Every two weeks, we find the most interesting data science links from around the web and collect them in Data Science Briefings, the DataMiningApps newsletter. Subscribe now for free if you want to be the first to get up to speed on interesting resources.
- The Next Word
Where will predictive text take us? - The rise of the financial machines
Forget Gordon Gekko. Computers increasingly call the shots in financial markets - Getting a new mobile number in China will involve a facial-recognition test
“China is taking every measure it can to verify the identities of its over 850 million mobile internet users.” - Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for Pixel 4 facial recognition
“They need facial scans of people with darker skin” - Gradient Descent: The Ultimate Optimizer
This is wild: “Working with any gradient-based machine learning algorithm involves the tedious task of tuning the optimizer’s hyperparameters, such as the learning rate. There exist many techniques for automated hyperparameter optimization, but they typically introduce even more hyperparameters to control the hyperparameter optimization process. We propose to instead learn the hyperparameters themselves by gradient descent, and furthermore to learn the hyper-hyperparameters by gradient descent as well, and so on ad infinitum.” - Beware of Automated Hiring
It won’t end employment discrimination. In fact, it could make it worse. - Facial analysis AI is being used in job interviews – it will probably reinforce inequality
“Artificial intelligence and facial analysis software is becoming commonplace in job interviews. The technology, developed by US company HireVue, analyses the language and tone of a candidate’s voice and records their facial expressions as they are videoed answering identical questions.” - Amazon and Apple are quietly building networks that know the location of everything
Amazon’s new Sidewalk protocol and Apple’s experiments with ultra-wideband signal a new battleground that gets Amazon out of the house and Apple inside it. - Africa Is Building an A.I. Industry That Doesn’t Look Like Silicon Valley
Researchers want to pave their own path. But the growing industry is still dependent on tech giants like Google and Microsoft. - 150 successful machine learning models: 6 lessons learned at Booking.com
Here’s a paper that will reward careful study for many organisations. - Applying deep learning to Airbnb search
“Ours is a story of the elements we found useful in applying neural networks to a real life product. Deep learning was steep learning for us. To other teams embarking on similar journeys, we hope an account of our struggles and triumphs will provide some useful pointers.” - Turn Python Scripts into Beautiful ML Tools
Introducing Streamlit, an app framework built for ML engineers - A Code Glitch May Have Caused Errors In More Than 100 Published Studies
The discovery is a reminder that science is collaborative and ideally self-correcting, but that nothing can be taken for granted. - Notice of retraction due to a programming error
… and one more. - Deep Learning with PyTorch: A 60 Minute Blitz
Understand PyTorch’s Tensor library and neural networks at a high level. - Artificial Intelligence: What’s to Fear?
What should worry us most about artificial intelligence: losing our jobs to cheaper labor or losing our lives to killer robots? The real threat may lie in yet another danger: losing our minds. - The State of Machine Learning Frameworks in 2019
“In 2019, the war for ML frameworks has two remaining main contenders: PyTorch and TensorFlow. My analysis suggests that researchers are abandoning TensorFlow and flocking to PyTorch in droves. Meanwhile in industry, Tensorflow is currently the platform of choice, but that may not be true for long.” - Many Experts Say We Shouldn’t Worry About Superintelligent AI. They’re Wrong
Stuart Russell explores ways to ensure that superintelligent machines don’t pose a danger - Military drills for robots
“Researchers tested ground robots performing military-style exercises, much like Soldier counterparts, at a robotics testing site in Pennsylvania recently as part of a 10-year research project designed to push the research boundaries in robotics and autonomy.” - Pinterest uses AI to reduce self-harm content by 88% over the past year
Pinterest announced on World Mental Health Day that it’s reduced self-harm content by 88 percent over the past year using AI. - New chips for machine intelligence
This note summarises details of some of the new silicon chips for machine intelligence. - How Exactly UMAP Works
And why exactly it is better than tSNE - Tools I recommend for building Geospatial Web Applications
“Being a freelance WebGIS developer, it is very frequent for me to decide what tools I’ll need for my next project.”
