Data Science newsletter – May 14, 2020

Newsletter features journalism, research papers, events, tools/software, and jobs for May 14, 2020

GROUP CURATION: N/A

 
 
Data Science News



How New Zealand put coronavirus on the brink of elimination

Wired UK, David Cox


from

On February 28, the news emerged of New Zealand’s first case of Covid-19. For Michael Baker, a government advisor and epidemiologist at the University of Otago in Wellington, the following weeks would be a time of extreme anxiety.

While New Zealand is now regarded as a global success story in containing the coronavirus – as of May 7 it has reported just 1,489 cases and 21 deaths amongst a population of five million – this did not always appear such a likely outcome. Indeed, scientists believe that without the right strategies being swiftly implemented at crucial times, the country could have experienced more than 1,000 cases a day, overwhelming its fragile healthcare network.

When the news arrived that Covid-19 had reached New Zealand’s shores, Baker had already been monitoring the seemingly inexorable global progression of the pandemic since early January.


What Will College Look Like in the Fall (and Beyond)? (Ep. 418)

Freakonomics podcast


from

Three university presidents try to answer our listeners’ questions. The result? Not much pomp and a whole lot of circumstance. [audio, 58:16]


I’ve landed in Hong Kong after flying from Paris CDG, via London Heathrow. I now have to wait ~8 hours before I get my #COVID19 test results and thus have ample time to tweet about my experience.

Twitter, Laurel Chor


from

At CDG, the @British_Airways
check-in staff wore masks and gloves. Masks are mandatory inside the airport. But on the plane to London, and on my next flight to HK, no BA staff wore masks, surprisingly. [thread]


How a hockey analyst is helping experts in the fight against COVID-19

Sportsnet.ca, Mike Shulman


from

Amid the cacophony, sometimes the founding collaborative spirit of the Internet reemerges.

David Yu — team lead of hockey analytics at Sportlogiq, a Montreal-based, AI-driven advanced stats company that works with most NHL teams — is the author of one of those recent precious moments.

He isn’t an epidemiologist. Nor is he an expert in infectious diseases.

But the soon-to-be 33-year-old hockey analyst has created a powerful tool, the COVID Projections Tracker, which has provided those in the field a way to find flaws in the model widely used by U.S. health care providers, media outlets and government bodies — including the White House — to make crucial decisions related to the novel coronavirus pandemic.


Jonah Hill Passes Samuel L Jackson With Most F-ing Swears on Film

The Wrap, Brian Welk


from

No f—ing joke, a new study showed that Jonah Hill has overtaken Samuel L. Jackson as the actor who has uttered the most damn swear words in movies.

An analysis from the research group Buzz Bingo called “Profanity On Film” said that Hill has used bad language 376 times in his movies while Jackson has only used swear words 301 times in his films, landing him at just third place overall.

Hill took the top spot in large part because of his role in Martin Scorsese’s 2013 film “The Wolf of Wall Street,” which the report says is the most profane movie in terms of language ever, with offensive language used over 700 times.


Five AI chip startups that VCs love

FierceElectronics, Karen Field


from

Top funded chip startup company Graphcore is a semiconductor firm, which has developed an intelligence processing unit (IPU) that is specifically designed for AI applications.

Palo Alo-based SambaNova Systems, a stealth startup, has received over $450 million to build a net-generation AI computing system of hardware and software.

Cerebras Systems’ Wafer Scale Engine—the world’s largest computer chip—is at the heart of its deep learning systems, enabling AI research at unprecedented speeds and scale.

Mythic is focused on machine learning inference. Its IPUs leverage analog computing by performing the calculations required for the inference stage of deep neural networks inside a flash memory array.

Groq offers an alternative platform for machine learning that is not dependent on the performance limitations of GPU parallelism and long latency, offering a superior inference platform with no performance penalty for small batch sizes or workloads of any size.


Using social and behavioural science to support COVID-19 pandemic response

Nature Human Behaviour, Jay J. Van Bavel et al.


from

The COVID-19 pandemic represents a massive global health crisis. Because the crisis requires large-scale behaviour change and places significant psychological burdens on individuals, insights from the social and behavioural sciences can be used to help align human behaviour with the recommendations of epidemiologists and public health experts. Here we discuss evidence from a selection of research topics relevant to pandemics, including work on navigating threats, social and cultural influences on behaviour, science communication, moral decision-making, leadership, and stress and coping. In each section, we note the nature and quality of prior research, including uncertainty and unsettled issues. We identify several insights for effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic and highlight important gaps researchers should move quickly to fill in the coming weeks and months. [full text]


Experts Question Why Coronavirus Hasn’t Killed More Russians

Bloomberg Prognosis, Henry Meyer


from

As Russia’s surging coronavirus infections have turned it into a global epidemic hotspot second only to the U.S., one thing puzzles health experts: Why is it reporting so few deaths?

