Data Science newsletter – September 28, 2021

Newsletter features journalism, research papers and tools/software for September 28, 2021

 

Thrilled to announce the launch of the Computational Social Science Lab at UPenn! Integrative thinking.

Twitter, Duncan Watts


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Use-inspired basic science. Research Infrastructure. Mass Collaboration. Open Science.


Professor Gina Neff appointed to lead the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy

Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy


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Gina Neff, Professor of Technology and Society at the Oxford Internet Institute and the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford, has been appointed as the Executive Director of the Centre.

Professor Neff will lead the team at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, which is researching the impact of digital technologies on work, the environment and trust.


How DeepMind Is Reinventing the Robot

IEEE Spectrum, Tom Chivers


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Artificial intelligence has reached deep into our lives, though you might be hard pressed to point to obvious examples of it. Among countless other behind-the-scenes chores, neural networks power our virtual assistants, make online shopping recommendations, recognize people in our snapshots, scrutinize our banking transactions for evidence of fraud, transcribe our voice messages, and weed out hateful social-media postings. What these applications have in common is that they involve learning and operating in a constrained, predictable environment.

But embedding AI more firmly into our endeavors and enterprises poses a great challenge. To get to the next level, researchers are trying to fuse AI and robotics to create an intelligence that can make decisions and control a physical body in the messy, unpredictable, and unforgiving real world. It’s a potentially revolutionary objective that has caught the attention of some of the most powerful tech-research organizations on the planet. “I’d say that robotics as a field is probably 10 years behind where computer vision is,” says Raia Hadsell, head of robotics at DeepMind, Google’s London-based AI partner.


University of Waterloo announces $1.6-million partnership for autonomous vehicle research

Waterloo Chronicle (Canada)


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The University of Waterloo has announced a $1.6-million partnership with the federal government and Magna International to help ensure the safety and security of vehicles as they become increasingly autonomous.

The project headed by Sebastian Fischmeister, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, involves the development of theories, methods and tools to produce complex automotive software for connected and automated vehicles.


Do Algorithms Lead Admissions in the Wrong Direction?

Inside Higher Ed, Scott Jaschik


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An algorithm is a process to follow in solving a problem, often in a mathematical calculation. Most people think of algorithms (if they think of them at all) as involving complicated formulas and computers.

In higher education, hundreds of colleges use algorithms in the admissions process. Their primary use is predicting how much money a student will need from the college to enroll. Colleges don’t tell students they ran their information through a computer program, but they tell students what their aid package looks like. The same student will get a different package at different colleges. Only a minority of colleges pledge to meet students’ demonstrated need. And many colleges — public and private — award aid that’s not intended to focus on the lowest-income students.

Algorithms make the process more precise and more effective for many colleges. But do they serve students who need aid to succeed in higher education?


HSC receives $50 million to rectify health disparities

Fort Worth Business Press


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The National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced a $50 million award to the University of North Texas Health Science Center at Fort Worth (HSC) to lead the coordinating center for the Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Consortium to Advance Health Equity and Researcher Diversity, or AIM-AHEAD, program.

HSC will lead the multi-institutional coordinating center, which brings together experts in community engagement, artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML), health equity research, data science training, and data infrastructure, the school said in a news release.

AIM-AHEAD was created to close the gaps in the AI/ML field, which currently lacks diversity in its researchers and in data, including electronic health records.


Purdue Researchers Peer into the ‘Fog of the Machine Learning Accelerator War’

HPC Wire, John Russell


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Making sense of ML performance and benchmark data is an ongoing challenge. In light of last week’s release of the most recent MLPerf (v1.1) inference results, now is perhaps a good time to review how valuable (or not) such ML benchmarks are and the challenges they face. Two researchers from Purdue University recently tackled this issue in a fascinating blog on ACM SIGARCH – An Academic’s Attempt to Clear the Fog of the Machine Learning Accelerator War.

Tim Rogers and Mahmoud Khairy wrote, “At its core, all engineering is science optimized (or perverted) by economics. As academics in computer science and engineering, we have a symbiotic relationship with industry. Still, it is often necessary for us to peel back the marketing noise and understand precisely what companies are building, why their offering is better than their competitors, and how we can innovate beyond what industrial state-of-the-art provides.


Ad Industry Says $1 Billion For FTC Should Be Accompanied By National Privacy Law

MediaPost, DigitalNewsDaily, Wendy Davis


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A funding boost for the Federal Trade Commission to create a new data protection bureau should be accompanied by a national privacy law, ad industry groups say.

“The U.S. needs both a strong privacy regulator and a rational, comprehensive national consumer privacy law,” Leigh Freund, CEO and president of the self-regulatory organization Network Advertising Initiative stated Monday.

She added that while the FTC needs more resources, increasing funding without establishing a national standard “will still leave U.S. consumers and businesses subject to a jumble of incompatible state and international laws.”


