Data Science Weekly - Issue 309
Issue #309 Oct 24 2019
Editor Picks
The newest gene editor radically improves on CRISPR
Researchers have developed “prime editing,” a true search-and-replace function for DNA...
Teaching Rats To Drive Tiny Cars Helps Them Relax, Scientists Discover
Researchers from the University of Richmond in Virginia used the vehicle-driving rodents to show that an enriched environment can improve cognitive function and help sharpen the ability to learn complex tasks. They also demonstrated that the mastery of a complicated skill can reduce levels of stress and help the rodents chill out...
Quantum Supremacy Using a Programmable Superconducting Processor
Physicists have been talking about the power of quantum computing for over 30 years, but the questions have always been: will it ever do something useful and is it worth investing in? For such large-scale endeavors it is good engineering practice to formulate decisive short-term goals that demonstrate whether the designs are going in the right direction. So, we devised an experiment as an important milestone to help answer these questions. This experiment, referred to as a quantum supremacy experiment, provided direction for our team to overcome the many technical challenges inherent in quantum systems engineering to make a computer that is both programmable and powerful...
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Data Science Articles & Videos
Learning to Smell:
Using Deep Learning to Predict the Olfactory Properties of Molecules
Our [Google] research team is using graph neural networks to predict the olfactory properties of molecules, expanding our understanding of smell & odor, with potential applications ranging from odorant synthesis to scent digitization..
Convolutional Neural Network for Breast Cancer Classification
Deep Learning for solving the most commonly diagnosed cancer in women...
Real-Time Visual Navigation in Huge Image Sets Using Similarity Graphs
This is super fun and performant: WikiView for image similarity search...
A Deep Active Learning System for Species Identification and Counting in Camera Trap Images
In this paper, we focus not on automating the labeling of camera trap images, but on accelerating this process. We combine the power of machine intelligence and human intelligence to build a scalable, fast, and accurate active learning system to minimize the manual work required to identify and count animals in camera trap images. Our proposed scheme can match the state of the art accuracy on a 3.2 million image dataset with as few as 14,100 manual labels, which means decreasing manual labeling effort by over 99.5%...
Understanding Classification Thresholds Using Isocurves
Your job as a data scientist isn’t done until you explain how to interpret the model and apply it. That means threshold selection for the business decision that motivated the model. As a data scientist, you might say…“A blog post about thresholds? It’s not even a data science problem, it’s a business problem.” And you would be right! Threshold selection lacks the appeal of say, generative adversarial networks. But it’s also where the rubber meets the road, where all the creative stuff you did with fancy algorithms interacts with real-world decision-making...
Improving long-form question answering by compressing search results
A new method to improve the performance of long-form question answering (QA) systems by enabling them to search relevant text more efficiently. This method builds on Facebook AI’s work on long-form QA a natural language processing (NLP) research task where models must answer a natural language question, such as “What is Albert Einstein famous for?” by using the top 100 web search results...
Military artificial intelligence can be easily and dangerously fooled
AI warfare is beginning to dominate military strategy in the US and China, but is the technology ready?...
CrossFit — A Young Men’s Game or Not
Every year, the finest athletes compete in the Crossfit Games to win the title of “Fittest on Earth”. To kickstart this competition, the CrossFit community (or cult) participates in the Crossfit Opens where the fittest are selected. Typically perceived as a sport of the young due to the intensity of the workouts and heavy lifting involved. Despite that, the emphasis on functional fitness and community has attracted people of all ages, from kids to elderly. As a Crossfitter who is frequently gasping for air at the end of a workout with a buddy who is older, I was interested to find out if my situation was the norm...
How can I find Data Science Internships to strengthen my resume?
There's lots of advice out there espousing the value of internships. We agree. Getting an internship (or more) under your belt can be a great way to build up practical experience and provide real-world examples of your work when it comes to applying for full-time roles. However, that's the theory. How about the practice? How should you go about finding internships? Who offers them? How can you source them?...
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Jobs
Developer Advocate: NLP - Rasa -
San Francisco / Remote US or Berlin, Germany
Developer Advocates are extremely important for the success of open source projects and we are looking for new team members to help us grow our open source community. At Rasa, it’s an exciting mix of working on bleeding-edge machine learning projects, hacking with new technologies, speaking at developer conferences all around the world and educating devs about ML, conversational AI, and our tools.
What do you need to become a developer advocate? Two things: a passion for ML and an eagerness to teach and help others. If this sounds like you, then send your application to L.morley@rasa.com...
Want to post a job here? Email us for details >> team@datascienceweekly.org
Training & Resources
Audio and Visual Quality Measurement using Fréchet Distance
Since generative models have no “ground-truth,” evaluating their performance can be difficult. New quantitative metrics use the Fréchet distance between model and source distributions to evaluate the quality of generative audio and video. Learn more...
stacknn-core: The Successor to StackNN
This library implements differentiable stacks and queues in PyTorch. It is a light-weight version of StackNN that is easier to install and optimized for faster training. The API is also straightforward...
We’ll Do It Live: Updating Machine Learning Models on Flask/uWSGI with No Downtime
This blog post will walk through the steps of getting a Flask application with an endpoint to update a model into production...
Books
The Lady Tasting Tea:
How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century An insightful, revealing history of how mathematics transformed our world...
"I have taken courses in statistics, taught it many times and solved several statistical problems that have appeared in journals. But until I read this book, I never really thought about it in so deep and philosophical a manner..."
For a detailed list of books covering Data Science, Machine Learning, AI and associated programming languages check out our resources page.
P.S., Enjoy the newsletter? Please forward it to your friends and colleagues - we'd love to have them onboard :) All the best, Hannah & Sebastian