Data Science newsletter – March 2, 2021

According to United Nations estimates, the global population is expected to grow by 2 billion within the next 30 years, giving rise to an expected increase in demand for food and agricultural products. Today, biotic and abiotic environmental stresses such as plant pathogens, sudden fluctuations in temperature, drought, soil salinity, and toxic metal pollution — made worse by climate change — impair crop productivity and lead to significant losses in agriculture yield worldwide.

New work from the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, and Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory (TLL) highlights the potential of recently developed analytical tools that can provide tissue-cell or organelle-specific information on living plants in real-time and can be used on any plant species.

A U.S. national security commission is recommending that American universities take steps to prevent sensitive technology from being stolen by the Chinese military, a sign of growing concerns over the security of academic research.

Algorithms are already being used in criminal-justice applications in many places, helping decide where police departments should send officers for patrol, as well as which defendants should be released on bail and how judges should hand out sentences. Research is exploring the potential benefits and dangers of these tools, highlighting where they can go wrong and how they can be prevented from becoming a new source of inequality. The findings of these studies prompt some important questions such as: Should artificial intelligence play some role in policing and the courts? If so, what role should it play? The answers, it appears, depend in large part on small details.

Florida State University’s College of Arts and Sciences has announced the launch of a new interdisciplinary graduate program that will welcome its first students in Fall 2021.

The FSU Interdisciplinary Data Science Master’s Degree Program, or IDS, leverages FSU’s strengths in computer science, mathematics, scientific computing and statistics to prepare students for contemporary careers in data science, one of the fastest growing fields in the United States.

The vast majority of artificial intelligence has been developed in an idealized environment: a computer simulation that dodges the bumps of the real world. Be it DeepMind’s MuZero program for Go and chess and Atari or OpenAI’s GPT-3 for language generation, the most sophisticated deep learning programs have all benefitted from a pruned set of constraints by which software is improved.

For that reason, the hardest and perhaps the most promising work of deep learning may lie in the realm of robotics, where the real world introduces constraints that cannot be fully anticipated.

That is one takeaway from a recent report by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and Google who have summarized several years of experiments with robots using what’s known as reinforcement learning.

2/ How much you publish is gendered—spoiler: women publish less. Because hiring and promotion depends on publishing, it’s important to understand why. We asked: how much of the gendered “publishing gap” is explained by the unequal impact of parenthood in academia?

Inside the Perseverance rover sits a gleaming, toaster-sized appliance. It has nothing to do with the mission’s primary objective of searching for signs of ancient life on the Red Planet, and it’s still technically a prototype, but the device happens to be one of the vehicle’s most demanding components. … The golden box is called the Mars OXygen In-situ resource utilization Experiment, or MOXIE for short. (Hailing from Boston, Hecht chose the name in part to honor the Massachusetts-born soda infamous throughout New England, and this year he served as the grand marshal at Maine’s annual MOXIE parade.) MOXIE aims to act like a mechanical tree. It will inhale carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere, which is about a hundred times less dense than Earth’s but made up almost entirely of CO2. It will then exhale oxygen—back out into the atmosphere on this mission, but perhaps next time, into fuel tanks that will get astronauts back to Earth.

As of February 2021, JAIR publishes, on a regular basis, detailed metrics on the submission handling process. This transparent publishing approach is intended to provide useful information to prospective authors and valuable calibration to the editorial team and to reviewers.

Submission evaluation statistics based on data from 2019/11/22 to 2020/11/21, released on 2021/02/19
(these statistics do not cover the past 90 days, to minimize distortion from submissions currently being evaluated)

With the scale and diversity of the data, along with buy-in from providers, Myerson sees Truveta as being in a unique position to use AI to structure the data and build a database that has clinical and research value, all while protecting the privacy of patients by relying on the ethics and governance procedures already built into the health networks’ policies.

“The most important thing to all the health systems that are in this really has come down to governance,” Myerson said. “This is their patient’s data. They don’t want this to be used for marketing drugs to sell the wrong drug to the wrong patient.”

