism and Media Meetup


from

New York, NY May 22, starting at 6 p.m., Newmark Graduate School of Journalism (219 W 40th St). Speaker: Nick Diakopoulos from Northwestern. [rsvp required]

 
Tools & Resources



[1904.09954] Why Software Projects need Heroes (Lessons Learned from 1100+ Projects)

arXiv, Computer Science > Software Engineering; Suvodeep Majumder, Joymallya Chakraborty, Amritanshu Agrawal, Tim Menzies


from

A “hero” project is one where 80% or more of the contributions are made by the 20% of the developers. In the literature, such projects are deprecated since they might cause bottlenecks in development and communication. However, there is little empirical evidence on this matter. Further, recent studies show that such hero projects are very prevalent. Accordingly, this paper explores the effect of having heroes in project, from a code quality perspective. We identify the heroes developer communities in 1100+ open source GitHub projects. Based on the analysis, we find that (a) hero projects are majorly all projects; and (b) the commits from “hero developers” (who contribute most to the code) result in far fewer bugs than other developers. That is, contrary to the literature, heroes are standard and very useful part of modern open source projects.


The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th Anniversary Edition

Pragmatic Publishing


from

“Mark your calendars and tell your friends: on May 8, 2019, the Pragmatic Bookshelf will release the 20th Anniversary Edition of the best-selling The Pragmatic Programmer. Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt have updated this classic to reflect the current state of software development with new tips, new topics, and revisions throughout.”


Stretch – A high performance & cross-platform layout engine

Visly


from

We chose to write stretch in the Rust programming language as it ensures memory safety, efficient multi-threading, and has fantastic cross-platform support.

 
Careers


Postdocs

Health Disparities Research Scholars



University of Wisconsin, School of Medicine and Public Health; Madison, WI

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