Media
Who are the news nerds?
As hundreds of members of the journalism-tech community descend on Jacksonville for the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting conference, we wanted to share results from a recent community survey. Affectionately referred to as "news nerds," 514 folks who work at the intersection of journalism and technology responded to a survey last year to help us get a better sense of who we are, what the heck we call this work, and what we do. Thank you to everyone who took part in the survey–the data gathered has given us a baseline of understanding about this community, so we can hold ourselves accountable to goals on inclusion, representation, and what it takes to do amazing journalism together. Before we dive into the data, I want to share a little bit about how we got here. Nearly two years ago, Brian Hamman of the New York Times and Scott Klein of ProPublica reached out with an idea to organize a SRCCON session as a way to do a census of this community.
[P] Aboleth - A bare-bones TensorFlow framework for Bayesian NNs • r/MachineLearning
The purpose of Aboleth is to provide a set of high performance and light weight components for building Bayesian neural nets and approximate (deep) Gaussian process computational graphs (and more). We aim for minimal abstraction over pure TensorFlow, so you can easily assign parts of the computational graph to different hardware, use your own data feeds/queues, and manage your own sessions etc. Have a look at the docs for more information!
What the robots of Star Wars tell us about automation, and the future of human work
Millions of fans all over the world eagerly anticipated this week's release of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the eighth in the series. At last we will get some answers to questions that have been vexing us since 2015's The Force Awakens. Throughout the franchise, the core characters have been accompanied by a number of much-loved robots, including C-3PO, R2-D2 and more recently, BB-8 and K2-SO. While often fulfilling the role of wise-cracking sidekicks, these and other robots also play an integral role in events. Interestingly, they can also tell us useful things about automation, such as whether it poses dangers to us and whether robots will ever replace human workers entirely.
2018 AI predictions
In the information industry and at Thomson Reuters, AI and machine learning (ML) are already driving innovation and transformation. They are embedded in how we sift through large volumes of data and content, and how we enhance, organize, connect, and deliver content and information. They are the engines underlying many of our products and services. In the long term, our objective is to build personal digital assistants for knowledge workers. Its purpose is not to replace you, but to augment you, to scale you, and to help you focus on more interesting tasks.
Data Wonderland: Christmas songs from the viewpoint of a data scientist
Whether „Driving Home for Christmas", „Winter Wonderland", „Let it snow!" or „Last Christmas" – every year christmas songs are taking over the charts again. While average Joe is joyfully putting on the next christmas song, the data scientist starts his journey of discovery through the snowy music history. The data set comes from 55000 Song Lyrics, which contains over 55,000 songs. Our goal is to perform a comprehensive analysis of the song texts to identify the Christmas songs. In order to do so, first we add an additional column to the data frame to give each song a label of either Christmas or Not Christmas, where every song which contains the words Christmas, Xmas or X-mas will be labeled as Christmas and otherwise as Not Christmas. This is just the initialization of the labels, later we will apply Naive Bayes to a training set to identify the other Christmas songs.
[D] NLP models with output in the embedding space? • r/MachineLearning
I am interested in knowing if there are any publications that propose models where the output is not a softmax but a vector in the embedding space or, alternatively, suggestions on how to do it, like what loss function to use (e.g. MSE between output and expected embedded vectors) or not to use, and why. I have not been able to find anything in google or google scholar, that's why I resort to the knowledge of this subreddit. I would appreciate any help.