Data Science newsletter – April 16, 2021

“One of the big challenges for companies today is that you have processes for nearly everything. You have a process for … financial reporting, for managing a supply chain, for dealing with marketing. But if you go back and ask yourself, ‘Do we have a well-established process for doing AI and analytics in the company?,’ the answer most places is no,” says [Eric] Anderson.

Instead, many companies develop an ad hoc approach to using artificial intelligence and analytics to solve individual problems—which limits the impact, making it unlikely that these tools will ever transform the company’s culture, or be used to drive its most critical decisions.

During a recent The Insightful Leader Live event, Anderson, who is also director of the new MBAi program, offered advice for leaders who want to develop an analytics and AI process robust enough to make a real difference in their business.

In the earliest stage of life, animals undergo some of their most spectacular physical transformations. Once merely blobs of dividing cells, they begin to rearrange themselves into their more characteristic forms, be they fish, birds or humans. Understanding how cells act together to build tissues has been a fundamental problem in physics and biology.

Now, UC Santa Barbara professor Otger Campàs(link is external), who also holds the Mellichamp Chair in Systems Biology and Bioengineering, and Sangwoo Kim(link is external), a postdoctoral fellow in professor Campàs lab, have approached this question, with surprising findings.

“When you have many cells physically interacting with each other, how does the system behave collectively? What is the physical state of the ensemble?” said Campàs.

On Tuesday, April 6 at 7 p.m. EDT, the University formally extended offers of admission to 1,498 students for the class of 2025 amid a historic application cycle upended by the COVID-19 pandemic and unprecedented disruptions to high school coursework.

The decisions represent a record-low acceptance rate of 3.98 percent and the sharpest year-to-year drop in over a decade. Due to over 200 students formerly in the class of 2024 requesting to defer their enrollment by one year over the summer, the total number of admits is around 20 percent lower than it would otherwise be in an ordinary year.

With the global auto industry’s push toward vehicles becoming cleaner and safer, Toyota Motor Corp. unveiled in Japan new versions of the Lexus LS and Toyota Mirai, both equipped with advanced-driver assistance. Toyota officials in the US told Autoweek the 2022 LS 500h AWD with Advanced Drive, as the system is called, is expected to arrive at dealerships here this fall.

Advanced Drive features a Level 2 autonomous system, so it helps keep the car in its lane, maintains the distance from other vehicles, and assists with lane changes. In Level 2, the driver is still required to monitor the road, hold the steering wheel most of the time, and be ready to take over control immediately.

For people who are visually impaired, one of the biggest challenges is navigating public spaces.

Several tech solutions have emerged in recent years, vying to make the situation more manageable, such as smart glasses to identify everyday objects and connected canes that tell people when they’re approaching a curb.

Among the latest iterations of next-generation assistive accessories is a backpack powered by Intel’s artificial intelligence software. It’s designed to audibly alert wearers when they’re approaching possibly hazardous situations like crosswalks or strangers.

In its 21st year, the Rice Business Plan Competition hosted 54 student-founded startups from all over the world — its largest batch of companies to date — and doled out over $1.4 million in cash and investment prizes at the week-long virtual competition.

RBPC, which is put on by the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship, took place Tuesday, April 6, to Friday, April 9 this year. Just like 2020, RBPC was virtually held. The competition announced the 54 participating startups last month, and coordinated the annual elevator pitches, a semi-finals round, wildcard round and live final pitches. The contestants also received virtual networking and mentoring.

ppl are behind the scams, which presents a challenge b/c existing chatbots are easily recognized as bots… 1/

The city, which has been booming for a decade, has been the top destination for tech workers leaving California during Covid.

… To be a food blogger is to try to balance a huge number of competing interests. You want to create recipes and run a site that you like, that’s readable and useful. You also want to make money. And you know that Google is your meal ticket. “If Google isn’t your No. 1 source of traffic, you have a problem,” said Casey Markee, an SEO consultant who has worked with hundreds of food bloggers on improving their site and business. Pinterest is typically second, and Instagram and Facebook are currently in a heated competition for third place. Even TikTok is a space most food bloggers are thinking about now. But Google dominates.

