Data Science newsletter – October 29, 2019

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In order to create a symbiotic AI workforce, organizations will need to use human-centered AI processes that motivate workers, retrain them in the context of their workflow, and shift the focus from automation to collaboration between humans and machines.

To test that proposition, our company’s innovation hub in Dublin, Ireland, conducted an experiment designed to see how human workers might augment the work of an existing AI system and embrace their new roles as AI trainers.

Scientists monitored human waste from 60 million people in 37 countries to discover how the world gets high.

In the agency’s latest grand challenge, teams competed for $2 million and a chance to shape the future of communication technology by finding a better way to carve up the radio spectrum.

This surveillance nightmare almost became a reality at US music events. Industry giants like Ticketmaster invested money in companies like Blink Identity, a startup run by ex–defense contractors who helped build the US military’s facial recognition system in Afghanistan. These vendors, and the venture capitalists who backed them, saw the live music industry as a huge potential market for biometric surveillance tech, marketed as a convenient ticketing option to concertgoers.

But now, it seems they’ll be sorely disappointed — and there’s a lesson in the story of how we dashed their dystopian profit dreams. A future where we are constantly subjected to corporate and government surveillance is not inevitable, but it’s coming fast unless we act now.

Over the last month, artists and fans waged a grassroots war to stop Orwellian surveillance technology from invading live music events. Today we declare victory. Our campaign pushed more than 40 of the world’s largest music festivals — like Coachella, Bonnaroo, and SXSW — to go on the record and state clearly that they have no plans to use facial recognition technology at their events. Facing backlash, Ticketmaster all but threw Blink Identity under the bus.

The public are more likely to blame accidents involving semi-autonomous cars on driver – rather than machine – error, a new study has found.

An international research team, including Edmond Awad from the University of Exeter’s Business School, has examined how the general public attribute blame in accidents involving self-driving cars.

It found that in crashes involving a car that has dual human and AI controls, the public presume that the machine is less accountable.

Today, hundreds of startup companies around the world are trying to apply deep learning to radiology. Yet the number of radiologists who have been replaced by AI is approximately zero. (In fact, there is a worldwide shortage of them.)

At least for the short term, that number is likely to remain unchanged. Radiology has proven harder to automate than Hinton — and many others — imagined. For medicine in general, this is no less true. There are many proofs of concept, such as automated diagnosis of pneumonia from chest X-rays, but surprisingly few cases in which deep learning (a machine learning technique that is currently the most dominant approach to AI) has achieved the transformations and improvements so often promised.

The fourth of 10 basic rules Western spies followed when trying to infiltrate Russia’s capital during the Cold War—don’t look back because you’re never alone—is more apt than ever. Only these days it’s not just foreigners who are being tracked, but all 12.6 million Muscovites, too.

Officials in Moscow have spent the last few years methodically assembling one of the most comprehensive video-surveillance operations in the world. The public-private network of as many as 200,000 cameras records 1.5 billion hours of footage a year that can be accessed by 16,000 government employees, intelligence officers and law-enforcement personnel.

The Gaia-X cloud is a collaboration between companies including SAP, Deutsche Telekom, and Deutsche Bank and the Economy Minister Peter Altmaier.

Thanks to Michael Gillespie, an obscure programmer at a Nerds on Call repair store, hundreds of thousands of ransomware victims have recovered their files for free.

Little under two years ago, Facebook announced a global licensing deal with Universal Music Group – covering the use of music on FB, Instagram and VR platform Oculus. Over the following few months, we learned of similar agreements involving the likes of Warner Music Group, Sony/ATV (and Sony Music) and a host of independent labels via Merlin and others.

Mastercard has launched the Data Responsibility Imperative that seeks to establish a core set of principles guiding the ethical collection, management and use of data.

It follows the results of a survey which revealed that nine out of ten people said that data privacy was important to them, but only a quarter believed that companies were doing a good job of handling individuals’ data.

On Reddit, r/Tim and r/Tom threw down in the most vicious meme battle they’d ever seen, complete with turncoats, allegiances, uprisings and even a United Nations for dude names. We report from inside the battlements

In Dubai, where tower blocks seem to pop up almost overnight, residents have grown adept at averting their eyes from building sites. But one construction project has caught everyone’s attention: the Museum of the Future, which has loomed up over the city’s elevated, driverless metro system on the edge of the financial district.

The museum’s framework, comprising 2,400 diagonally intersecting steel members, was completed in November 2018; the facade panels now are being lifted into place. The museum is due to open in a year – a momentous time for Dubai as it will be hosting the World Expo from 20 October 2020.

