Data Science newsletter – February 9, 2022

Business analytics programs report high demand from prospective students. The master’s degree program at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business reports that only 199 students were admitted of the 915 completed applications for the class entering fall 2021—for an acceptance rate of almost 22%. By comparison, the comparable program at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business reported 2,956 applicants vying for 189 slots last fall.

When USC began exploring the creation of a business analytics program, there was initially some concern internally that it would dilute the school’s other offerings, recalls Dawn Porter, academic director for the master’s degree program and professor of clinical data sciences and operations management.

“It’s gone from hesitation from an academic perspective to everybody wants to do it now,” she says of the program USC began offering in 2014; the Marshall School now offers 13 specialized master’s degrees. “It was a big step in moving from general management kinds of degrees to actually zooming in on a particular subject.”

[Jiaming] Luo and his colleagues tested their model on two ancient scripts that had already been deciphered: Ugaritic, which is related to Hebrew, and Linear B, which was first discovered among Bronze Age–era ruins on the Greek island of Crete. It took professional and amateur epigraphists — people who study ancient written matter — nearly six decades of mental wrangling to decode Linear B. Officially, 30-year-old British architect Michael Ventris is primarily credited with its decipherment, although the private efforts of classicist Alice Kober lay the groundwork for his breakthrough. Sitting night after night at her dining table in Brooklyn, New York, Kober compiled a makeshift database of Linear B symbols, comprising 180,000 paper slips filed in cigarette boxes, and used those to draw important conclusions about the nature of the script. She died in 1950, two years before Ventris cracked the code. Linear B is now recognized as the earliest form of Greek.

Luo and his team wanted to see if their machine-learning model could get to the same answer, but faster. The algorithm yielded what was called “remarkable accuracy”: it was able to correctly translate 67.3% of Linear B’s words into their modern-day Greek equivalents. According to Luo, it took between two and three hours to run the algorithm once it had been built, cutting out the days or weeks — or months or years — that it might take to manually test out a theory by translating symbols one by one. The results for Ugaritic showed an improvement on previous attempts at automatic decipherment.

The work raised an intriguing proposition. Could machine learning assist researchers in their quests to crack other, as-yet undeciphered scripts — ones that have so far resisted all attempts at translation? What historical secrets might be unlocked as a result?

This is an interesting argument. From a regulatory/social standpoint, I feel there are double standards. From a technical perspective, I don’t want automation to have the same flaws as a human. I don’t want my ABS to get distracted sometimes, I want consistent superhuman timing.

Canada’s leading developer of self-driving systems has unveiled its new strategy for teaching autonomous vehicles to perform safely: It’s basically a driving school for robots run by another robot.

More precisely, Waabi Innovations Inc. has developed an artificial intelligence-powered simulator that not only recreates the driving experience but challenges an automated driver’s weaknesses so it learns faster. On Wednesday, the Toronto-based company announced its simulator will provide a level of experience that would otherwise take thousands of autonomous vehicles driving millions of miles on the road to acquire.

“We’ve flipped the equation for how much simulation versus real world you need‚” said Raquel Urtasun, the company’s chief executive officer and a professor of computer science at the University of Toronto. “It’s really the key for unlocking self-driving technology.”

https://tinyurl.com/yckw5rpb

An interdisciplinary research team has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to design and test a new generation of AI-driven conversational agents, or chatbots, for public data collection, with the goal of understanding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic – and ultimately other large-scale crises – on small-town communities.

Lead investigator Narges Mahyar, assistant professor in the Manning College of Information and Computer Science, will collaborate with co-principal investigators Pari Riahi, assistant professor of architecture, and Ali Sarvghad, research assistant professor of information and computer science, using the $147,000 grant under the NSF’s Smart and Connected Communities program.

Carnegie Mellon University researchers will collaborate with Fujitsu Limited, a leading Japanese information and communication technology company, to develop social digital twin technology, with an emphasis on exploring practical applications for the work.

A social digital twin digitally reproduces the relationships and connections between people, goods, the economy and society to offer a simulation, prediction and decision-making environment for solving diverse and complex social issues. This research is the first attempt between Fujitsu and CMU to explore future applications of social digital twins in global communities.

A project through CMU’s Mobility Data Analytics Center (MAC) will leverage real world data, including input of traffic regulations and the movement of vehicles, to evaluate the effectiveness of measures designed to dynamically estimate and control traffic flow. Another project with CMU’s Computational Behavior Lab in the School of Computer Science’s Robotics Institute will extend current capabilities in 3D modeling of pedestrians and forecasting their behavior over time in urban environments. This technology can be used to monitor activity on streets and determine where issues or accidents may be taking place.

The new Master of Science degree in applied geospatial analytics will be offered online and is designed for working professionals who find it difficult to undertake an on-campus program. The interdisciplinary master’s program will combine Purdue Polytechnic’s strengths in applied data analytics with the Brian Lamb School of Communication’s strengths in strategic communication management and the College of Agriculture’s strengths in spatial data science.

The new PhD in computer and information technology will provide expanded opportunities for research, both within the academic community and with external research partners. The program will support both goals in both the Polytechnic Institute and its Department of Computer and Information Technology to increase domestic and international graduate student populations. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, occupations that design new approaches to technology and find innovative uses for existing technology are projected to grow by 15% by 2029.

