Data Science newsletter – June 19, 2019

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Unlocking the potential in biospecimens for medical breakthroughs is among the cornerstones of precision medicine. Signaling its continued commitment to pioneering research, UC San Francisco has appointed Rohit Gupta as its inaugural Chief Biobank Officer (CBO). His appointment, which follows a national search, is effective June 19.

Gupta will oversee UCSF’s biobank infrastructure, including UCSF BIOS, a program designed to provide comprehensive support for the “life cycle” of human research biospecimens to enhance their use in the life sciences. As CBO, Gupta will work closely with Harold Collard, MD, associate vice chancellor of clinical research, and Scott VandenBerg, MD, PhD, BIOS’s faculty director.

The close encounter will have to wait. Astronomers have come up empty-handed after scanning the heavens for signs of intelligent life in the most extensive search ever performed.

Researchers used ground-based telescopes to eavesdrop on 1,327 stars within 160 light years of Earth. During three years of observations they found no evidence of signals that could plausibly come from an alien civilisation.

The only signals picked up by the Green Bank telescope in West Virginia and the Parkes telescope in Australia had more Earthly origins, the scientists found, with mobile phones and other terrestrial technology providing plenty of noise, and more transient signals coming from overflying satellites.

The analysis is one of just a few to look closely at research-misconduct investigations, and the first to use a systematic approach to rate them, says C. K. Gunsalus, a specialist in research integrity at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, who was not part of the analysis. Too many research-misconduct investigations turn out to be inadequate or flawed, says Gunsalus, who had a hand in creating a 26-point checklist2 that university officials can use to guide probes into research misconduct, which Grey’s team used to rate the investigations.

The checklist questions an investigation’s scope, reliability and impact — for instance, whether the investigating committee included external members and whether evidence could have been tampered with. The team independently assessed each investigation report using the checklist; one report had addressed none of the points adequately and two others properly addressed only two or three points. “Overall, each report was considered unacceptable,” say Grey and colleagues.

UMass Amherst, Columbia University, Carnegie Mellon University, Colorado School of Mines and The Rockefeller Foundation today announced the launch of the Electricity Growth and Use In Developing Economies (e-GUIDE) Initiative, an effort to apply data science to electricity demand prediction in energy-poor emerging economies. The e-GUIDE Initiative is being funded through a $3.8 million grant from The Rockefeller Foundation, which has a dedicated focus on ending energy poverty and improving livelihoods by leveraging breakthroughs in data science and decentralized energy to both accelerate the pace of electrification and dramatically decrease the cost.

A $10 million gift from Portland’s Mary and Tim Boyle is fueling the start of a joint center in biomedical data science recently announced by the University of Oregon and Oregon Health & Science University.

The Boyles were inspired to make the gift earlier this year when they learned of plans for a UO-OHSU biomedical data center. The joint center combines efforts from around the UO and at the Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact with those at the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute to detect and fight deadly forms of cancer and other diseases.

Voxel51, a University of Michigan startup, today launched its flagship product—a software platform designed to make it easier, faster and more affordable to access the untapped potential of video data.

The software is aimed at companies that work with video but struggle to extract the information they need from it. While video is a rich form of data, it is difficult to analyze and search because of its complexity, large file sizes and lack of defined units like words.

Voxel51 has set out to overcome those obstacles with their video analytics platform and open source software libraries that, together, enable state-of-the-art video recognition. It identifies and follows objects and actions in each clip. As co-founder Brian Moore says, “We transform video into value.”

Online education provider Udacity said today it’s launching a nanodegree program to teach product managers how to create AI-powered products. The nontechnical course will also teach product managers how to identify business opportunities with AI or machine learning.

Enrollment for the first program begins today and consists of 6 lessons and 3 projects, and lasts about 2 months.

While there has been a lot written about SaaS businesses (how they operate, what metrics to watch, etc.), there has been surprisingly little written about data businesses. [thread, h/t Pete Skomoroch]

Laura Quinn moved mountains to raise the funds, assemble the team, and lead the overhaul of the Democratic Party’s web, data, and analytics infrastructure. The Republicans were able to conduct national targeting in 2000 because they had built a consolidated voter file covering all 50 states. As a key part of the overhaul, and with just a few years of effort, Lina Brunton miraculously consolidated the Democratic Party’s voter files, which had previously been controlled individually by the state parties. Between 2003 and 2008, the Democratic Party developed significant infrastructure on top of this standardized data substrate.