Russian officials say 2,305 people have died so far from Covid-19 out of 252,245 confirmed cases since the epidemic erupted. Russia’s total cases on Tuesday overtook those of Spain, which has reported close to 27,000 deaths, after passing the U.K. and Italy, which have more than 13 times the Russian level of fatalities.

The World Health Organization said it’s in talks with Russia about the country’s statistics for coronavirus deaths, which at 0.9% is far below the global average and the lowest among nations with the highest numbers of infections.


Meet this super-spotter of duplicated images in science papers

Nature, News Feature, Helen Shen


from

Elisabeth Bik quit her job to spot errors in research papers — and has become the public face of image sleuthing.


Scientists are drowning in COVID-19 papers. Can new tools keep them afloat?

Science, Jeffrey Brainard


from

Timothy Sheahan, a virologist studying COVID-19, wishes he could keep pace with the growing torrent of new scientific papers about the disease and the novel coronavirus that causes it. But there are just too many—more than 4000 alone last week. “I’m not keeping up,” says Sheahan, who works at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. “It’s impossible.”

A loose-knit army of data scientists, software developers, and journal publishers is pressing hard to change that. Backed by large technology firms and the White House, they are racing to create digital collections holding thousands of freely available papers that could be useful to ending the pandemic, and scrambling to build data-mining and search tools that can help researchers quickly find the information they seek. And the urgency is growing: By one estimate, the COVID-19 literature published since January has reached more than 23,000 papers and is doubling every 20 days—among the biggest explosions of scientific literature ever.


We now have enough #SARSCoV2 genomic data from different states to make some broad conclusions about how the #COVID19 epidemic has unfolded in the US. 1/14

Twitter, Trevor Bedford, h/t, Tim O'Reilly


from

We see a spectrum where some states had single (early) introductions that fueled the majority of the epidemic, while in others the epidemic appears to be driven by a larger number of separate introductions. 2/14


The New and Improved PubMed® Is Here!

National Library of Medicine, NLM Musings from the Mezzanine blog


from

Since our last blog post, our coders have been hard at work preparing for the full transition to the new and improved PubMed. The latest features have been added, and beginning May 18, you can experience the new PubMed too!

The new PubMed features a modern interface with enhanced search results, including highlighted text snippets to help you preview an abstract while scanning your results list, and updated web elements for easier navigation. The new Best Match sort order uses advanced machine-learning technology and a new relevance search algorithm to bring you the top-ranked results.


COVID-19 expert: Coronavirus will rage ‘until it infects everybody it possibly can’

USA Today News, Ken Alltucker


from

A high-profile infectious disease researcher warns COVID-19 is in the early stages of attacking the world, which makes it difficult to relax stay-at-home orders without putting most Americans at risk.

Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said the initial wave of outbreaks in cities such as New York City, where one in five people have been infected, represent a fraction of the illness and death yet to come.

“This damn virus is going to keep going until it infects everybody it possibly can,” Osterholm said Monday during a meeting with the USA TODAY Editorial Board. “It surely won’t slow down until it hits 60 to 70%” of the population, the number that would create herd immunity and halt the spread of the virus.


USPTO Adds Company to $50M Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Contract

Nextgov, Brandi Vincent


from

The United States Patent and Trademark Office officially selected a new partner to support its increasing adoption of artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities.

General Dynamics Information Technology on Monday announced it was awarded a contract worth up to $50 million through USPTO’s Intelligent Automation and Innovation Support Services blanket purchase agreement.

GDIT is the latest of more than a dozen companies the agency tapped under the future-facing BPA. Other businesses who’ve made their own recent announcements detailing partnerships via the agreement include Octo and Steampunk.


How Hardcore Edit Analysts Unravel the Secrets of ‘Survivor’

The Ringer, Ben Lindbergh


from

Can the winner of a season be identified in advance by the edit each character receives? These superfans are determined to try. Welcome to the sabermetrics of ‘Survivor.’


Modeling the Spread of COVID-19 in UCLA Classrooms

University of California-Los Angeles, Daily Bruin student newspaper; Radhika Ahuja, Charlotte Huang, Sydney Kovach, Laurel Wood


from

What would happen if UCLA students returned in the fall to take in-person classes? We explore the potential spread of COVID-19 among students on UCLA’s campus.

