Data Science newsletter – April 26, 2021

Newsletter features journalism, research papers and tools/software for April 26, 2021

 

Cerebras’ New Monster AI Chip Adds 1.4 Trillion Transistors

IEEE Spectrum, Samuel K. Moore


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Almost from the moment Cerebras Systems announced a computer based on the largest single computer chip ever built, the Silicon Valley startup declared its intentions to build an even heftier processor. Today, the company announced that its next-gen chip, the Wafer Scale Engine 2 (WSE 2), will be available in the 3rd quarter of this year. WSE 2 is just as big physically as its predecessor, but it has enormously increased amounts of, well, everything. The goal is to keep ahead of the ever-increasing size of neural networks used in machine learning.

“In AI compute, big chips are king, as they process information more quickly, producing answers in less time—and time is the enemy of progress in AI,” Dhiraj Malik, vice president of hardware engineering said in a statement.

Cerebras has always been about taking a logical solution to the problem of machine learning to the extreme. Training neural networks takes too long—weeks for the big ones when Andrew Feldman cofounded the company in 2015. The biggest bottleneck was that data had to shuttle back and forth between the processor and external DRAM memory, eating up both time and energy. The inventors of the original Wafer Scale Engine figured that the answer was to make the chip big enough to hold all the data it needed right alongside its AI processor cores. With gigantic networks for natural language processing, image recognition, and other tasks on the horizon, you’d need a really big chip. How big? As big as possible, meaning the size of an entire wafer of silicon (with the round bits cut off), or 46,225 square millimeters.


American University of Paris, MSc in Human Rights and Data Science

The American University of Paris, Claudia Roda


from

“The HRDS program combines a rigorous foundation in data science with the legal and philosophical considerations necessary to ensure the ethical implementation of policies and protections. It concerns itself as much with the use of coding as it does with its development, with the human and social costs of emerging digital technologies as much as with the benefits.”


EFF Sues Proctorio on Behalf of Student It Falsely Accused of Copyright Infringement to Get Critical Tweets Taken Down | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Electonic Frontier Foundation, Press Release


from

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a lawsuit today against Proctorio Inc. on behalf of college student Erik Johnson, seeking a judgment that he didn’t infringe the company’s copyrights when he linked to excerpts of its software code in tweets criticizing the software maker.

Proctorio, a developer of exam administration and surveillance software, misused the copyright takedown provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to have Twitter remove posts by Johnson, a Miami University computer engineering undergraduate and security researcher. EFF and co-counsel Osborn Maledon said in a complaint filed today in U.S. District Court, District of Arizona, that Johnson made fair use of excerpts of Proctorio’s software code, and the company’s false claims of infringement interfered with Johnson’s First Amendment right to criticize the company.


WHOI and ADI Launch Ocean and Climate Innovation Accelerator

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Press Room


from

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and Analog Devices, Inc. (Nasdaq: ADI) today launched the Ocean and Climate Innovation Accelerator (OCIA) consortium. ADI has committed $3 million over three years towards the consortium which will focus on advancing knowledge of the ocean’s critical role in combatting climate change as well as developing new solutions at the intersection of oceans and climate.

“Carbon emissions feature as a centerpiece in global efforts to mitigate climate change. Oceans are among our most important defense mechanisms against a warming planet – yet their ability to continue to play this critically important role is being threatened by the effects of climate change,” said Vincent Roche, CEO of Analog Devices.


Health Equity as a System Strategy: The Rush University Medical Center Framework

NEJM Catalyst; David A. Ansell, MD, MPH, Darlene Oliver-Hightower, JD, Larry J. Goodman, MD & Omar B. Lateef, DO


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Rush University Medical Center adopted a health equity strategy in 2016 in an effort to address the large life-expectancy gaps in its primary service area. The center named structural racism and economic deprivation as among the root causes for neighborhood-based racial health inequities and proposed an organizational anchor mission and equity strategy to begin to address the social and structural determinants of health that underpinned these racial health inequities. A dedicated senior executive team with experience and credibility and support from the board and the civic community are critical to the success of such an initiative. Listening sessions in the community and a commitment to share decision-making with community leaders are foundational to the strategy and necessary to overcome historical mistrust. Rush’s community efforts are guided by the voice of the community: “Nothing about us without us.”


