Data Science newsletter – April 19, 2021

In the past 20 years, drones have become a fixture of modern life. From photography and journalism to package delivery and crop monitoring, companies of all kinds are increasingly turning to unmanned flying devices to cut costs, increase efficiency, decrease workload or simply do what humans cannot.

Where the world hasn’t seen drones play a prominent role, however, is in the world of health and fitness. But that may be changing.

Researchers say that the recreational drone market — valued at $2.33 billion in 2020, according to data from Research and Markets — could come together with the $30 billion wearables market to produce what may one day be a fixture in personal health and wellness: fitness drones.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has named Purdue University as the new host of the Midwestern Regional Climate Center (MRCC). Beth Hall, Indiana state climatologist, will direct the center for five years with $3.1 million in federal base funding.

Hall came to Purdue in 2019 to lead the state’s climate office, which is housed in the Department of Agronomy. She previously served as director of the MRCC from 2012 to 2019 when she was at the University of Illinois, where the center has been located since its creation in the early 1980s.

Increasing diversity remains a key priority at universities, especially in the wake of mass demonstrations in support of racial equality in 2020 following the death of George Floyd. Many universities are guided by the motivation that diversity enhances student learning, a rationale supported by the U.S. Supreme Court.

This approach, however, is a view preferred by white and not Black Americans, and it also aligns with better relative outcomes for white Americans, according to a paper published by Princeton University researchers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Across eight studies including 1,200 participants, the researchers looked at two different approaches to diversity: an “instrumental rationale,” which asserts that including minority perspectives provides educational benefits; and a “moral rationale,” which, often invoking a legacy of racial inequality, argues that people from all backgrounds deserve access to a quality education.

Researchers at Duke University have developed a method that uses machine learning, satellite imagery and weather data to autonomously find hotspots of heavy air pollution, city block by city block.

The technique could be a boon for finding and mitigating sources of hazardous aerosols, studying the effects of air pollution on human health, and making better informed, socially just public policy decisions.

“Before now, researchers trying to measure the distribution of air pollutants throughout a city would either try to use the limited number of existing monitors or drive sensors around a city in vehicles,” said Mike Bergin, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Duke.

The project, called LandCover6k, offers a new classification system that the researchers hope will improve predictions about the planet’s future and fill in gaps about its past.

The tropical water at the equator is renowned for having the richest diversity of marine life on Earth, with vibrant coral reefs and large aggregations of tunas, sea turtles, manta rays and whale sharks. The number of marine species naturally tapers off as you head towards the poles.

Ecologists have assumed this global pattern has remained stable over recent centuries — until now. Our recent study found the ocean around the equator has already become too hot for many species to survive, and that global warming is responsible.

In other words, the global pattern is rapidly changing. And as species flee to cooler water towards the poles, it’s likely to have profound implications for marine ecosystems and human livelihoods. When the same thing happened 252 million years ago, 90% of all marine species died.

For epidemiologists studying air pollution, there’s only so much to learn at ground level. So they’ve been taking advantage of aerosol data from NASA satellites to link health outcomes with local air pollution. But only recently have NASA and epidemiologists teamed up to start the space agency’s first mission focused on health.

NASA’s Multi-Angle Imager for Aerosols (MAIA) mission, scheduled for launch in 2022, will combine the expertise of planetary scientists and epidemiologists to answer a question that, before now, has been largely impossible at a large scale: What kind of air pollutant particles is most harmful to human health?

Of the different types of air pollutants, particulate matter (PM), especially particles smaller than 2.5 micrometers (PM2.5), poses some of the most severe health risks. These particles, which primarily form from combustion sources like fossil fuel use and wildfires, vary in composition but are small enough to pass from the lungs into the bloodstream. From there, they can travel all over the body. In the short-term, high PM2.5 levels in the air exacerbate respiratory diseases, whereas long-term exposure can even lead to premature death from heart and lung conditions.