HHS doles out $73M to 10 universities for health IT workforce initiatives

FierceHealthcare, Heather Landi


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The 10 institutions will collectively train more than 4,000 individuals over a four-year period through an interdisciplinary approach in public health informatics and technology. They will develop curricula, recruit and train participants, secure paid internship opportunities and assist in career placement at public health agencies, public health-focused nonprofits or other public health-focused organizations. … The 10 universities to receive funding are: Bowie State University in Maryland; California State University’s Long Beach Research Foundation; Dominican College in Orangeburg, New York; Jackson State University in Mississippi; Norfolk State University in Virginia; Regents of The University of Minnesota in Minneapolis; the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston; the University of Massachusetts Lowell; the University of California, Irvine; and the University of the District of Columbia in Washington, D.C.


Booker, Padilla, Merkley Lead Push to Enhance Nation’s Data Science and Literacy Education

Cory Booker


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Today, U.S. Senators Cory Booker (D-NJ), Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) led a group of colleagues in urging the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) to improve equity and access to high-quality K-12 data science education. The Senators also asked how Congress can better support the development and deployment of data science curriculum to reach more communities and open doors to STEM careers.

Increasing access to high-quality data science education will help students keep pace with our 21st century world. One poll found that while 69 percent of employers would prefer candidates with data science skills, only 23 percent of educators said their graduates would possess those skills. Only 25 percent of students took a statistics course in 2019.

“Enhancing data science education will have significant benefits for our nation’s citizenry and economy. Like reading, writing, and arithmetic, basic data literacy is vital for informed democratic participation. We also see employers increasingly demanding data science expertise. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment of computer and information research scientists is expected to grow 15 percent between 2019 to 2029, far exceeding the average growth rate of other occupations,” wrote the Senators.


UVM’s supercomputer to gain massive database access capability

Vermont Business Magazine


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The University of Vermont’s supercomputer array will gain a massive new database cluster, dubbed DataMountain, that will allow researchers to find solutions that improve the health of societies and the environment.

DataMountain will allow for near real-time access to enormous data files, supporting projects that require such speed to effectively analyze, describe, and explain rapidly growing datasets. The cluster will be available to the more than 500 Vermont researchers who have access to the university’s Vermont Advanced Computing Core (VACC) high performance computing environment.


US Research Universities and the National Interest

Issues in Science and Technology, Steven W. McLaughlin and Bruce R. Guile


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If the US research and innovation system is to adapt to rising S&T and innovation capabilities in other nations, then US research universities are crucial to the response. Our nation’s research universties, lacking direct access to national levers of control (they do not vote, engage in political action, or control government budgets), have no choice but to lead by example and commit to building actionable consensus around a few essential areas of national importance. The nation needs some of the most fiercely competitive and proudly autonomous global institutions in the United States to coalesce around the national interests of economic prosperity and economic security.

Any such change will be an anathema to many academics, accustomed as they are to focusing on education, the advancement of knowledge, and the global good. But the reality is that regional and national interests in talent development and innovation for industrial development are already clearly articulated in the charters and founding documents of many leading US research universities. Coalesing around US national interests in economic prosperity and economic security does not require that universities abandon their core values of openness, academic freedom, and contributions to knowledge for the good of humankind. But it does require research universities to step back from their conventional calls for additional federal funding for curiosity-driven research. Instead, they should partner with government and industry to propel a revolution in how the United States integrates the core civic contributions of universities with national interests in economic security in the context of shifting international economics and geopolitics.


Finding a new formula for sharing salmon between people and bears

Anthropocene magazine, Warren Cornwall


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The Wuikinuxv Nation on the coast of British Columbia, Canada teamed up with scientists in an unusual collaboration aimed at striking a balance between the needs of people and the needs of grizzlies when divvying up the annual supply of spawning salmon. The results illustrate how science can combine with the values of an indigenous people to manage scarce natural resources.

“We’re trying to think about a catch that wildlife might need and a catch that local people might need,” says Megan Adams, a wildlife biologist who led the research through the Raincoast Conservation Foundation, a conservation science non-profit in British Columbia.


College Admissions, Student Enrollment, Melt

NPR, Planet Money, The Indicator, Sally Herships and Adrian Ma


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Every year aspiring undergrads have to make a monumental decision of where they want to go to college. At the same time, colleges and universities have to predict how many of their prospective students, who’ve accepted a place and paid their deposit, will actually show up. It’s a calculation colleges call “melt” and it can help them figure out everything from how many professors to hire to how many dorm rooms to build.

On today’s show, we visit the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where the school has found itself with too many students. The Hechinger Report’s Jon Marcus explains why “melt” has been so much harder to figure out in recent years.


Department of Statistics charts a new path with data science major

Northwestern University, The Daily Northwestern student newspaper, Joshua Perry


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Data science is continuing its positive trend at Northwestern, with the Department of Statistics launching a new data science major next fall.

