Data Science newsletter – January 28, 2021

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Facebook on Monday said it’s giving outside researchers more information about how and why political ads get shown to certain users.

Why it matters: Researchers have long complained that Facebook has been slow to grant experts access to information about ways its platform is used.

Details: The tech giant says it will be providing new data to researchers on Feb. 1 about political, social and election ads that ran on its platform from Aug. 3 to Nov. 3 of 2020.

FIU’s Division of IT’sCenter for Internet Augmented Research and Assessment (CIARA) has been awarded two five-year grants totaling $10.3 million for network infrastructure and software projects that will help scientists around the world share more data at a faster rate.

The funds will help CIARA continue to evolve the infrastructure of the AmLight intercontinental network and internet exchange points and help develop new software that will increase operational efficiency and better enable research that spans multiple continents.

These universities join MIT, Stanford and the University of Michigan which have worked with TRI over the last five years to expand the body of research into artificial intelligence (AI) with the goal of amplifying the human experience.

The next five-year phase includes investing more than $75 million in the academic institutions, making it one of the largest collaborative research programs by an automotive company in the world.

Elizabeth M. Renieris, a technology and human rights fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and a practitioner fellow at Stanford University’s Digital Civil Society Lab, has been appointed founding director of the Notre Dame-IBM Technology Ethics Lab at the University of Notre Dame.

Launched in 2020, the Notre Dame-IBM Tech Ethics Lab aims to address ethical questions associated with the development and use of emerging technologies such as AI and machine learning. The lab serves as the applied research arm of Notre Dame’s Technology Ethics Center (ND-TEC), which develops and supports multi- and interdisciplinary research on questions related to the impact of technology on humanity.

… One of the latest smart-city causalities was Cisco’s ambitious Kinetic for Cities software, a dashboard for governments to manage data from their local smart-city projects. Cisco said in December that it would kill the product.

“The cities realized that that’s not what they actually need,” said Cisco global innovation officer Guy Diedrich.

Instead of pushing its software, Cisco plans to work with city governments on other efforts involving Internet connectivity. The company recently worked a lot with local officials to install basic Internet infrastructure, for instance, like helping Brazilian cities create virtual courtrooms, he said.

Contemporary robots can move quickly. “The motors are fast, and they’re powerful,” says Sabrina Neuman.

Yet in complex situations, like interactions with people, robots often don’t move quickly. “The hang up is what’s going on in the robot’s head,” she adds.

Perceiving stimuli and calculating a response takes a “boatload of computation,” which limits reaction time, says Neuman, who recently graduated with a PhD from the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Neuman has found a way to fight this mismatch between a robot’s “mind” and body. The method, called robomorphic computing, uses a robot’s physical layout and intended applications to generate a customized computer chip that minimizes the robot’s response time.

Fifteen of the country’s leading research universities—Brown, Caltech, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, the University of Illinois, Michigan, Northwestern, Penn, Princeton, SUNY Binghamton, UC Berkeley, UCLA, the University of Southern California, and Yale—today launched University Technology Licensing Program LLC (UTLP).

UTLP brings a subset of intellectual property assets from within these universities’ patent portfolios related to the physical sciences together for efficient licensing, enabling interested tech companies to obtain licenses to inventions from multiple universities for their existing and future product offerings.

When we introduced the next generation of the Twitter API in July 2020, we also shared our plans to invest in the success of the academic research community with tailored solutions that better serve their goals. Today, we’re excited to launch the Academic Research product track on the new Twitter API.

The U.S. faces a steep uphill struggle in gearing up to monitor Covid-19 variants, a key part of watching for the emergence of dangerous mutations that might spread quickly, evade vaccines or kill more infected people.

Other countries, such as the U.K., have established robust, nationwide surveillance programs to identify new Covid genomes and track the spread of existing ones. But the U.S. has not: It ranks 32nd in the world for the number of sequences completed per 1,000 Covid cases, according to data from GISAID, a global database where researchers share new genomes.

Benefits experts say insurers and policymakers are growing used to treating food as a form of medicine that can help patients reduce blood sugar or blood pressure levels and stay out of expensive hospitals.

“People are finally getting comfortable with the idea that everybody saves money when you prevent certain things from happening or somebody’s condition from worsening,” said Andrew Shea, a senior vice president with the online insurance broker eHealth.

