Education
Computer science in service of medicine
MIT's Ray and Maria Stata Center (Building 32), known for its striking outward appearance, is also designed to foster collaboration among the people inside. Sitting in the famous building's amphitheater on a brisk fall day, Kristy Carpenter smiles as she speaks enthusiastically about how interdisciplinary efforts between the fields of computer science and molecular biology are helping accelerate the process of drug discovery and design. Carpenter, an MIT senior with a joint major in both subjects, said she didn't want to specialize in only one or the other -- it's the intersection between both disciplines, and the application of that work to improving human health, that she finds compelling. "For me, to be really fulfilled in my work as a scientist, I want to have some tangible impact," she says. Carpenter explains that artificial intelligence, which can help compute the combinations of compounds that would be better for a particular drug, can reduce trial-and-error time and ideally quicken the process of designing new medicines.
futureofwork _2019-10-13_18-33-36.xlsx
The graph represents a network of 4,041 Twitter users whose tweets in the requested range contained "futureofwork ", or who were replied to or mentioned in those tweets. The network was obtained from the NodeXL Graph Server on Monday, 14 October 2019 at 01:34 UTC. The requested start date was Monday, 14 October 2019 at 00:01 UTC and the maximum number of days (going backward) was 14. The maximum number of tweets collected was 5,000. The tweets in the network were tweeted over the 3-day, 8-hour, 54-minute period from Thursday, 10 October 2019 at 15:06 UTC to Monday, 14 October 2019 at 00:00 UTC.
Five Automated Machine Learning Solutions for P&C Insurance
In an insurance marketplace where the average P&C combined ratio is hovering close to 99 points, a single point improvement can yield a dramatic increase in profitability. AI and automated machine learning bring five new dynamics to P&C insurance operations that empower companies to shed previous constraints and break out of the pack to pursue substantial improvements in loss and combined ratios.
Quantum Computing Is Poised to Change Everything Inside Higher Ed
I recall the advent of the ILLIAC computer, ARPANET (that grew into the internet), the personal computer, the mobile phone, the smartphone, and other advancements in technology that have had such a huge impact on our society. Yet these are mere drops in the ocean compared to the impact we will see from the advent of quantum computing. Earlier this year, Google's 53-qubit computer reached computing supremacy, and from now on the world will never be the same. Google's quantum computer was reportedly able to solve a calculation -- proving the randomness of numbers produced by a random number generator -- in 3 minutes and 20 seconds that would take the world's fastest traditional supercomputer, Summit, around 10,000 years. This effectively means that the calculation cannot be performed by a traditional computer, making Google the first to demonstrate quantum supremacy.
Zach Pardos is Using Machine Learning to Broaden Pathways from Community College
UC Berkeley Assistant Professor Zachary Pardos and his team have developed a machine learning approach that promises to help more community college students position themselves to transfer and succeed at four-year colleges and universities. Along the way, they've discovered that considering course enrollment patterns -- or the classes that students take before, along with, and after a particular course -- can help provide a more complete picture of what courses should "count" when students transfer. Roughly 80% of community college students aim to continue their education at four-year institutions, but the vast majority never make the transfer. Contributing to the problem are the complexities of "articulation," or determining which course at one institution will count for credit at another. This entails assessing the similarity of thousands, or potentially even millions, of pairs of courses, an endeavor that's impossible to comprehensively achieve and keep current across all institutions manually.
SAS Tutorial Python Integration with SAS Viya
In this SAS How To Tutorial, Ari Zitin explores several examples of Python integration with SAS. There are many SAS Viya Cloud Analytic Services (CAS) that can be submitted from Python. In this Python integration demo, Ari focuses on predictive modeling. He shows how to connect to CAS, access in-memory data, bring data locally to use Pandas, and prepare data for predictive modeling. Ari then steps through how to build, score and assess a Decision Tree model.