In an interview with Protocol, Myerson explained Truveta’s new approach to data collection and analysis in medicine, how his company addresses algorithmic bias, how they’re protecting privacy in the data and creating “an alliance of health systems.”

For many busy working scientists, receiving yet another invitation from an academic journal to peer review yet another manuscript can trigger groans. The work is time-consuming, and rewards can seem intangible. What’s more, the reviewers work for free, even as the large commercial publishers that operate many journals earn hefty profits.

But despite occasional, exasperated cries of “I should get paid for this,” scientists have soldiered on. Many cite a sense of duty to help advance their disciplines, as well as the need for reciprocity, knowing other researchers volunteer to peer review their manuscript submissions.

But last week, researchers at a scholarly publishing conference debated a provocative question: Should peer reviewers be paid?

McDonald’s is testing out artificial intelligence in a Chicago suburb’s drive-thru in order to keep up with the high demand and to increase efficiency.

The plan is to replace human servers with voice-based technology, since slow service, long lines and inaccurate orders have threatened sales. The new AI’s voice has a feminine tone, sounding a lot like Siri or Alexa.

Part of Governor Raimondo’s Back to Work Rhode Island initiative, this advanced job board uses technology to curate skills and eliminate resume readers.

Amazon announced a $15 million donation from its Amazon Future Engineer program to nonprofit Code.org to support the development and launch of a new equity-minded Advanced Placement computer science programming curriculum. The new curriculum will teach students the same tools and concepts as the existing AP Computer Science A (AP CSA) course, but it will do so in an inclusive way that considers the cultural perspectives, interests, and experiences of Black, Latino, Native American (BLNA), and students of other underrepresented groups. The program’s goal is to grow the number of participants in the program and ultimately increase the number of students from under-represented groups who will pursue a career in engineering.

This paper reports the results of the first systematic attempt at quantitatively measuring the seminar culture within economics and testing whether it is gender neutral. We collected data on every interaction between presenters and their audience in hundreds of research seminars and job market talks across most leading economics departments, as well as during summer conferences. We find that women presenters are treated differently than their male counterparts. Women are asked more questions during a seminar and the questions asked of women presenters are more likely to be patronizing or hostile. These effects are not due to women presenting in different fields, different seminar series, or different topics, as our analysis controls for the institution, seminar series, and JEL codes associated with each presentation. Moreover, it appears that there are important differences by field and that these differences are not uniformly mitigated by more rigid seminar formats. Our findings add to an emerging literature documenting ways in which women economists are treated differently than men, and suggest yet another potential explanation for their under-representation at senior levels within the economics profession.

The most fertile topsoil is entirely gone from a third of all the land devoted to growing crops across the upper Midwest, the scientists say. Some of their colleagues, however, remain skeptical about the methods that produced this result.

The new study emerged from a simple observation, one that people flying over Midwestern farms can confirm for themselves. The color of bare soil varies, and that variation is related to soil quality.

The soil that’s darkest in color is widely known as topsoil. Soil scientists call this layer the “A-horizon.” It’s the “black, organic, rich soil that’s really good for growing crops,” says Evan Thaler, a Ph.D. student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

When developers can see the information, we can learn through interaction. One of my favorite quotes says it all.

Our team uses Observable to model our system architecture, understand system performance, understand feature usage patterns in order to optimize our code. These are just some of the ways that Observable can help you be a better developer that we’ve learned by doing ourselves.

Over the next several weeks, we’re going to share how we’re doing this. I think you’ll see that it allows you to iterate faster, improves your communication and collaboration with others, and helps you make better decisions. We’ll provide blog posts, example notebooks, and event some meetups to learn techniques. If you’re interested in following this series, you can subscribe here. Please join us for the first meetup on March 9, 2021.

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In this report, authors Justin Norman, Pete Skomoroch, and Mike Loukides present four in-depth essays to help business leaders, AI specialists, and data scientists examine what makes AI different. Once you’re familiar with the issues, you’ll be better prepared to anticipate and solve the problems you face as you develop an AI project and shepherd it into production.