Data Science newsletter – November 16, 2019

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The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is excited to announce the creation of the Center for Artificial Intelligence Innovation (CAII), which seeks to continue the groundbreaking work already being done in the domains of Deep Learning, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence.

“We are truly excited to announce the formation of this Center, which brings together a number of efforts that have been underway for some time along with new areas of focus to propel AI research and application forward,” said NCSA’s Director, Bill Gropp.

Lawyers, students, and scholars called on legal database providers to end their contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security, and private surveillance contractor Palantir, saying the arrangements put universities and immigration lawyers in the untenable position of feeding money and even information into systems that facilitate deportation.

Researchers Against Surveillance and Law Students Against ICE made their requests in a letter and petition asking Thomson Reuters, which owns the legal search tool Westlaw, and RELX, owner of LexisNexis, to end the deals, which they estimated were worth tens of millions of dollars. They were joined by Latinx advocacy group Mijente as well as Immigrant Defense Project, which engages in litigation and legal activism.

The signatories, about 300 so far, said law firms and universities are put in an ethical bind when they routinely pay companies whose products the government relies on to target immigrants for detention and deportation.

[Holly] Herndon’s 2019 album, Proto, contains the first recorded debut of an AI on a pop-music album. Here, she explains how she did it.

The US office responsible for patents and trademarks is trying to figure out how AI might call for changes to copyright law, and it’s asking the public for opinions on the topic. The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) published a notice in the Federal Register last month saying it’s seeking comments, as spotted by TorrentFreak.

The office is gathering information about the impact of artificial intelligence on copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property rights. It outlines thirteen specific questions, ranging from what happens if an AI creates a copyright-infringing work to if it’s legal to feed an AI copyrighted material.

It starts off by asking if output made by AI without any creative involvement from a human should qualify as a work of authorship that’s protectable by US copyright law. If not, then what degree of human involvement “would or should be sufficient so that the work qualifies for copyright protection?”

Despite being AI powerhouse, Israel’s academic institutions find themselves outpaced by thriving industry as many students turn to online classes

Israeli universities are struggling to keep up with the demand for academic programs in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, amid a severe shortage of skilled workers in the booming sector.

There are presently dozens of AI courses and tracks offered at the undergraduate and master’s level in academic institutions across the country. However, there is not enough space to accommodate the number of students wishing to enroll. The lack of sufficient academic staff and programs is exacerbating the already-existing tech talent crunch, estimated at roughly 15,000 workers.

The underwriters of municipal bonds are disclosing more about cities’ exposure to higher temperatures and rising seas.

[Andy] Coravos, whose parents were a dentist and a nurse practitioner, has been thinking about healthcare for a long time. After a stint in private equity and consulting, she took a coding bootcamp and returned to the world she was raised in by taking an internship with the digital therapeutics company Akili Interactive.

Coravos always thought she wanted to be in healthcare, but there was one thing holding her back, she says. “I’m really bad with blood.”

That’s why digital therapeutics made sense. The stint at Akili led to a position at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as an entrepreneur in residence, which led to the creation of Elektra Labs roughly two years ago.

A University of Minnesota researcher is using a novel concept to conduct research: miniature labs.

Rather than bring materials to a laboratory for analyzing and testing, Peter Larsen is transporting the lab into the field. Called a “mobile lab,” Larsen and his fellow researchers are using the tool to more efficiently conduct tests and analyze data. They are hoping to convince others to integrate mobile labs into their own work.

Larsen developed the mobile lab while at Duke University and brought the concept with him when he came to the University of Minnesota in 2018.

For a week over the summer, Larsen and a team of researchers brought the lab to Itasca State Park to study ticks and genetic variations of Lyme disease.

We finally know where Microsoft plans to operate in Louisville — and who’s running the initiative locally.

In June, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) announced it would make Louisville a new regional hub for artificial intelligence, Internet of Things and data science. As a part of that imitative, the tech giant planned to establish a visible, physical location downtown or in Louisville’s Innovation District, which includes The Center by SIDIS, the Thrive Center and University of Louisville Health Science Campus.

That location was announced on Wednesday at Story, a co-working community within entrepreneurial center at 900 E. Main St., which happens to be Microsoft’s new home. It’s now called Story Louisville powered-by-Microsoft.

