Data Science Weekly - Issue 99
Issue #99 October 15 2015
Editor Picks
Using only tweets, scientists can now detect earthquakes in 29 seconds flat
Did you first hear about the devastating earthquake that struck Sichuan on Twitter? You’d be surprised at how many did, as the social-media platform was actually faster at reporting the earthquake than the US government organization tasked with monitoring such events...
An algorithm might save your life:
How the Amazon and Netflix method might someday cure cancer
Algorithms recommend movies, books, dates — even job candidates. In the future, they might cure disease...
Auto-Generating Clickbait With Recurrent Neural Networks
“F.D.R.’s War Plans!” reads a headline from a 1941 Chicago Daily Tribune. Had this article been written today, it might rather have said “21 War Plans F.D.R. Does Not Want You To Know About. Number 6 may shock you!”. Modern writers have become very good at squeezing out the maximum clickability out of every headline. But this sort of writing seems formulaic and unoriginal. What if we could automate the writing of these, thus freeing up clickbait writers to do useful work?...
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Data Science Articles & Videos
Data Science Project Checklist To Use Before You Start A Project To Convey You Can Actually Get Work Done
You're relatively new to DS, you're about to start project, and you're looking to make sure that you're going to be on the right track so that you don't fall into bad habits and methods early on and you can nip them in the bud. Not only that, your main objective with doing this project is to show your future data science interviewers that you have a track record of doing data science...
Deep-Learning Robot Takes 10 Days to Teach Itself to Grasp
Leave a human baby with some toys and it’ll quickly learn to pick them up. Now a robot with deep-learning capabilities has done the same thing...
Applications of Machine Learning in FinTech
There are various applications of machine learning used by the FinTech companies falling under different subcategories. Let us look at some of the applications of machine learning and companies using such applications...
Which NFL Teams Are the Biggest Surprises of 2015 So Far?
We’re now 4.0625 weeks into the NFL’s 2015 regular season. (If you don’t know what the NFL is, you should probably stop reading now.) That’s about one-quarter of the whole 256-game shebang, enough to start taking stock of preseason predictions. So I got to wondering: Which teams have been the biggest surprises so far?...
Catcierge
Image recognition (to keep cat prey out) and RFID chip reader system for automated DIY cat door...
Machine learning for model selection in population genomics
In a recent preprint posted on bioRxiv, Sara Sheehan and Yun Song present a likelihood-free inference framework for population genomics that applies deep learning, an active area of machine learning research. They aimed to jointly infer natural selection and changes in population size, processes that can leave similar signatures in the genome, by testing their method on simulated data and on empirical data for Drosophila melanogaster...
Differentiable Memory
Reference implementations of various differentiable memory schemes for neural networks, in pure numpy. These are meant to serve as correctness checks against which higher performance batched GPU implementations can be evaluated...
OpenFace: Face recognition with Google's FaceNet deep neural network
This is a Python and Torch implementation of the CVPR 2015 paper FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering by Florian Schroff, Dmitry Kalenichenko, and James Philbin at Google using publicly available libraries and datasets. Torch allows the network to be executed on a CPU or with CUDA...
New Report Puts Numbers on Data Scientist Trend
Data scientist – a job that barely existed a decade ago – has become one of the hottest and best-paid professions in the U.S. Companies say they need people who have the skill sets – both business and technical – to analyze the rising tide of data produced by customers and operations. RJMetrics, a software startup that itself is looking for data scientists to fill open positions, dove into LinkedIn data to gauge the field’s scope...
Jobs
Data Scientist: Experimentation - RelayRides - San Francisco, CA We are looking for a big data artist to join our exceptional Analytics and Data Science team. If you’re interested in experimentation design and hypothesis testing to power a rapidly growing business, we have the perfect role for you. Be at the intersection of Big Data, Modelisation and Business Intelligence at RelayRides, and help our modeling, product, marketing, and operations teams figure out answers to their most challenging questions. The more data insights we have, the happier we are...
Training & Resources
Machine Learning for Developers
Most developers these days have heard of machine learning, but when trying to find an 'easy' way into this technique, most people find themselves getting scared off by the abstractness of the concept...
Getting Started with the Cloudera Kudu Storage Engine in Python
Cloudera Kudu is a distributed storage engine for fast data analytics. The python api is in alpha stage but already usable...
Visual Information Theory
Unfortunately, information theory can seem kind of intimidating. I don’t think there’s any reason it should be. In fact, many core ideas can be explained completely visually!...
Books
Data Scientists at Work Collection of interviews with sixteen of the world's most influential and innovative data scientists...
"Excellent book. It was fascinating to learn how the great minds behind of our most popular Internet sites evolved and are affecting our future..."
For a detailed list of books covering Data Science, Machine Learning, AI and associated programming languages check out our resources page.
P.S. Interested in reaching fellow readers of this newsletter? Consider sponsoring! Email us for details :) - All the best, Hannah & Sebastian