The Urban Institute has transformed their original idea into Data4Kids, a series of “data stories” that educators can use to teach data science concepts in their classrooms. The project was released in December in partnership with seven K-12 organizations and a $10,000 grant from the National Science Foundation’s South Big Data Hub.

“We wanted to collaborate with educators and figure out what is it that they need, what have they learned in the last year about being in this remote environment and the best ways to engage students [in data science],” Bowen says, and the data stories concept was born. “We wanted to make sure it is as flexible as possible for instructors. Maybe they want to do something a little more advanced, or maybe they just want to get their kids’ toes wet into data and start with something a little more basic.”

Each data story toolkit comes complete with an instructor’s guide, data, and slidedeck.

The University of Florida prides itself on ascending to a top-five public university but in recent months, allegations of politically motivated infringements on academic freedom have ignited controversy and made their way to courts and Congress.

Open discourse has a checkered history on campus.

Throughout the university’s history, administrators have terminated or forced the resignation of professors whose ideologies were revolutionary for their time and went against the state government. Some professors say the most recent examples fall in line with a pattern of academic repression.

As researchers race to find the latest and greatest technologies the world needs to be more resilient and sustainable, one team of educators at the University of Delaware is aiming to create a blueprint for a more renewable manufacturing future with a $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation.

“It’s important to educate the new generation of engineers to try to change the mentality of how we’re utilizing the limited resources we have,” said Marianthi Ierapetritou, UD’s Bob and Jane Gore Centennial Chair of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. She will lead the project as she works with Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Professors Dionisios Vlachos and Raul Lobo, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Associate Professor Hui Fang and Joseph R. Biden, Jr. School of Public Policy and Administration Assistant Professor Kalim Shah to launch the future manufacturing project in 2022.

Areas near a national laboratory or a research university exhibit more startup activity, but increased federal research support only spurs entrepreneurship near universities.

The Defense Department must become a digital and artificial intelligence-enabled enterprise capable of operating at the speed and scale necessary to preserve its military advantage, according to a memorandum issued by Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen H. Hicks.

The memorandum, published on defense.gov, outlines how the chief digital and artificial intelligence officer, or CDAO, is charged with making sure DOD supports such an enterprise. John Sherman, DOD chief information officer, will serve as the acting chief digital and artificial intelligence officer until the position is filled permanently.

“[It’s] an honor to be able to help get this organization stood up while performing my chief information officer duties,” Sherman said today in a Pentagon media roundtable, adding that he has worked closely with several organizations to make sure the CDAO effort is launched on a solid footing.

The use of autonomy and artificial intelligence will play an increasingly vital role in military operations in such places as the Middle East, where U.S. forces no longer have a sizeable military presence, an Army general said.

Lander should be a lesson for the White House. Legitimate questions about his personal conduct were raised before and during his confirmation hearing. Enthusiasm for his brilliance and political acumen was tempered by accusations that he did not appropriately acknowledge the contributions of Nobel Prize winners Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier to gene-editing technology. He apologized and then was appointed.

Biden has much work to do to maintain the confidence of the scientific community.

Although OSTP is a small office with relatively little clout, observers say Lander deserves credit for helping advance important research policies. He has promoted plans for a new agency to fund high-risk medical research, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health. And OSTP has been in the middle of efforts to devise new rules aimed at curbing improper foreign influence in U.S.-funded research.

Some believe any damage to such efforts, including a renewed cancer research “moonshot,” will be short-lived. Lander’s “behavior is regrettable, but it doesn’t mean these programs will grind to a halt,” says Mary Woolley, president of the biomedical research advocacy group Research!America. “These big things don’t depend on a single person.”

“OSTP will get past this,” says Chris Fall, former head of OSTP’s national security division and now vice president for applied science at MITRE Corp. “The only real source of the [OSTP] director’s authority,” he notes, is the president. So, “If the president wants something done, it’ll happen.”

Researchers hope that leadership will soon be restored to the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), which Lander directed, so that it can continue with Biden’s agenda, which included the creation of a new biomedical innovations agency and the revamping of the country’s pandemic preparedness plan. Some are already naming scientists who might be well suited to replace Lander, who they say had a well-known reputation for abrasiveness and aggression towards his colleagues.

“Eric Lander is a successful researcher, but everyone knows that he is a bully,” says Kenneth Bernard, an epidemiologist and biodefense researcher who has worked in several US administrations. “He is widely known as arrogant and controlling.” Bernard, who testified before an elite scientific advisory panel co-chaired by Lander during the administration of former president Barack Obama, notes that such behaviour can backfire in government agencies, where leaders must navigate varied viewpoints. “He was a bad fit from the beginning,” Bernard says.

“A high-level, data-driven sports analytics framework. floodlight is a Python package for streamlined analysis of sports data. It is designed with a clear focus on scientific computing and built upon popular libraries such as numpy or pandas.”

Finally-a unified approach to classifying research participants performance caliber, where the terms world-class/elite/sedentary actually mean something! Great co-authors in @MckayAlannah @ella__smith_ @davidtmartin @inigomujika_en Dr. Goosey-Tolfrey, @SheppardCoach @LouiseMBurke