You wake up. Biometric indicators determine that your mood is ‘Sad’, so the new Blue Ivy Carter album starts to play to help boost your serotonin levels. Music is streamed directly to your brain through your NeuralinkChip™ and it is with you all day, helping to manage negative emotions and automatically changing cadence to match your activity – increasing for your gym workout, lowering when you get a taxi home. You go to sleep. You have barely had to make a conscious decision about the music you have listened to all day.

Shane told CBSN Denver’s Kelly Werthmann she came up with this fun and flirty idea a couple of years ago. The AI couldn’t quite string a complete sentence together, she explained, so Shane tried the experiment again with more modern AI.

“What I was using this time was a kind of AI that looked at a lot of Internet text and learn how to predict what comes next in any given chunk of text you get at the beginning of an article, the beginning of the sentence,” she said. “It has to try to guess what the rest that is like, so it will in theory know if it’s doing a cooking blog or if it’s doing a new report, what kind of characters and countries it should involve.”

With the pickup lines, Shane explained the AI saw enough examples on the internet that once she gave it the introduction, it filled in the rest of the text.

Concerned about growing momentum behind efforts to regulate the commercial use of personal data, Big Tech has begun seeding watered-down “privacy” legislation in states with the goal of preempting greater protections, experts say.

The swift passage in March of a consumer data privacy law in Virginia, which Protocol reported was originally authored by Amazon with input from Microsoft, is emblematic of an industry-driven, lobbying-fueled approach taking hold across the country. The Markup reviewed existing and proposed legislation, committee testimony, and lobbying records in more than 20 states and identified 14 states with privacy bills built upon the same industry-backed framework as Virginia’s, or with weaker models. The bills are backed by a who’s who of Big Tech–funded interest groups and are being shepherded through statehouses by waves of company lobbyists.

Researchers know that biodiversity in, for example, fish populations can improve their productivity and resilience to environmental changes. But the relationship between aquatic biodiversity and human nutrition hasn’t received as much attention. Researchers from Yale University and the University of British Columbia decided to investigate this relationship both globally and locally.

To understand nutritional distribution, the researchers analyzed the levels of five micronutrients and essential fatty acids—calcium, iron, zinc, docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA)—in 7,245 samples from 801 aquatic finfish and invertebrates. They also assessed levels of common contaminants. Then, they simulated how nutrient levels in seafood diets would change if the number of species increased.

With funding from the gift and hubs at the Rockefeller Library, John Hay Library and Sciences Library, a new Center for Library Exploration and Research promises to strengthen academic excellence, fuel innovative scholarship and extend the Library’s impact beyond campus, bringing research resources and collections to more adults and kids in the greater community.

University Provost Richard M. Locke said the center will build on the strengths of Brown’s libraries as essential spaces and resources.

“In addition to its role advancing the work of scholars across Brown, the University Library is a center of academic excellence in its own right,” Locke said. “The Center for Library Exploration and Research will enable a growing number of students, faculty and community members to experience that excellence for themselves. It will provide more opportunities to learn the fundamental principles of scholarly research, explore Brown’s unique special collections and strengthen data-driven research that aims to solve pressing societal problems.”

The University of Arizona and the French National Centre for Scientific Research signed a research collaboration agreement today to establish a new international research center focused on the environment, space science, data science and global climate change.

This historic partnership between the university and CNRS establishes the France-Arizona Institute for Global Grand Challenges at the University of Arizona. The institute will address critical research areas through large-scale international collaboration, innovation and exchange of resources through a high-level strategic dialogue between the two partners.

Led by Fred Morstatter, a research assistant professor and research lead at ISI, and Kristina Lerman, a research professor of computer science and principal scientist at ISI, the multidisciplinary research group includes data scientists, anthropologists, counterinsurgency and machine learning experts. They want to automate the process of learning mental models shared by a group of people.

Imagine a Siri for culture – a personal cultural assistant capable of translating norms, customs, and values to humanitarian responders during a natural disaster or a virus outbreak. How much more nuanced their response could be?

It will provide funding for 4 postdoctoral leaders to support their research and aid them in building their careers.