In 2008, the Democrats’ national field director, Jon Carson, insisted that the campaign volunteers be empowered and treated with respect. The volunteers were given access to the Party’s tools and data, and they were treated like staff. This visionary choice made Obama ‘08 the first internet-era campaign. Carson directed the volunteers to recruit other volunteers throughout the summer. This strategy yielded quadratic growth in our volunteer army and enabled more than one million get-out-the-vote calls every day in the last weekend of the campaign.

A ground-breaking study in Bangladesh has found that using data from mobile phone networks to track the movement of people across the country can help predict where outbreaks of diseases such as malaria are likely to occur, enabling health authorities to take preventative measures.

Libra will be backed 1:1 by a bundle of financial assets likely to include bank deposits and short-term government securities from the US Treasury, among others. This will help it avoid the volatility that has plagued other cryptocurrencies like bitcoin.

A coin backed 1:1 is unusual among cryptocurrencies, according to Ari Juels, a professor at the Jacobs Institute at Cornell Tech who studies cryptocurrency. Digital currencies are not often backed this way because that would tie up billions of dollars in reserve currencies that could not be used. Even traditional financial institutions, like US banks, do not fully back deposits this way, hence the need for FDIC deposit insurance.

Some companies are spending over $5 million on artificial-intelligence projects, showing just how serious businesses are getting about the cutting-edge technology.

The finding comes from a recent survey of over 300 companies by Figure Eight, a business that was recently acquired by data company Appen that helps customers label their data. The results provide a glimpse into how quickly companies are adopting A.I. and some of the related complications.

Over half the respondents said they oversee an annual A.I. budget of at least $51,000. Meanwhile, 13% said they control A.I. budgets of $251,000 to $500,000, an amount that reflects a modest commitment and likely small staff.

Researchers at the University of Washington have developed a new tool to monitor people for cardiac arrest while they’re asleep without touching them. A new skill for a smart speaker — like Google Home and Amazon Alexa — or smartphone lets the device detect the gasping sound of agonal breathing and call for help. On average, the proof-of-concept tool, which was developed using real agonal breathing instances captured from 911 calls, detected agonal breathing events 97% of the time from up to 20 feet (or 6 meters) away. The findings are published June 19 in the Nature journal npj Digital Medicine.

“A lot of people have smart speakers in their homes, and these devices have amazing capabilities that we can take advantage of,” said co-corresponding author Shyam Gollakota, an associate professor in the UW’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. “We envision a contactless system that works by continuously and passively monitoring the bedroom for an agonal breathing event, and alerts anyone nearby to come provide CPR. And then if there’s no response, the device can automatically call 911.”

Nearly half of America’s college students can’t afford their next meal. On many campuses, these students—who are getting by on donated meal swipes and sometimes living out of their cars—also face another barrier to food security: The people in power don’t believe them.

“So many folks want to deny that this is a problem,” says Ruben Canedo, who heads the food insecurity efforts at the University of California–Berkeley. “They don’t consider the college population a population that is struggling with their food and housing.”

We’re announcing an additional $1 billion investment in housing across the Bay Area.

First, over the next 10 years, we’ll repurpose at least $750 million of Google’s land, most of which is currently zoned for office or commercial space, as residential housing. This will enable us to support the development of at least 15,000 new homes at all income levels in the Bay Area, including housing options for middle and low-income families. (By way of comparison, 3,000 total homes were built in the South Bay in 2018). We hope this plays a role in addressing the chronic shortage of affordable housing options for long-time middle and low income residents.

Brooklyn, NY June 24, starting at 8:30 a.m. “This workshop, hosted by NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress with funding from the National Science Foundation, will bring together a wide range of scientists and engineers from academe and industry with governmental officials, big data specialists, data standards organizations, and community groups to help give voice to the individual needs of each of these groups of stakeholders in the crucial dialogue surrounding the future of the urban subsurface.” [free, registration required]

In this post, I’ll show how to use tidyverse tools to do exploratory analyses of Pew Research Center survey data. (These tools, however, can be used with data from any source.)

“Since the 2017 edition of this blog post, I [Wasim Ahmed] have seen even more unique and interesting uses of social media data across a wide variety of research disciplines, such as sociology, computer science, media and communication, political science, and engineering to name only a few. Social media platforms generate a vast amount of data on a daily basis on a variety of topics and consequently represent a key source of information for anyone seeking to study 21st century society.”