 
Events



Space Apps COVID-19 Challenge

NASA, ESA, JAXA


from

Online “On May 30-31, NASA, along with the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), are inviting coders, entrepreneurs, scientists, designers, storytellers, makers, builders, artists, and technologists to participate in a virtual hackathon. During a period of 48 hours, participants from around the world will create virtual teams and use Earth observation data to develop solutions to issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic.” [registration required]


Robot Stories – How to become a roboticist

MassRobotics


from

Online May 20, starting at 3 p.m. EDT. “Laurie Leshin, President of Worcester Polytechnic Institute: Laurie has sent robots to Mars, overseen NASA’s largest science center, and even has a piece of the solar system named after her. Cool. She now oversees WPI, offering the first undergraduate program in robotics. Learn how robotics is being taught and the many career paths you can pursue with a robotics degree.” [registration required]


AnitaB.org Chicago Covid-19 Epidemic Data Visualization Workshop

AnitaB.org Community network


from

Online May 20, starting at 5 p.m. CDT. “With the rapid spread in the novel Corona-virus worldwide, the World Health Organization (WHO) and several countries have published results on the impact of COVID-19 over the past few months. We will be using the data repository curated by John Hopkins University, together with nCoV2019 dataset and other public data, to analyze the COVID-19 epidemic data and create interactive dashboards using Python. We will visualize the emergence of the COVID-19 epidemic, including analysis on infection, mortality, and recovery rates, at different times and geographical location.” [registration required]

 
Deadlines



Join our volunteer study: can Californians exercise their data privacy rights?

“Are you in California? We need your help to test if your new Do-Not-Sell rights are working as intended.”

Excited to announce the Hateful Memes Challenge, a new dataset and competition for vision and language, focusing on multimodal understanding and reasoning

We are organizing a @NeurIPSConf
competition around the challenge, hosted by @drivendataorg
, with $100k in prize money! We know that new benchmarks play an important role in driving progress in AI, and we hope this challenge will do the same and spur innovation. (5/7)

MOVIS 2020 Workshop at IEEE VIS

Salt Lake City, UT October 25. “The MoVIS ’20 workshop is situated in a larger body of research on geovisualization, geospatial data analytics and exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA). This body of work includes mapping spatial datasets using different visual techniques, and assessing how humans interact and gain insights from spatial data. Spatial flow data is a special type of data that presents issues like the “haystack” problem of overlapping flows, edge effects, issues of using polygon centroids as origins or destinations, and issues of scale and modifiable areal units.” Deadline for submissions is July 10.

ACM Gordon Bell Special Prize for HPC-Based COVID-19 Research: Call for Nominations

“ACM logoACM has established a special category of the ACM Gordon Bell Prize to recognize outstanding research achievements that use high performance computing (HPC) applications to understand the COVID-19 pandemic, including the understanding of its spread. The ACM Gordon Bell Special Prize for High Performance Computing-Based COVID-19 Research will be presented in 2020 and 2021.” Deadline for nominations is October 8.
 
Tools & Resources



Here’s a List of Colleges’ Plans for Reopening in the Fall

The Chronicle of Higher Education


from

The coronavirus pandemic has left higher-education leaders facing difficult decisions about when to reopen campuses and how to go about it. The Chronicle is tracking individual colleges’ plans. Currently the vast majority say they are planning for an in-person fall semester.


Jail Population Data

Vera Institute of Justice


from

“In response to the novel coronavirus, Vera researchers in the In Our Backyards Project have been publishing jail populations. The most recent available data for each jail jurisdiction is presented in a simple table at the Vera Institute of Justice website along with information on COVID-19 cases. This page provides access to the complete set of jail data since January 1, 2020.”


Before starting to code an ML algorithm, spend one hour trying to do its job. Be the algorithm.

Twitter, Monica Rogati


from

Learned this early on from @IBMResearch
‘s Salim Roukos. You can read more in the @mlpowered
book, which is full of practical ML advice missing from textbooks: https://mlpowered.com/book/


Dolby introduces Dolby.io, a new media and interactivity platform for developers

Dolby Laboratories


from

Dolby Laboratories, Inc. (NYSE DLB), a leader in immersive entertainment experiences, today announced Dolby.io, an API platform that further broadens the opportunities to create in Dolby for the enterprise and application development space. Dolby.io will enable businesses, developers, and content creators to enhance every interaction and every piece of content in order to deliver spectacular communications, collaboration, and audiovisual experiences in their apps and services.


Our paper, “Saving social media data: Understanding data management practices among social media researchers and their implications for archives”, is out now in JASIST

Twitter, Libby Hemphill


from

We surveyed researchers and reviewed publications and found management and sharing practices for social media data similar to other social science data (e.g. surveys): focus on acquisition more than sharing or documentation, concerns about ethical reuse.

 
Careers


Postdocs

Research Fellow (Organisation and HRM)



University of Warwick, Warwick Business School; Coventry, England
Full-time positions outside academia

p5.js Project Lead



Processing Foundation; Remote

Research Scientist or Principal Research Scientist – Signal Processing



MERL – Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories; Cambridge, MA

Research Scientist or Senior Research Scientist – Computer Vision



MERL – Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories; Cambridge, MA
Full-time, non-tenured academic positions

IT Support Specialist – Scientific Computing – (2000413)



Vanderbilt University, Basic Science Research; Nashville, TN

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