NIH funds new influenza research network

National Institutes of Health (NIH), News Releases


from

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, has established a network of research sites to study the natural history, transmission and pathogenesis of influenza and provide an international research infrastructure to address influenza outbreaks. The program, called the Centers of Excellence for Influenza Research and Response (CEIRR), is expected to be supported for seven years by NIAID contracts to five institutions. Funding for the first year of the contracts will total approximately $24 million. CEIRR will replace the Centers of Excellence for Influenza Research and Surveillance (CEIRS) program, which was supported by contracts that concluded on March 31, 2021.


Developing a Flexible National Wastewater Surveillance System for COVID-19 and Beyond

National Institutes of Health (NIH), Environmental Health Perspectives, Commentary; Aparna Keshaviah , Xindi C. Hu , and Marisa Henry


from

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services have begun developing a National Wastewater Surveillance System (NWSS), with cross-agency collaboration from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and other partners (CDC 2020e). As agencies coordinate to build the NWSS from the ground up, thinking through the needs of not only COVID-19, but also of future infectious disease, chronic disease, and drug epidemics, can help ensure that the NWSS is not overly optimized for the current threat. Although COVID-19 has catalyzed the use of wastewater surveillance in the United States, the next epidemic threat may differ in important ways from the novel coronavirus. We seek to generalize lessons learned by a global network of wastewater researchers with respect to validation and implementation of wastewater surveillance for COVID-19 while also drawing on examples closer to home because the needs of a U.S. NWSS may differ from those of systems developed abroad. This is in part because the United States has a much larger and more geographically dispersed population, resulting in substantially more wastewater treatment plants across which to coordinate [e.g., the United States has roughly 15,000 plants (U.S. EPA 2016), compared with roughly 1,200 in Australia (Hill et al. 2012)]. Specifically, we leverage our experience translating wastewater data for opioid epidemic management (Margetts et al. 2020) to provide a roadmap for adapting wastewater testing for pandemic


Ceres Nanosciences Receives $8.2M NIH Award to Improve Wastewater-Based COVID-19 Surveillance

Ceres Nanosciences, Press Release


from

Ceres Nanosciences (Ceres), a privately held company that makes innovative products to improve diagnostic testing, is announcing today that it has been awarded a contract from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADxSM) Initiative for $8.2 million to support the development and implementation of wastewater-based surveillance systems for COVID-19 powered by the Nanotrap® particle technology in a network of sites with an emphasis on underserved and vulnerable populations.

Wastewater surveillance can help communities monitor spatial and temporal trends in SARS-CoV-2 infection at a population level, but widespread implementation has been stymied by the lack of a sensitive, rapid, high-throughput viral concentration method. Nanotrap® Magnetic Virus Particles address this need by capturing and concentrating virus directly from raw sewage prior to RNA extraction and detection and can be readily adapted for small-scale as well as large-scale surveillance systems.


AI Hub to help enhance Penn State’s global leadership in artificial intelligence

Penn State University, Penn State News


from

Penn State has launched an expanded initiative in artificial intelligence (AI), termed the AI Hub. It will bring together the University’s considerable resources and talent in AI to further advance its position as a global leader developing fundamental innovations in AI, in using AI and machine learning (ML) to solve the hardest challenges, and to create unique applications of AI and ML in unforeseen areas. The hub also will help to address a national priority for the U.S. to be the world leader in developing responsible AI.

Lora Weiss, senior vice president for research, announced the initiative, which is designed to forge collaborations among Penn State’s AI researchers, centers and institutes and increase the visibility and impact of Penn State’s AI research.



“Penn State is poised to take AI to new levels where researchers are already creating new knowledge and discoveries with AI, from tackling climate change to improving health outcomes to developing new materials,” said Weiss. “Our University’s strong history of interdisciplinary collaborations and established leadership in scientific research and technology development has fostered an environment of innovation for leading the next wave of AI and ML advances, spanning research disciplines, applications and industries.”


Penn State joins Public Interest Technology University Network

Penn State University, Penn State News


from

Penn State has joined the Public Interest Technology University Network (PIT-UN), a public interest technology partnership managed by New America focused on fostering collaborations between colleges and universities committed to growing the public interest technology field and educating the next generation of civic-minded technology experts.


LexisNexis Partnership Grows Alongside Researchers, Students

North Carolina State University, NC State News


from

In 2014, global analytics firm LexisNexis opened its North American corporate innovation center on NC State’s Centennial Campus. In seven years, the center has grown from just 150 employees to nearly 800 computer and software programmers, analysts, legal and business experts, sales and marketing professionals and support staff. The partnership with NC State has expanded, too — largely fueled by research collaborations, unique branding opportunities and access to talent just around the corner.

