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The Data Science Puzzle, Explained

#artificialintelligence

There is no dearth of articles around the web comparing and contrasting data science terminology. There are all sorts of articles written by all types of people relaying their opinions to anyone who will listen. So let me set the record straight, for those wondering if this is one of those types of posts. I think that, while there may be an awful lot of opinion pieces defining and comparing these related terms, the fact is that much of this terminology is fluid, is not entirely agreed-upon, and, frankly, being exposed to other peoples' views is one of the best ways to test and refine your own. So, while one may not agree entirely (or even minimally) with my opinion on much of this terminology, there may still be something one can get out of this.


Machine-Learning Maestro Michael Jordan on the Delusions of Big Data and Other Huge Engineering Efforts

@machinelearnbot

The overeager adoption of big data is likely to result in catastrophes of analysis comparable to a national epidemic of collapsing bridges. Hardware designers creating chips based on the human brain are engaged in a faith-based undertaking likely to prove a fool's errand. Despite recent claims to the contrary, we are no further along with computer vision than we were with physics when Isaac Newton sat under his apple tree. Those may sound like the Luddite ravings of a crackpot who breached security at an IEEE conference. In fact, the opinions belong to IEEE Fellow Michael I. Jordan, Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Jordan is one of the world's most respected authorities on machine learning and an astute observer of the field. His CV would require its own massive database, and his standing in the field is such that he was chosen to write the introduction to the 2013 National Research Council report "Frontiers in Massive Data Analysis." San Francisco writer Lee Gomes interviewed him for IEEE Spectrum on 3 October 2014. IEEE Spectrum: I infer from your writing that you believe there's a lot of misinformation out there about deep learning, big data, computer vision, and the like. Michael Jordan: Well, on all academic topics there is a lot of misinformation. The media is trying to do its best to find topics that people are going to read about. Sometimes those go beyond where the achievements actually are.


First Person: A conversation with Jeff Dean, senior fellow at Google Research

#artificialintelligence

For example, Dean's affinity for cats comes in handy with his line of work. In this context, cats are a mere vehicle for determining how much a computer can see, learn, communicate and understand. It also turns out that machines and humans are complementary in skills. While some computers are capable of beating a human opponent in a game such as Go, it's challenging for the same computers to perform more interpretive functions such as identifying and describing images. On the other hand, humans (and cats) are challenged by performing algorithmic functions on large sets of data, a task at that machines excel at.


First Person: A conversation with Jeff Dean, senior fellow at Google Research - Artificial Intelligence Online

#artificialintelligence

For example, Dean's affinity for cats comes in handy with his line of work. In this context, cats are a mere vehicle for determining how much a computerMachine learning is next big thing in programming. Read more ... ยป can see, learn, communicate and understand. It also turns out that machinesAI research nerve centre launched in Cambridge. Read more ... ยป and humans are complementary in skills.


Rafeef Ziadah: 'Make a pariah state of Israel'

Al Jazeera

And no sound bite I come up with, no matter how good my English gets, will bring them back to life." First written in the aftermath of the 2008-2009 Israeli war on Gaza, these words from Rafeef Ziadah's poem "We Teach Life, Sir" became popularised by a 2011 performance that went viral. A Palestinian performance poet based in London, Ziadah is an activist in her own right and a member of the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) National Committee. She has helped spearhead many of the initiatives calling for the academic and cultural boycott of Israel until it adheres to the demands granting Palestinians rights under international law. The poem is now featured on Ziadah's latest album of the same name, which blends her poetry with original music composed by Phil Mansour. Al Jazeera spoke with Ziadah about her latest album, the inspiration and politics of her art, as well as her UK-based activism. Al Jazeera: Your poems were previously known for your captivating performance. Why did you decide to add music to your poems? Rafeef Ziadah: Both my first album "Hadeel" and this second one "We Teach Life" have been collaborations with wonderful musicians who deliberately worked to ensure the music strengthened and emphasised the words. With an album, unlike live performances, people are not able to see me and relate to my facial expressions or hand gestures - on the album we wanted to recreate that connection and music really helped to bring the poems to life. I was happy to work with activist-artist Phil Monsour (who produced the album). The music has also helped introduce the work to a broader audience and is beginning to have radio play on independent radio stations around the world. Al Jazeera: How long did it take you to make this album? Why have you decided to release it now and what do you hope will come out of its release? Ziadah: The album was a slow collaboration that started with a number of poetry pieces and slowly grew in number. It took about 12 months to complete the final production, but the poems were written over several years and recorded in a few countries depending on accessibility. It is really an attempt to capture in words a number of recent experiences of Palestinians inside historic Palestine and in exile as well. This work is also - in many ways- a collective effort beyond myself and the musicians because we launched a crowd funding campaign to support the final stages of production and many people generously donated to make sure narratives that are largely absent in the Western mainstream can be heard. As I explain in the album's artwork "the poems and music here have been written over several years, three wars, two sieges, too many borders and many protests and picket lines.


