Data Science newsletter – April 19, 2021

Springer Nature and the University of California (UC) today launched a new initiative to gain greater understanding of researcher attitudes to and motivations towards open research practices (including open access articles, data, and code; transparent peer review; and preprints). As part of the partnership, participating UC authors will also have the option to trial Guided Open Access (GOA) for some flagship Nature titles.

Niche and proprietary data formats used in cutting-edge research and technology have specific curation considerations and challenges. The increased demand for subject liaisons, library archivists, and digital curators to curate this variety of data types created locally at an institution or organization poses difficulties. Subject liaisons possess discipline knowledge and expertise for a given domain or discipline and digital curation experts know how to properly steward data assets generally. Yet, a gap often exists between the expertise available within the organization and local curation needs.

While many institutions and organizations have expertise in certain domains and areas, oftentimes the heterogeneous data types received for deposit extend beyond this expertise. Additionally, evolving research methods and new, cutting-edge technology used in research often result in unfamiliar and niche data formats received for deposit. Knowing how to ‘get-started’ in curating these file types and formats can be a particular challenge. To address this need, the data curation community have been developing a new set of tools – data curation primers. These primers are evolving documents that detail a specific subject, disciplinary area or curation task, and that can be used as a reference or jump-start to curating research data.

VIDIA announced its application framework for building conversational AI services is now available. The new NVIDIA Jarvis framework comes with pre-trained deep learning models and software tools to help developers create conversational AI services that can be easily deployed from the cloud or at the edge.

According to the company, it offers automatic speech recognition and language understanding, real-time translations for multiple languages and new text-to-speech capabilities to create expressive conversational AI agents.

What makes urban labor markets more resilient? This is the question at the heart of a new study published in Nature Communications by members of MIT’s Connection Science Group. The researchers in this study, including MIT research scientist and Universidad Carlos III (Spain) Professor Esteban Moro; University of Pittsburgh professor and former MIT postdoc Morgan Frank, MIT Professor Alex “Sandy” Pentland, and Max Planck professor and former MIT professor Iyad Rahwan, drew on prior network modeling research to map the job landscapes in cities across the United States, and showed that job “connectedness” is a key determinant of the resilience of local economies.

The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) will be preparing to put nearly ten racks of Habana AI hardware on the floor, marking the first time we have seen the AI chip startup (acquired by Intel in 2019) in force at any major supercomputing site.

This means we can cautiously add Habana to the list of AI chip startups that have found footing at national labs and large research institutions. The most prominent startups at these locations include Cerebras, SambaNova, and to a lesser extent, Graphcore.

The “cautiously” classifier comes from the nature of the procurement. As SDSC’s deputy director, Shawn Strande, tells us, the NSF funding for the system is not standard—it’s not about putting a production machine on the floor to validate and use immediately. Rather, it’s about experimentation and building a scientific computing community around an emerging architecture. Since the other labs and universities have already picked their AI accelerators, that left Habana. And for a cool $5 million total, including all networking, there is no reason not to take a chance.

There has been talk and cajoling and rumor for years that GPU juggernaut Nvidia would jump into the Arm server CPU chip arena once again and actually deliver a product that has unique differentiation and a compelling value proposition, particularly for hybrid CPU-GPU compute complexes. And today, at the GTC 2021 virtual conference, Nvidia co-founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang is going to announce just that by unveiling its “Grace” Arm server CPU effort.

A new study published in EPJ Data Science shows that fans of beyond-mainstream music, such as hard rock and ambient, may receive less accurate recommendations than fans of mainstream music, such as pop. A team of researchers at Know-Center Graz, Graz University of Technology, University of Innsbruck, University of Utrecht, and Johannes Kepler University Linz analysed the characteristics of beyond-mainstream music listeners to better understand the needs of this underserved user group.

Here, we describe the evolution of the DataBridge program and outline its unique role in both training the data stewards of the future with regard to FAIR data practices, and in contributing significant value to research projects at Virginia Tech. Ultimately, this work highlights the need for innovative, strategic programs that encourage and enable real-world experience of data curation, data analysis, and data publication for current researchers, all while training the next generation of researchers in these best practices.