Practically everything on a recipe website is dictated either by Google or by ad networks. Recipe cards are almost always at the bottom of a page, for instance, because when users spend even a few more seconds on a page it signals to Google that this was a useful search result. The life stories, Markee said, are mostly about the ad networks. “Word count is not a factor” for Google, he said, but more paragraphs and photos means more ad slots. (Advertisers hate the “jump to recipe” button.)

OthersideAI is a California-based startup manufacturing AI-driven software that converts short summaries and shorthand notes into well-composed professional written emails. The software automates the process of email writing with OpenAI’s GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) language generation engine. OthersideAI, with its new software, has claimed to convert simple points into highly personalized emails and goes beyond the auto-responding and the smart replying feature. In the recent Seed funding rounds, the company raised $2.6 million, which would be used to further develop the software. The company, for now, is available only for limited access and is in a private beta mode.

Universities are among the most age-segregated of institutions, catering almost exclusively to young people in their late teens and early 20s, even as new demographic realities render this educational model obsolete.

With unprecedented numbers of adults living longer, many want or need to learn and earn longer too. A new life stage—an encore to conventional adulthood—is opening up between the career- and family-building years, and the frailties associated with old age. Most people in their 50s, 60s, and 70s are healthy, energetic, and often surprised to be pushed into retirement or laid off with few job prospects. While some want to move into full-time leisure, the vast majority seek new pursuits, whether paid or unpaid, that offer meaning and purpose. But they find few roadmaps and few options for long-life learning at universities.

The Brazilian government has published the country’s artificial intelligence (AI) strategy to guide actions around research, innovation and the development of related technologies to tackle the country’s greatest challenges, as well as ethics.

The publication of the strategy follows a process of over a year since the launch of the consultation to gather input for the plan in late 2019, after a period of engagement with AI consulting firms and an international benchmarking process. According to the Brazilian government, the consultation lasted until March 2020 and more than 1,000 contributions were received.

Ecologists involved in mapping all life on Earth have now taken the next step: predicting where the life we don’t know about is waiting to be discovered. As a first pass, they have created an interactive map showing diversity hot spots with the richest potential for new mammal, bird, reptile, and amphibian species. They describe their results today in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

“Unknown species are usually left out of conservation planning, management, and decision-making,” says co-author Mario Moura, an ecologist at the Federal University of Paraíba. “If we want to improve biodiversity conservation worldwide, we need to better know its species.”

It never sat well with Moura that an estimated 85% of Earth’s species are still undescribed. So, in 2018, this newly minted Ph.D. in ecology teamed up with ecologist Walter Jetz at Yale University to come up with a way to better predict where those unknowns are.

Recent research continues to underscore the importance of data, and the perils of underestimating data quality’s role in AI development. A recent Google Research paper (PDF), “‘Everyone wants to do the model work, not the data work’: Data Cascades in High-Stakes AI,” compiles data challenges from 53 practitioners in India, East and West African countries, and the US, who are working on high-stakes AI projects with significant consequences for human safety and wellbeing. We believe the authors’ conclusions and lessons learned from these interviews are helpful to AI development at all levels in all sectors, beyond high-stakes applications.

The paper describes the prevalence and dangers of data cascades: “compounding events causing negative, downstream effects from data issues that result in technical debt over time.”

A fantastic resource from Gradient Flow which provides an intuition on the growing importance of metadata management systems across industries, and how they are the foundation for data governance solutions.

This looks fantastic for anyone working on machine learning for video understanding: https://vidsitu.org

Today, we are introducing the OpenSearch project, a community-driven, open source fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana. We are making a long-term investment in OpenSearch to ensure users continue to have a secure, high-quality, fully open source search and analytics suite with a rich roadmap of new and innovative functionality. This project includes OpenSearch (derived from Elasticsearch 7.10.2) and OpenSearch Dashboards (derived from Kibana 7.10.2). Additionally, the OpenSearch project is the new home for our previous distribution of Elasticsearch (Open Distro for Elasticsearch), which includes features such as enterprise security, alerting, machine learning, SQL, index state management, and more. All of the software in the OpenSearch project is released under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (ALv2). We invite you to check out the code for OpenSearch and OpenSearch Dashboards on GitHub, and join us and the growing community around this effort.