Bloomberg Opinion columnist Barry Ritholtz interviews the Wall Street Journal’s Gregory Zuckerman, a three-time winner of the Gerald Loeb Award for business journalism who writes about big trades, big firms and big personalities. His latest book, “The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution” will be released Nov. 5. [audio, 1:32:06]
Nature Communications journal, Charles J. Gomez & David M. J. Lazer
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Diversity tends to generate more and better ideas in social settings, ranging in scale from small-deliberative groups to tech-clusters and cities. Implicit in this research is that there are knowledge-generating benefits from diversity that comes from mixing different individuals, ideas, and perspectives. Here, we utilize agent-based modeling to examine the emergent outcomes resulting from the manipulation of how diversity is distributed and how knowledge is generated within communicative social structures. In the context of problem solving, we focus on cognitive diversity and its two forms: ability and knowledge. For diversity of ability, we find that local diversity (intermixing of different agents) performs best at all time scales. However, for diversity of knowledge, we find that local homogeneity performs best in the long-run, because it maintains global diversity, and thus the knowledge-generating ability of the group, for a longer period. [full text]
“What we’re doing here will serve as a foundation that we can expand throughout the university,” [Jim] Nelson said, as making data-informed decisions grows more important in a wide range of industries. “I think [Southern Illinois University] will start getting a reputation for being the place to go for analytics.”
As new courses and degree options develop, the university will continue dialogue with its advisory board of corporate leaders, Nelson said, to ensure the programs stay relevant to industry needs.
But as I dug in a much bigger question emerged: Can you actually copyright work produced by AI? Traditionally, the law has been that only work created by people can receive copyright. You might remember the monkey selfie copyright claim from a few years back. In that case, a photographer gave his camera to a monkey who then snapped a selfie. The photographer then tried to claim ownership and PETA sued him to try to claim it back for the monkey. In the end, the photograph was judged to be in the public domain, since copyright requires human involvement. Machines, like monkeys, can’t own work, but clearly something made with the help of a human still qualifies for copyright. The question, then, is where do we draw the line?
The University of California is at war with its largest union, the 26,000-member Local 3299 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). November’s one-day strike, with picket lines at 10 UC campuses and five university hospitals across the state, was the sixth such angry walkout in the three years that the two sides have been fighting over a new contract.
The issue is outsourcing: the sprawling university system’s use of workers from temporary help agencies and staffing firms to fill low- and middle-wage service and healthcare jobs.
Step 1 – take standard letter of recommendation and change the address heading to match the program. If you make a mistake and send the Brandeis letter to Penn for instance, that program will say “well OBVIOUSLY the professor doesn’t care about this student” 2/n
Allen’s multibillion-dollar investment firm opened a new office in Singapore and continues pouring capital into new ventures. Vulcan Real Estate continues buying and selling properties, in the past few years with a greater emphasis on Bellevue. Allen’s research vessel, Petrel, continues discovering historically significant shipwrecks. The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation continues issuing grants. The two research institutes Allen established in Seattle focused on artificial intelligence, brain and cell science and immunology are growing.
Perched on opposite ends of Lake Union, the institutes, with an estimated 650 employees between them, have “transformed the landscape of Seattle as a center of research in these fields, complementing existing organizations,” said Ed Lazowska, professor at the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering.
A new study commissioned by energy company OVO reckons Brits send more than 64m unnecessary emails every day, and that if every adult in the UK sent one fewer “thank you” email a day we would save more than 16,433 tonnes of carbon a year – equivalent to 81,152 flights to Madrid or taking 3,334 diesel cars off the road.
The current model of the internet is not the inevitable one. Globally, we’ve seen at least two other possibilities emerge. One is in China, where the unfettered capitalism of the US internet is blended with tight state oversight and control. … The second alternative model is public service media.
University of California-Santa Barbara, The UCSB Current
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Climate change is reorganizing the life in our oceans in a big way: as waters warm, cold-loving species, from plankton to fish, leave the area and warm water species become more successful. So say an international group of scientists in the most comprehensive assessment of the effects of ocean warming on the distribution fish communities.
“We’ve known for a while that marine species tend to track ocean temperature, but this is the first time we’ve seen how entire communities respond, and that the redistribution of species is so predictable by temperature alone,” said UC Santa Barbara marine ecologist Ben Halpern, an author on a paper in the journal Nature Climate Change. “The implications are very large for the ecology of the oceans and for the benefits — like food from fishing — people get from the oceans.”
English, Arabic, and French dialects can be found on parts of the African continent and are used across tribes, ethnic groups, and national borders, but none is native to Africa. Some estimates put the number of living languages on the continent at 2,000 or more. This can stand in the way of communication as well as commerce, and earlier this year such concerns led to the creation of the Masakhane open source project, an effort being undertaken by African technologists to translate African languages using neural machine translation.
The first question confronting a data analyst is always: where can you find good data? And more than one researcher has apparently found a treasure trove in the annals of daytime television game shows.
This month saw another example, as one economics writer explored 47 years’ worth of bids on “The Price Is Right,” the longest-running U.S. game show in history, where contestants guess the prices of consumer items. Behavioral economist Jonathan S. Hartley at Harvard’s public policy and public administration school wanted to understand why contestants seemed to be underbidding more often than they used to.
Barbara Liskov pioneered the modern approach to writing code. She warns that the challenges facing computer science today can’t be overcome with good design alone.
The government has released its national AI strategy. Here’s a three-sentence summary. The strategy has two parts: national AI projects and growing the AI ecosystem. The strategy mostly gathers ongoing projects into a neat framework. One new announcement is the creation of a National AI Office.
University of California-Berkeley, Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences
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Berkeley, CA December 13, starting at 9:30 a.m., Haas School of Business. “The event brings together stakeholders from academia, scholarly publishing, and policy to share knowledge and discuss the evolving movement toward research transparency and efforts to strengthen the standards of openness and integrity in the social sciences.” [free, rsvp required]
Pasadena, CA December 6-7. “Keynote speakers are experts from prestigious universities like Caltech and Harvard. They will share in-depth insights into the fields of artificial intelligence and big data. Featured panels include practitioners and professors who will discuss interesting topics such as the innovative discovery in recent AI & big data research, raising capital for data startups, and applications in media & entertainment.” [$$$]
Singapore May 11-14. “Literature-based discovery (LBD) addresses a key knowledge discovery challenge of the Big Data era: How to generate novel and actionable knowledge from vast, diverse, and seemingly disconnected fragments of information. Incorporating state-of-the-art data science, natural language processing, and network science techniques.” Deadline for submissions is January 24, 2020.
Towards Data Science “interviews Andreas Muller from Scikit-learn who shares 3 practical machine learning techniques all data scientists needs to know.” [video, 24:43]
arXiv, Computer Science > Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition; Ming Cheng, Kunjing Cai, Ming Li
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In recent years, surveillance cameras are widely deployed in public places, and the general crime rate has been reduced significantly due to these ubiquitous devices. Usually, these cameras provide cues and evidence after crimes conducted, while they are rarely used to prevent or stop criminal activities in time. It is both time and labor consuming to manually monitor a large amount of video data from surveillance cameras. Therefore, automatically recognizing violent behaviors from video signals becomes essential. In this paper, we summarize several existing video datasets for violence detection and propose a new video dataset with more than 2,000 videos captured by surveillance cameras in real-world scenes. Also, we present a new method that utilizes both the merits of 3D-CNNs and optical flow, namely Flow Gated Network. The proposed approach obtains an accuracy of 86.75% on the test set of our proposed RWF-2000 database.