“NC State’s collaborations with LexisNexis have led to technology breakthroughs while equipping our researchers and students with real-world training and insight,” said Leah Burton, director of NC State’s Office of Partnerships. “The benefit is definitely mutual. We view this as a case study for effective university-industry partnerships.”


LANL: Machine Learning Model Generates Realistic Seismic Waveforms

Los Alamos Reporter, LANL News


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A new machine-learning model that generates realistic seismic waveforms will reduce manual labor and improve earthquake detection, according to a study published recently in JGR Solid Earth.

“To verify the efficacy of our generative model, we applied it to seismic field data collected in Oklahoma,” said Youzuo Lin, a computational scientist in Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Geophysics group and principal investigator of the project. “Through a sequence of qualitative and quantitative tests and benchmarks, we saw that our model can generate high-quality synthetic waveforms and improve machine learning-based earthquake detection algorithms.”


Yale researchers create map of undiscovered life

Yale University, YaleNews


from

Less than a decade after unveiling the “Map of Life,” a global database that marks the distribution of known species across the planet, Yale researchers have launched an ambitious and perhaps even more important project — creating a map of where life has yet to be discovered.

For Walter Jetz, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale who spearheaded the Map of Life project, the new effort is a moral imperative that can help support biodiversity discovery and preservation around the world.

“At the current pace of global environmental change, there is no doubt that many species will go extinct before we have ever learned about their existence and had the chance to consider their fate,” Jetz said. “I feel such ignorance is inexcusable, and we owe it to future generations to rapidly close these knowledge gaps.”


Right call made here, and UMN’s IRB made the wrong one by claiming that the research in the thread wasn’t human subjects.

Twitter, Vicky Rampin


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Folks with UMN emails are banned from contributing to Linux kernel after researchers make contribs with security bugs (in bad faith! for the sake of a paper


The Program Era Project: Limning the depths of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop’s literary influence

University of Iowa, News


from

It’s no surprise, then, that the first computational investigation into the Workshop’s primary influence on American literature would also happen at Iowa. Loren Glass, professor and chair of the university’s Department of English, has teamed up with former PhD student Nicholas M. Kelly, now assistant professor at New Mexico Tech, and digital humanities librarian Nichole White to create the Program Era Project.

The Program Era Project, or PEP, uses data visualization and other computer-assisted methods to track the aesthetic and cultural influence of the Workshop since its founding in 1936. In particular, writers affiliated with the Workshop, both as alumni and/or professors, have gone on to found or teach at many other creative writing programs around the nation. This has imprinted the program’s philosophies, values, and writing styles on thousands of students at hundreds of institutions, who in turn go on to write and teach, continuing the chain. The result is a lineage that points from all corners of American writing back to Iowa City and the Workshop.


Deadlines



Virtual Public Health Modeling Course Offered at Yale

“The Yale School of Public Health is offering a week-long virtual summer course in Public Health Modeling June 21-25.” … “The course is designed to provide researchers, clinicians, industry professionals and policymakers with the systems-based perspective and analytical tools they need to better understand and manage the complex forces that drive health outcomes.” Deadline to apply is June 15.

SPONSORED CONTENT

Assets  




The eScience Institute’s Data Science for Social Good program is now accepting applications for student fellows and project leads for the 2021 summer session. Fellows will work with academic researchers, data scientists and public stakeholder groups on data-intensive research projects that will leverage data science approaches to address societal challenges in areas such as public policy, environmental impacts and more. Student applications due 2/15 – learn more and apply here. DSSG is also soliciting project proposals from academic researchers, public agencies, nonprofit entities and industry who are looking for an opportunity to work closely with data science professionals and students on focused, collaborative projects to make better use of their data. Proposal submissions are due 2/22.

 


Tools & Resources



Presenting Giotto, an open-source toolbox for spatial data analysis & visualization of #SingleCell data

Twitter, NIH Common Fund


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developed by @_hubmap
researchers, Ruben Dries & Qian Zhu. Its images are almost as amazing as those of its namesake!


Here are a few book pairings for you to consider if you’re ordering Living in Data in the next two weeks.

Twitter, Jer Thorp


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Because the only thing better than a new book is two new books!


Careers


Postdocs

Postdoctoral Fellow, CSSI



Northwestern University, Kellogg School of Management, Center for Science of Science; Evanston, IL
Full-time positions outside academia

Data Scientist/Analyst



Atlanta United Football Club; Marietta, GA

Head of Data Visualization Strategy and Engineering



Graphicacy; Washington, DC

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