The department will also build on its data science minor to accommodate growing numbers of interested students, said Statistics Prof. Arend Kuyper, director of the minor in data science. He said the program has become increasingly popular since it launched, growing from 76 students in fall 2019 to 349 in fall 2021. Growing relevance in the working world today has boosted interest in the data science field, Kuyper said.

“Data is everywhere,” Kuyper said. “It’s becoming an essential part of many fields and it’s collected all over the place. People have it and they need to know what to do with it — they need to understand how to leverage it to make decisions.”

Weinberg junior Polina Cherepanova, who just added the data science minor, said her entry-level data science class is the largest class she’s taking this fall, with about 100 students.


Smartphone Sensor Data Has Potential to Detect Cannabis Intoxication

Rutgers University, Rutgers Today


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A smartphone sensor, much like what is used in GPS systems, might be a way to determine whether or not someone is intoxicated after consuming marijuana, according to a new study by the Rutgers Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research.

According to the study, published in Drug and Alcohol Dependence, which evaluated the feasibility of using smartphone sensor data to identify episodes of cannabis intoxication in the natural environment, a combination of time features (tracking the time of day and day of week) and smartphone sensor data had a 90 percent rate of accuracy.

“Using the sensors in a person’s phone, we might be able to detect when a person might be experiencing cannabis intoxication and deliver a brief intervention when and where it might have the most impact to reduce cannabis-related harm,” said corresponding author, Tammy Chung, professor of psychiatry and director of the Center for Population Behavioral Health at the Rutgers Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research.


Machine Learning Uncovers “Genes of Importance” in Agriculture and Medicine

New York University, News Release


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Machine learning can pinpoint “genes of importance” that help crops to grow with less fertilizer, according to a new study published in Nature Communications. It can also predict additional traits in plants and disease outcomes in animals, illustrating its applications beyond agriculture.


Engineering Professor Wins $2.7M Grant for Alzheimer’s Research

University of Massachusetts Lowell, News


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Assoc. Prof. Joyita Dutta of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering has been awarded a $2.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for research that could help shed light on the progression of Alzheimer’s disease.

Funded by the NIH’s National Institute on Aging, the research aims to develop models that predict the progression of tau tangles in the brain. While tau is an important protein that helps stabilize the brain’s nerve cells, in cases of Alzheimer’s, an abnormal form of tau builds ups inside the nerve cells and morphs into tangles. Along with amyloid plaques, which are abnormal proteins that build up between the nerve cells, tau tangles are primary markers for Alzheimer’s disease.

In the study, Dutta, who is the sole principal investigator on the five-year grant, will look at Alzheimer’s from a “network perspective,” viewing the interconnections between the regions of the brain.


Events



Registration is open for the 2021 MBDH Regional Community Meeting!

Twitter, Midwest Big Data Hub


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“Join us online Oct 27-28 for a full range of data science collaboration opportunities in the Midwest.”


2021 Women in Statistics and Data Science Conference

American Statistical Association


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Online October 6-8. [$$$]

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



A New Approach to the Data-Deletion Conundrum

Stanford University, Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence


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Rising consumer concern over data privacy has led to a rush of “right to be forgotten” laws around the world that allow individuals to request their personal data be expunged from massive databases that catalog our increasingly online lives. Researchers in artificial intelligence have observed that user data does not only exist in its raw form in a database, it is also implicitly contained in models trained on that data. So far, they have struggled to find methods for deleting these “traces” of users efficiently. The more complex the model is, the more challenging it becomes to delete data.

“The exact deletion of data — the ideal — is hard to do in real time,” says James Zou, a professor of biomedical data science at Stanford University and an expert in artificial intelligence. “In training our machine learning models, bits and pieces of data can get embedded in the model in complicated ways. That makes it hard for us to guarantee a user has truly been forgotten without altering our models substantially.”

Zou is senior author of a paper recently presented at the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS) that may provide a possible answer to the data deletion problem that works for privacy-concerned individuals and artificial intelligence experts alike. They call it approximate deletion.


The case for building a data-sharing culture in your company

MIT Sloan, Ideas Made to Matter, Brian Eastwood


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There used to be good reasons for companies to establish data siloes. “A lot of information was proprietary and related to valuable intellectual property. It made sense to not disclose it unless there was a reason to,” Clougherty Jones said. “But if you think about modern day data, we’re not in that world anymore.” Companies now realize not all data should be treated the same, relying on sophisticated methods of protecting some information while making other data sources readily available to those with the right to access it.

The most successful CDOs can tie data sharing initiatives not just to information technology goals but to companywide KPIs such as improved customer experience, cost optimization, revenue generation, or compliance. In addition, leaders who achieve these types of results are increasingly asked to take on digital transformation efforts and other strategic objectives, Clougherty Jones said. In other words, their focus is moving from data and analytics in IT alone to data and analytics for the business as a whole. These CDOs were also more likely to see their budgets increase.

There’s a clear tie between achieving value from data and analytics and seeing value from digital transformation. “It’s crucial to start talking about data and digital not synonymously but in tandem, because they both can drive measurable value to your organization,” she said.

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