Adversarial Regression. Generative Adversarial Networks for Non-Linear Regression: Theory and Assessment
Adversarial Regression is a proposition to perform high dimensional non-linear regression with uncertainty estimation. We used Conditional Generative Adversarial Network to obtain an estimate of the full predictive distribution for a new observation. Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) are implicit generative models which produce samples from a distribution approximating the distribution of the data. The conditional version of it (CGAN) takes the following expression: $\min\limits_G \max\limits_D V(D, G) = \mathbb{E}_{x\sim p_{r}(x)} [log(D(x, y))] + \mathbb{E}_{z\sim p_{z}(z)} [log (1-D(G(z, y)))]$. An approximate solution can be found by training simultaneously two neural networks to model D and G and feeding G with a random noise vector $z$. After training, we have that $G(z, y)\mathrel{\dot\sim} p_{data}(x, y)$. By fixing $y$, we have $G(z|y) \mathrel{\dot\sim} p{data}(x|y)$. By sampling $z$, we can therefore obtain samples following approximately $p(x|y)$, which is the predictive distribution of $x$ for a new $y$. We ran experiments to test various loss functions, data distributions, sample size, size of the noise vector, etc. Even if we observed differences, no experiment outperformed consistently the others. The quality of CGAN for regression relies on fine-tuning a range of hyperparameters. In a broader view, the results show that CGANs are very promising methods to perform uncertainty estimation for high dimensional non-linear regression.
Implicit Context-aware Learning and Discovery for Streaming Data Analytics
Lore, Kin Gwn, Reddy, Kishore K.
--The performance of machine learning model can be further improved if contextual cues are provided as input along with base features that are directly related to an inference task. In offline learning, one can inspect historical training data to identify contextual clusters either through feature clustering, or handcrafting additional features to describe a context. While offline training enjoys the privilege of learning reliable models based on already-defined contextual features, online training for streaming data may be more challenging-- the data is streamed through time, and the underlying context during a data generation process may change. Furthermore, the problem is exacerbated when the number of possible context is not known. In this study, we propose an online-learning algorithm involving the use of a neural network-based autoencoder to identify contextual changes during training, then compares the currently-inferred context to a knowledge base of learned contexts as training advances. Results show that classifier-training benefits from the automatically discovered contexts which demonstrates quicker learning convergence during contextual changes compared to current methods. Contextual cues can greatly benefit learning of predictive tasks in a machine learning model. A single datapoint may be meaningless.
Science and Technology Advance through Surprise
Figure 4 (left) shows that the probability of being a hit paper increases gradually with career and team novelty, but expedition novelty rises much more quickly as the strongest predictor. Papers involving the most unexpected publication events or conversations are 3.5 times more likely than random to be hit papers. Figure 4 (left) also shows that career and team novelties are highly correlated, suggesting that successful teams not only have members from multiple disciplines, but also members with diverse backgrounds who "glue" interdisciplinary teams together (also see Figure S3). Successful knowledge expeditions, however, are the most likely path associated with breakthrough discovery. When regressing content and context novelties of a paper separately on the three background novelty measures, we find that expedition novelty has by far the largest effect on context novelty (), but team novelty has the marginal top effect on . 2 3, p 0 0 1 β 2 .
Online Pricing with Offline Data: Phase Transition and Inverse Square Law
Bu, Jinzhi, Simchi-Levi, David, Xu, Yunzong
This paper investigates the impact of pre-existing offline data on online learning, in the context of dynamic pricing. We study a single-product dynamic pricing problem over a selling horizon of $T$ periods. The demand in each period is determined by the price of the product according to a linear demand model with unknown parameters. We assume that an incumbent price has been tested for $n$ periods in the offline stage before the start of the selling horizon, and the seller has collected $n$ demand observations under the incumbent price from the market. The seller wants to utilize both the pre-existing offline data and the sequential online data to minimize the regret of the online learning process. In the well-separated case where the absolute difference between the incumbent price and the optimal price $\delta$ is lower bounded by a known constant, we prove that the best achievable regret is $\tilde{\Theta}\left(\sqrt{T}\wedge (\frac{T}{n}\vee \log T)\right)$, and show that certain variants of the greedy policy achieve this bound. In the general case where $\delta$ is not necessarily lower bounded by a known constant, we prove that the best achievable regret is $\tilde{\Theta}\left(\sqrt{T}\wedge (\frac{T}{n\delta^2} \vee \frac{\log T}{\delta^2})\right)$, and construct a learning algorithm based on the "optimism in the face of uncertainty" principle, whose regret is optimal up to a logarithm factor. In both cases, our results reveal surprising transformations of the optimal regret rate with respect to the size of offline data, which we refer to as phase transitions. In addition, our result demonstrates that the shape of offline data, measured by $\delta$, also has an intrinsic effect on the optimal regret, and we quantify this effect via the inverse-square law.