Data Science newsletter – July 15, 2019

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New proposed legislation by U.S. senators Mark R. Warner and Josh Hawley seeks to protect privacy by forcing tech companies to disclose the “true value” of their data to users.

Specifically, companies with more than 100 million users would have to provide each user with an assessment of the financial value of their data, as well as reveal revenue generated by “obtaining, collecting, processing, selling, using or sharing user data.” In addition, the DASHBOARD Act would give users the right to delete their data from companies’ databases.

As a researcher exploring the ethical and political implications of digital platforms and big data, I’m sympathetic to the bill’s ambition of increasing transparency and empowering users. However, estimating the value of user data isn’t simple and won’t, I believe, solve privacy issues.

The board of the Boston Planning and Development Agency on Thursday approved one of the more interesting development proposals architecture-wise in the city: The 19-story Boston University Data Sciences Center that is due to look like a stack of books.

German healthcare technology company Siemens will provide $133 million worth of medical technology and equipment to boost the University of Missouri’s precision medicine efforts.

Three organizations—Siemens Healthineers, the University of Missouri System and the University of Missouri Health Care—will jointly contribute to the establishment of the Alliance for Precision Health in amounts that could reach $40 million.

An award-winning computer scientist who has directed academic departments and federal research centers will be the new dean of the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois.

Professor Eunice Santos, chair of the computer-science department at Chicago’s Illinois Institute of Technology, was announced Friday as dean effective Aug. 16, pending approval by UI trustees. She will be paid $414,167 a year.

Santos is a renowned scholar in computational social systems, including social networks analysis and sociocultural modeling, and her work has led to significant insights on community resilience, response to disasters, and how belief and opinion change, the UI said.

Ethics looms as a vexing issue when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI). Where does AI bias spring from, especially when it’s unintentional? Are companies paying enough attention to it as they plunge full-force into AI development and deployment? Are they doing anything about it? Do they even know what to do about it?

Wringing bias and unintended consequences out of AI is making its way into the job descriptions of technology managers and professionals, especially as business leaders turn to them for guidance and judgement. The drive to ethical AI means an increased role for technologists in the business, as described in a study of 1,580 executives and 4,400 consumers from the Capgemini Research Institute. The survey was able to make direct connections between AI ethics and business growth: if consumers sense a company is employing AI ethically, they’ll keep coming back; it they sense unethical AI practices, their business is gone.

Some Amazon employees vocally oppose selling technology to immigration enforcement agencies and law enforcement, but the company said the government should make the rules.

Company contracts with a fusion center reveal that nearly 8 million people in northern California are subject to Palantir surveillance tools, a Motherboard investigation finds.

“People say, ‘Oh, god, do we have to do our shopping when it’s dark outside?’” said Steve H. Hanke, an economist who, with astronomer Richard Conn Henry, is lobbying for the change. “No!”
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We would all still rise with the sun and retire when it’s dark, he said, but the times displayed on our clocks and watches would align with Coordinated Universal Time.

DNA-testing service Vitagene Inc. left thousands of client health reports exposed online for years, the kind of incident that privacy advocates have warned about as gene testing has become increasingly popular.

More than 3,000 user files remained accessible to the public on Amazon Web Services cloud-computer servers until July 1, when Vitagene was notified of the issue and shut down external access to the sensitive personal information, according to documents obtained by Bloomberg. The genealogy reports included customers’ full names alongside dates of birth and gene-based health information, such as their likelihood of developing certain medical conditions, a review of the documents showed.

Artificial intelligence is expected to have tremendous societal impact across the globe in the near future. Now Luis Videgaray PhD ’98, former foreign minister and finance minister of Mexico, is coming to MIT to spearhead an effort that aims to help shape global AI policies, focusing on how such rising technologies will affect people living in all corners of the world.

Starting this month, Videgaray, an expert in geopolitics and AI policy, will serve as director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Policy for the World Project (MIT AIPW), a collaboration between the MIT Sloan School of Management and the new MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing. Videgaray will also serve as a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan and as a distinguished fellow at the MIT Internet Policy Research Initiative.

“So, how did you two meet?” It’s the rare small-talk question that’s actually interesting. Single people hoping to shed single status want to know how couples get together, for obvious reasons, but it’s also a question that social scientists closely monitor and study. The data that results can make armchair social scientists of us all. The latest addition to this body of work arrived this week in the form of research out of Stanford University (highlighted on Twitter by journalist Derek Thompson) that presents new data and conclusions about how the internet is changing dating and relationships.

Michael Rosenfeld, Reuben J. Thomas, and Sonia Hausen’s report, which is available online as a draft, used a 2017 survey of American adults to show that online dating has overtaken meeting through friends as the most popular way of meeting a partner. (They estimate the shift happened in approximately 2013.) Moreover, the researchers found that meeting via the internet is “displacing the roles that family and friends once played in bringing couples together.” They had hypothesized that friends and family might continue to facilitate relationships, only now doing so with the help of the internet, but they found that by and large, the internet could do the job all by itself. Don’t worry: The researchers clarified that “despite the disintermediation of friends and family from the matchmaker role, friends and family of course have many other important functions.” Glad to hear friends and family are not obsolete quite yet.

In 2000, psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper wrote a paper on the paradox of choice — the concept that having too many options can lead to decision paralysis. Seventeen years later, two Stanford classmates, Sophia Sterling-Angus and Liam McGregor, landed on a similar concept while taking an economics class on market design. They’d seen how overwhelming choice impacted their classmates’ love lives and felt certain it led to “worse outcomes.”

“Tinder’s huge innovation was that they eliminated rejection, but they introduced massive search costs,” McGregor explained. “People increase their bar because there’s this artificial belief of endless options.”

Sterling-Angus, who was an economics major, and McGregor, who studied computer science, had an idea: What if, rather than presenting people with a limitless array of attractive photos, they radically shrank the dating pool? What if they gave people one match based on core values, rather than many matches based on interests (which can change) or physical attraction (which can fade)?

Oracle today lost its bid to be considered for the US Department of Defense’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract, leaving either Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure as the likely winner of the $10bn, decade-long deal.

JEDI aims to provide “enterprise-level, commercial cloud services” to the Pentagon and its partners – all US military branches and defense-related intelligence agencies – with appropriate security and operational requirements.

Four key areas were identified as successes respondents and workshop participants have had in implementing ethical practices: Providing access to experts, leveraging existing processes, providing context-specific educational resources, and finding sponsors and supporters of your work.

The Chronicle‘s executive-compensation package includes the latest data on more than 1,400 chief executives at more than 600 private colleges from 2008-16 and nearly 250 public universities and systems from 2010-18. Hover over bars to show total compensation as well as pay components including base, bonus, and other. Click bars to see details including other top-paid college employees, how presidents compare with their peers, and how presidential pay looks in context to an institution’s expenses, tuition, and pay for professors. For more, read our coverage of public-college presidents’ compensation or view presidents’ pay in context.

Elementl is proud to announce an early release of Dagster, an open-source library for building systems like ETL processes and ML pipelines. We believe they are, in reality, a single class of software system. We call them data applications.

Your new microservice development environment friend. This CLI tool allows you to define a configuration to work with both local applications (Go, NodeJS, Rust or others) and forward some other applications over Kubernetes in case you don’t want to run them locally.

This new survey, How Couples Meet and Stay Together 2017 (HCMST 2017), features a fresh set of 3,510 survey respondents, with no overlap in subjects from the original HCMST survey which was first fielded in 2009.