Wearable technology can safely identify heart rate irregularities that subsequent clinical evaluations confirmed to be atrial fibrillation, reports a study from the Stanford University School of Medicine and Apple now published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Three universities and a health care institution are sharing a gift of more than $1 billion that’s one of the largest in the history of higher education, they announced Wednesday.

Receiving $260 million apiece will be Duke University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Southern California, and the Cleveland Clinic. The institutions are free to use the money as they see fit.

The gifts come from this year’s sale of the Lord Corp. to Parker-Hannifin for $3.68 billion. Lord made products that dampened noise and vibration, specialty adhesives, and other products used by automotive and aerospace industries.

Microsoft Executive Vice President Harry Shum (Shen Xiangyang), the head of Microsoft AI and Research, will leave the tech giant in early 2020. A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed the departure of the 23-year Microsoft veteran, who will continue advising CEO Satya Nadella and company co-founder Bill Gates. Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott assumes Shum’s position as head of Microsoft AI and Research effective immediately.

Science is littered with poor data visualizations that confound readers and can even mislead the scientists who make them. Deficient data visuals can reduce the quality and impede the progress of scientific research. And with more and more scientific images making their way into the news and onto social media — illustrating everything from climate change to disease outbreaks — the potential is high for bad visuals to impair public understanding of science.

The problem has become more acute with the ever-increasing amount and complexity of scientific data. Visualization of those data — to understand as well as to share them — is more important than ever. Yet scientists receive very little visualization training. “The community hasn’t by and large recognized that this is something that really is needed,” says O’Donoghue, of the University of New South Wales and lead author of a paper about biomedical data visualization in the 2018 Annual Review of Biomedical Data Science.

There are signs of progress, however. At least two annual conferences dedicated to scientific data visualization have sprung up in the last decade. And the journal Nature Methods ran a regular column from 2010 to 2016 about creating better figures and graphs, which was then adapted into guidelines for scientists submitting papers to that journal. But so far, few scientists are focusing on the problem.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a cornerstone of the digital revolution. While we’ve heard of AI for many years, today we sit at a unique crossroads where the volume of data, accessibility of computational power and evolution of algorithms such as deep learning have come together to empower the digital revolution in ways that have never been seen before.

To explore AI and where it can take us, the University of Louisville (UofL) College of Business has founded the AI Innovation Consortium (AIIC) with participation from several industry leaders such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), General Electric Appliances (GEA), Amgen, V-Soft Consulting and other Fortune 1000 companies.

The AIIC is a Louisville-based think tank of IT and advanced technology thought leaders focusing on how AI can propel organizations and our community forward. Specifically, the AIIC will build standards and best practices that help drive AI adoption, evolve privacy, data governance and bias, guiding principles and effectively align AI evolution.

Google plans to offer checking accounts next year.

The project, code-named Cache, will be run in conjunction with Citigroup and the Stanford Federal Credit Union.

How do the hyperparameters for a decision tree affect your model and how do you choose which ones to tune?

We also released a storage engine for MariaDB for fast SQL queries on TileDB arrays, a new powerful genomics variant store, and integrations with Spark, Dask, GDAL, PDAL and more!

Development, testing, security and operations have all been transformed to keep up with the pace of software today — but one piece is still missing. Data is now becoming a roadblock to Agile and DevOps initiatives.

“People are getting stuck with data saying ‘I have my infrastructure layer automated and self-serviced so a developer can push a button and an environment can be configured automatically. I have made my entire CI/CD pipeline, my entire software delivery life cycle automated. I can promate code. I can test code. I can automate testing. But the last layer is data. I need data everywhere,’” said Sanjeev Sharma, vice president and global practice director for data modernization and strategy at Delphix.

We present Kaolin, a PyTorch library aiming to accelerate 3D deep learning research. Kaolin provides efficient implementations of differentiable 3D modules for use in deep learning systems. With functionality to load and preprocess several popular 3D datasets, and native functions to manipulate meshes, pointclouds, signed distance functions, and voxel grids, Kaolin mitigates the need to write wasteful boilerplate code. Kaolin packages together several differentiable graphics modules including rendering, lighting, shading, and view warping. Kaolin also supports an array of loss functions and evaluation metrics for seamless evaluation and provides visualization functionality to render the 3D results. Importantly, we curate a comprehensive model zoo comprising many state-of-the-art 3D deep learning architectures, to serve as a starting point for future research endeavours. Kaolin is available as open-source software at this https URL.