I’m Sophie Zhang. I was fired from Facebook in September 2020, sending a 7.8k farewell memo on my last day that was leaked to Buzzfeed and went viral on Reddit w/ 52k upvotes. Earlier this week, I chose to go public with the Guardian in a deep-dive, because everything else has failed.

Please ask me anything. I might not be able to answer every question, but if so, I’ll do my best to explain why I can’t.

There have been moves to shed exposure to California wildfire risk in some corners of the insurance, reinsurance and ILS market, while premium rates have risen significantly for primary property insurance in wildfire exposed areas, as well as for property catastrophe reinsurance and wildfire property liability covers.

All of which makes the outlook for the coming season one that re/insurers and ILS funds will find potentially alarming, as experts suggest conditions are looking ripe for more impactful burns and wildfire potential.

A research team from San Jose State University analyses moisture levels in plants that can become a significant fuel source for wildfires in California and they have found that so-called fuel moisture content (FMC) has fallen to new record lows, indicating particularly dry conditions and higher fire potential.

The U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is moving for the first time to expel sexual harassers from its membership. Science has learned that the institution is adjudicating complaints that could lead to the ejection of astronomer Geoffrey Marcy and evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala.

The process is unfolding 2 years after the prestigious, 158-year-old academy changed its bylaws to allow expulsion of members. Until then, membership had been for life. Rescinding membership is the most drastic penalty under the new rules, which also allow for lesser sanctions.

No HAL 9000s or Ultrons on this continent, thank you very much.

The European Union wants to avoid the worst of what artificial intelligence can do — think creepy facial recognition tech and many, many Black Mirror episodes — while still trying to boost its potential for the economy in general.

According to a draft of its upcoming rules, obtained by POLITICO, the European Commission would ban certain uses of “high-risk” artificial intelligence systems altogether, and limit others from entering the bloc if they don’t meet its standards. Companies that don’t comply could be fined up to €20 million or 4 percent of their turnover. The Commission will unveil its final regulation on April 21.

The rules are the first of their kind to regulate artificial intelligence, and the EU is keen to highlight its unique approach.

UM researchers: Drs. Julien Arino, Stéphanie Portet, and Kang-Ling Liao, (mathematics) are part of a $10 million-dollar investment in Emerging Infectious Diseases Modelling established between the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and the Public Health Agency of Canada.

The funding supports five multidisciplinary infectious disease modelling networks, that will significantly improve the coordination of infectious disease modelling to help Canada better respond to future public health threats.

Georgia State University researchers have received a five-year, $3 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to develop new strategies to identify mood disorders using whole brain dynamics, which considers changes in the shape, size or location of brain networks, as well as changes in the connections between brain networks.

The researchers will use the approaches they develop to integrate four-dimensional brain imaging with clinical and cognitive data to identify clues about how mental illness presents in the brain.

The World Bank has released the Harmonized Learning Outcomes database, which uses standardized test performances to measure the state of children’s education in 164 countries that represent 98 percent of the world’s population. The dataset uses standardized test scores between 2000 and 2017 to give a metric for the state of education in a country by schooling level, test subject, gender, global region, and income group. The dataset shows that even though enrollment rates for primary education in North Africa and the Middle East increased from 95 percent to 99 percent between 2000 and 2010, performance on standardized tests remained low.

this list runs the gamut, from single purpose utilities to enormous open source applications. the goal is to enable constellations of working entirely outside of proprietary systems, moving instead from one hand-made software to another.

I got an email request to write a blog post about how I go about trying to publish statistics papers in general purpose journals like Nature, Science, PNAS, etc. One recent example of such a paper is our work on the problem of post-prediction inference that appeared in PNAS. But we have a few others over the years in these journals.

I’ll start by saying that I don’t think I have any special secret sauce. I’m going to say the things that we usually think about when targeting these journals but your mileage will absolutely vary.

First there are two types of work I have had success in getting into these journals: (1) opinion pieces and (2) scientific work. In general my experience is it is much easier to get statistics ideas into these journals as opinion pieces rather than research.