This push is still relatively small and happening mostly with government-funded programs like Medicaid or Medicare Advantage, the privately run versions of the government’s health program for people who are 65 or older or have disabilities. But some employers that offer coverage to their workers also are growing interested.

For about eight years, a coalition of non-governmental organisations has pushed for a treaty banning “killer robots,” saying human control is necessary to judge attacks’ proportionality and assign blame for war crimes. Thirty countries including Brazil and Pakistan want a ban, according to the coalition’s website, and a United Nations body has held meetings on the systems since at least 2014.
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While autonomous weapon capabilities are decades old, concern has mounted with the development of AI to power such systems, along with research finding biases in AI and examples of the software’s abuse.

The US panel, called the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, in meetings this week acknowledged the risks of autonomous weapons. A member from Microsoft for instance warned of pressure to build machines that react quickly, which could escalate conflicts.

A recently produced enterprise artificial intelligence strategy is now in place to guide the Health and Human Services Department’s ongoing and upcoming efforts involving the technology.

The 7-page document outlines a strategic approach to broaden tech fluency and accelerate AI-centered pursuits across HHS—and it also establishes an AI Council to help facilitate the massive health agency’s overall implementation.

“Ultimately, this strategy is the first step towards transforming HHS into an AI fueled enterprise,” it reads.

Cornell is moving forward, and underground, with plans to drill an observatory borehole to explore the viability – and ensure the safety – of using geothermal energy to heat the Ithaca campus.

At a virtual community forum Jan. 19, a Cornell faculty and staff panel outlined the next steps for testing Earth Source Heat (ESH), the process by which water would be extracted from the Earth’s crust, its heat transferred to a separate supply of water flowing within Cornell’s heating distribution pipeline to heat most of the Ithaca campus buildings, and the original geothermal water returned to the subsurface.

Tony Ingraffea, the Dwight C. Baum Professor of Engineering Emeritus, was among the faculty and staff members who outlined the next steps for testing Earth Source Heat during a virtual community forum Jan. 19.

“Not only would Earth Source Heat enable Cornell to heat our campus without burning fossil fuels,” said Rick Burgess, vice president for facilities and campus services and co-chair of the Sustainable Cornell Council. “It also brings an exciting opportunity for scientific discovery.”

The rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent countermeasures, such as school closures, the shift to working from home, and social distancing are disrupting economic activity around the world. As with other major economic shocks, there are winners and losers, leading to increased inequality across certain groups. In this project, we investigate the effects of COVID-19 disruptions on the gender gap in academia. We administer a global survey to a broad range of academics across various disciplines to collect nuanced data on the respondents’ circumstances, such as a spouse’s employment, the number and ages of children, and time use. We find that female academics, particularly those who have children, report a disproportionate reduction in time dedicated to research relative to what comparable men and women without children experience. Both men and women report substantial increases in childcare and housework burdens, but women experienced significantly larger increases than men did.

Sharon Begley died of complications of lung cancer on Jan. 16, just five days after completing this article. She was a never-smoker.

Breast cancer wouldn’t have surprised her; being among the 1 in 8 women who develop it over their lifetime isn’t statistically improbable. Neither would have colorectal cancer; knowing the risk, Mandi Pike “definitely” planned to have colonoscopies as she grew older.

But when a PET scan in November 2019 revealed that Pike, a 33-year-old oil trader, wife, and mother of two in Edmond, Okla., had lung cancer — she had been coughing and was initially misdiagnosed with pneumonia — her first reaction was, “but I never smoked,” she said. “It all seemed so surreal.”

Online February 3, starting at 1 p.m. Pacific time. [rsvp required]

As you may know, my new book, Better Data Visualizations: A Guide for Scholars, Researchers, and Wonks is coming out in February 2021. One of my goals in that book is to help expand readers’ graphic literacy. Instead of relying on the tried-and-true bar, line, and pie charts, what about trying a slope chart, dot plot, or tile grid map?

As a companion to the book, I asked experts and friends in the data visualization field to record short videos explaining how to read and use different charts.

The sections in this exhibition examine information graphics that show space, time, nature, and society. Many are beautiful. Each is a unique way of seeing still worth our attention.

Using data from @CDCgov
the team added 1st and 2nd shot data for all 50 states and DC. Through scraping, a handful of counties in TX, NC, and FL have data too.