Data Science newsletter – April 9, 2020

GROUP CURATION: N/A

The next frontier for university technology transfer will likely be in the transformation of data-rich sectors using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies. One area largely accumulating data is the healthcare sector. Medical knowledge is doubling every 73 days, yet we are barely scratching the surface of utilizing this data. With our computing power today and the new era of AI we are at the cusp of a healthcare revolution. Academic institutions are sitting on massive amounts of valuable data that is vastly underutilized, and research institutions will soon begin to recognize and develop healthcare data into the next revolutionary asset.

Foursquare is not the same company it was when it launched at SXSW in 2009. The location-based social network, which let people check in to locations to share with their friends and earn badges, has evolved over time into an advertising and marketing platform focused on location as a differentiator. … Factual, for its part, also launched in 2009 as a repository for open data, but over time it has become increasingly focused on using its location data to improve advertising. The company offered brands the ability to track the success of their marketing campaigns, measuring whether a campaign actually got people to visit stores physically — so you can see why it might be a good fit with Foursquare.

Many states report coronavirus cases and COVID-19 hospitalizations differently, and the federal government is way behind on data tracking. Without consistent information, the U.S. won’t be able to properly respond as new coronavirus hot spots emerge.

Today, we’re bringing you three stories that illustrate a fact of American life that has become abundantly clear over the past few weeks: Our unemployment support systems are woefully underprepared for this crisis. That has caused delays in how quickly help can get to the people who need it most, and threatens to deplete states’ financial reserves. Congress just injected $260 billion into the state unemployment insurance system, and most Americans will eventually receive $1,200 relief payments. Because of the way our unemployment insurance system is set up, many Americans are still struggling to file unemployment claims, and the amount of government assistance they’ll receive will also depend on where they live. In the meantime, jobless workers are scrambling to pay their bills and discovering other cracks in the makeshift social safety net that’s been created to catch them.

The World Health Organization has announced an ambitious global effort, called Solidarity II, of so-called serosurveys, studies that look for antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 in the population.

The United States has launched an unprecedented effort as well. One serosurvey is already underway in six metropolitan areas, including New York City, the hardest hit city in the United States. A second, even larger one, is on its heels, and together they should give a strong nationwide effort to track closely how many Americans have become infected as the pandemic unfolds. Serosurveys may also help efforts to develop vaccines, and, separately attempts to devise therapies to stop the virus from causing harm.

As the coronavirus touches on virtually every part of life around the globe, social scientists are rushing to suck up real-time data on how people are responding to the unfolding pandemic. Economists are gathering data about supply chains. Political scientists are scrutinizing how government responses track with ideology. Psychologists are monitoring children in after-school programs. Behavioral scientists are surveying thousands of people to see how they respond to information in a crisis.

James Heckman, a Nobel Prize–winning economist at the University of Chicago, suggests researchers need to take to heart former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s adage: Never let a crisis go to waste. “Here, scientifically, I think we need to operate on that credo,” Heckman says. “We’re getting new information. It’s very valuable information.”

We thought we’d talk to some folks at NC State about the basics of COVID-19 and (importantly) what we don’t know in the context of food safety, as well as what’s being done to fill those gaps in our understanding.

With that in mind, we took some time to pick the brains of Lee-Ann Jaykus and Ben Chapman. Both are trained microbiologists and are internationally recognized experts on various aspects of food safety. Jaykus, in particular, is a leading authority on food virology.

Some local officials are disappointed the federal government will end funding for coronavirus testing sites this Friday. In a few places those sites will close as a result. This as criticism continues that not enough testing is available.

In the Philadelphia suburbs, Montgomery County has a drive-through site that has tested 250 people a day since March 21.

“It has been a very successful site. We are hoping by the time it closes Friday afternoon that we will have tested a little over 5,000 individuals,” says Dr. Valerie Arkoosh, who chairs the commission in the county of more than 825,000 people.

Two separate research projects suggest that the novel coronavirus may have been circulating in New York City earlier than thought and the earliest cases likely originated with travelers coming from Europe and other parts of the United States, not Asia.

The new data come from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the NYU Grossman School of Medicine.

Over the past decade, Instagram has become an engine of commerce and cultural influence with few peers—aside from its parent company, Facebook Inc. Reporter Sarah Frier’s inside look at Instagram, based on interviews with hundreds of the companies’ leaders, current and former employees, competitors, and stars, traces the union of Facebook and Instagram and the disintegration of the relationship between their chief executive officers. Facebook said in a statement that it has committed significant resources to fuel Instagram’s development and that “Instagram’s success is Facebook’s success.”

Eventbrite CEO Julia Hartz announced Wednesday during a companywide meeting that 45% of employees were being laid off, Protocol has learned. The massive cut at the publicly traded ticketing and event management site represents one of the most dramatic blows to the live events business, which has been decimated by the novel coronavirus.

Multiple employees who attended the meeting said Hartz was emotional as she delivered the news to staff around the world via video call. Employees were notified after the call if they had lost their job. Eventbrite currently employs between 1,000 and 1,100 employees, meaning the cuts will cost as many as 500 people their jobs.

“We have been looking at how 23andMe can leverage its research platform to help better understand how humans might respond to this virus,” said Joyce Tung, Ph.D., 23andMe’s Vice President of Research. “Ultimately, we want to publish our research findings in order to help provide more insight on COVID-19 for the scientific community.”

US labs that underwent huge efforts to retool for COVID-19 testing still aren’t operating at full capacity. Experts say the lack of a national strategy is largely to blame.

A new study on malaria prevention shows that employees who know their health status become more productive at work.

The head of the European Research Council, Mauro Ferrari, has resigned, citing his disappointment with the European Union’s response to the coronavirus outbreak.

Ferrari, who became president of the council in January and is the EU’s top scientist, said his proposal to create a special program dedicated to combating COVID-19 was unanimously rejected by the research council.

“I am afraid that I have seen enough of both the governance of science, and the political operations at the European Union. In these three long months, I have indeed met many excellent and committed individuals, at different levels of the organization of the ERC and the EC. However, I have lost faith in the system itself,” Ferrari said in a statement to the Financial Times announcing his resignation.

The market for specialty silicon that enables companies to run artificial intelligence models on battery-sipping and relatively constrained devices is flush with funds and ideas. Two new startups have entered the arena, each proposing a different way to break down the computing-intensive tasks of recognizing wake words, identifying people, and other jobs that are built on neural networks.

Perceive, which launched this week, and Kneron (pronounced neuron), which launched in March, are relying on neural networks at the edge to reduce bandwidth, speed up results, and protect privacy. They join a dozen or more startups all trying to bring specialty chips to the edge to make the IoT more efficient and private.

“In this post, we will discuss two of our recent projects aimed at addressing these challenges. First, we describe how robots can learn agile behaviors by imitating motions from real animals, producing fast and fluent movements like trotting and hopping. Then, we discuss a system for automating the training of locomotion skills in the real world, which allows robots to learn to walk on their own, with minimal human assistance.”

“By simple, I mean easy to implement, less than 5 minutes on each step, and the changes should force you to do things better.” … “1. Use version control to track chanes in your code”