The Pentagon announced Friday that it has awarded its $10 billion “war cloud” computing contract to Microsoft over rival Amazon.

The announcement from the Department of Defense (DOD) marked a surprising turn of events — for months, Amazon was viewed as the favorite to win the contract amid an increasingly political lobbying battle.

The Pentagon said that awarding Microsoft the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract (JEDI) “continues our strategy of a multi-vendor, multi-cloud environment,” adding that “the department’s needs are diverse and cannot be met by any single supplier.”

Tea drinkers have been urged to avoid plastic tea bags after tests found that a single bag sheds billions of particles of microplastic into each cup.

A Canadian team found that steeping a plastic tea bag at a brewing temperature of 95°C releases around 11.6 billion microplastics – tiny pieces of plastic between 100 nanometres and 5 millimetres in size – into a single cup. That is several orders of magnitude higher than other foods and drinks.

Boston, MA November 4-8 at Northeastern University Network Science Institute. Speakers include: Nicola Perra, Jennifer Chayes, Giovanni Petri, Miriam J. Metzger, Zachary Chase Lipton, Rossano Schifanella. [free]

Brussels, Belgium March 5, 2020. “Join the Center for Data Innovation to discuss why European success in AI is important, how the EU compares to other world leaders today, and what steps European policymakers should take to be more competitive in AI.” [$$$]

Ottawa, ON, Canada November 12, starting at 5:30 p.m. “This new initiative will explore the role science can and should play in a modern economy, and seeks to reaffirm the contributions that science provides – by generating new knowledge, talent, innovation and evidence for decision making — while exploring a new, strengthened relationship with civil society.” [registration required]

Washington, DC October 30, starting at 3:30 p.m., U.S. Department of Agriculture (1400 Independence Ave., S.W.) Keynote by Malay Ghosh, Distinguished Professor, University of Florida, “Small Area Estimation: Its Evolution in Five Decades.” [registration required]

Philadelphia, PA November 2-6. “APHA champions the health of all people and all communities. It aims to create the healthiest nation. The primary event in Public Health category will be the centerpiece of Medical, Health Care, Epidemiology, Public Health, Community Health and Health Equity issues.” [$$$]

A climate data record of global sea surface temperature (SST) spanning 1981–2016 has been developed from 4 × 1012 satellite measurements of thermal infra-red radiance. The spatial area represented by pixel SST estimates is between 1 km2 and 45 km2. The mean density of good-quality observations is 13 km−2 yr−1. SST uncertainty is evaluated per datum, the median uncertainty for pixel SSTs being 0.18 K. Multi-annual observational stability relative to drifting buoy measurements is within 0.003 K yr−1 of zero with high confidence, despite maximal independence from in situ SSTs over the latter two decades of the record. Data are provided at native resolution, gridded at 0.05° latitude-longitude resolution (individual sensors), and aggregated and gap-filled on a daily 0.05° grid. Skin SSTs, depth-adjusted SSTs de-aliased with respect to the diurnal cycle, and SST anomalies are provided. Target applications of the dataset include: climate and ocean model evaluation; quantification of marine change and variability (including marine heatwaves); climate and ocean-atmosphere processes; and specific applications in ocean ecology, oceanography and geophysics. [full text]

Soccer analytics is attracting increasing interest in academia and industry, thanks to the availability of sensing technologies that provide high-fidelity data streams for every match. Unfortunately, these detailed data are owned by specialized companies and hence are rarely publicly available for scientific research. To fill this gap, this paper describes the largest open collection of soccer-logs ever released, containing all the spatio-temporal events (passes, shots, fouls, etc.) that occured during each match for an entire season of seven prominent soccer competitions. Each match event contains information about its position, time, outcome, player and characteristics. The nature of team sports like soccer, halfway between the abstraction of a game and the reality of complex social systems, combined with the unique size and composition of this dataset, provide an ideal ground for tackling a wide range of data science problems, including the measurement and evaluation of performance, both at individual and at collective level, and the determinants of success and failure. [full text]

“We review and analyze the current state in this area in order to give recommendations for making computer science research software FAIR and open. We observe that research software publishing practices in computer science and in computational science show significant differences.”

“There are many customers that probably already tried and loved Cloud AI Platform Notebooks (CAIP Notebooks). However if it happens that you want to deploy CAIP Notebooks to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) cluster there were no way to do so. Until now.”