This is the future of video game development

Engadget

The Girls Make Games initiative aims to encourage young women to dive into the rich industry of video game development, and it seems to be doing the trick. This year at the Independent Games Festival awards ceremony, nine young ladies from Girls Make Games collected the ID@Xbox Rising Star award for their work on The Hole Story. It's a top-down RPG featuring an archaeologist named Wendy who digs a portal to a fantastical dimension in her backyard. We caught up with the winners right after they collected their prizes and had one question for each of them: What do you want the future of video games to look like?


It's Your Business: Checkers headed for C-U - Artificial Intelligence Online

#artificialintelligence

A fast-food chain with restaurants in 28 states is getting ready to start serving burgers and fries in Champaign-Urbana. Bruce Kim, director of franchise development for Checkers and Rally's Restaurants, said the company is in the process of awarding a franchise for up to three new Checkers restaurants in the area. "We are a quick-service restaurant," he said. "We are known for our seasoned, seared and grilled burgers; fries; grilled, all-meat hot dogs; crazy good chicken wings; golden fish sandwiches; and ice cream. "Our seasoned fries were named the best fries for 2015 by Yahoo." Kim said Checkers restaurants typically stay open late, with most of them serving customers in their double drive-thru until 2 or 3 a.m. The Tampa, Fla.-based chain has 828 locations nationwide, and the website Thrillist recently named Checkers the fastest-growing fast-food chain in Illinois. Kim said the chain is up to 20 Checkers restaurants and seven Rally's restaurants in the state, and the next step is to start building stores in Champaign County. "There is plenty of room to grow, and we are trying to build several locations in Champaign-Urbana," Kim said. "Our studies show we have room for three stores, with our growth franchise-driven." "The community has a good, solid income base, good ethnic diversity and lots of university students.


An Interview with Stanford University President John Hennessy

Communications of the ACM

John Hennessy joined Stanford in 1977 right after receiving his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He soon became a leader of Reduced Instruction Set Computers. This research led to the founding of MIPS Computer Systems, which was later acquired for 320 million. There are still nearly a billion MIPS processors shipped annually, 30 years after the company was founded. Hennessy returned to Stanford to do foundational research in large-scale shared memory multiprocessors. In his spare time, he co-authored two textbooks on computer architecture, which have been continuously revised and are still popular 25 years later. This record led to numerous honors, including ACM Fellow, election to both the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences. Not resting on his research and teaching laurels, he quickly moved up the academic administrative ladder, going from the CS department chair to Engineering college dean to provost and finally to president in just seven years. He is Stanford's tenth president, its first from engineering, and he has governed it for an eighth of its existence. Since 2000, he doubled Stanford's endowment, including a record 6.2 billion for a single campaign. He used those funds to launch many initiatives--which often cross departmental lines--along with new buildings to house them. Undergraduate applications also doubled, for the first time making Stanford even more selective than Harvard.


Peter Naur

Communications of the ACM

Peter Naur, a Danish computer scientist and 2005 recipient of the ACM A.M. Turing Award for fundamental contributions to programming language design and the definition of Algol 60, to compiler design, and to the art and practice of computer programming, died January 3 after a brief illness. Born in Fredricksberg, Denmark, Naur studied astronomy at the University of Copenhagen, where he received his Ph.D. in that field before going to Kings College Cambridge in the 1950s to conduct research both into astronomy and the emerging field of computer programming. As he told Computerworld Denmark in a 2014 interview (http://bit.ly/1O13v1I), "I had the great privilege to get to Cambridge in the early 1950s. Here I discovered that calculations of planetary motion that could take several hours, could now be carried out in seconds with a computer."


Beauty and Brains: Detecting Anomalous Pattern Co-Occurrences

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Our world is filled with both beautiful and brainy people, but how often does a Nobel Prize winner also wins a beauty pageant? Let us assume that someone who is both very beautiful and very smart is more rare than what we would expect from the combination of the number of beautiful and brainy people. Of course there will still always be some individuals that defy this stereotype; these beautiful brainy people are exactly the class of anomaly we focus on in this paper. They do not posses intrinsically rare qualities, it is the unexpected combination of factors that makes them stand out. In this paper we define the above described class of anomaly and propose a method to quickly identify them in transaction data. Further, as we take a pattern set based approach, our method readily explains why a transaction is anomalous. The effectiveness of our method is thoroughly verified with a wide range of experiments on both real world and synthetic data.