DataCoLab

Via Bits Blog

Program Seeks to Nurture ‘Data Science Culture’ at Universities

The modern flood of data comes in a many forms — sensor data, genomic data, web click streams and credit card transactions, to name a few. The disparate data sources are often called “silos,” suggesting the challenge of mingling different data sets to generate insights.

But if the data is in a silo, so are the people, often isolated in their fields of expertise. In universities, that problem is a key obstacle to progress in data science, according to academic research scientists.

Via VentureBeat

If you’re looking into a career as a data scientist, you may soon become one of the most sought-after people in your industry.

Given that job posting for data scientists increased 15,000 percent between 2011 and 2012 alone, according to FICO, if you’re not looking for a career as a data scientist, then maybe you should be.

Data scientists are the people who can understand and provide meaning to the piles and piles of data that companies collect and keep nowadays. “Big data” is the buzzword that represents those piles — tons of information about customers, products, and habits, that may one day help people sell advertising, build better merchandise, or even save lives.

Analytics platform that correlates online/mobile behavior to mental health wellness.

Via The Independent

Just who is looking over your shoulder when you browse the Internet? Tomorrow, web users will be given a new tool to shine a light on the commercial organisations which track your every movement online.

Lightbeam, a download produced by Mozilla, the US free software community behind the popular Firefox browser, claims to be a “watershed” moment in the battle for web transparency.

Everyone who browses the Internet leaves a digital trail used by advertisers to discover what your interests are.

Data scientists have emerged as magicians in this era of Big Data. They crunch, analyze and visualize data, and strategically suggest how to use the information to make key decisions.

A recent New York Times article discusses the tremendous demand for data science professionals and the sources of these professionals.

Universities across the country have been forced to almost overnight deliver courses and majors related to the field. These include top tier names such as NYU, Stanford, Northwestern, Indiana University, and University of California at Irvine, Syracuse and George Mason. Starting this fall, Columbia will offer new masters and certificate programs heavy on data.

In an era where youth are brought up watching movies suggested by Netflix or reading books suggested by Amazon, universities are scrambling to rapidly meet the demand from employers. The US alone requires a 60% increase in graduates with skills to handle large amounts of data. In the next five years, the economy will see almost half a million jobs, with a shortage of up to 190,000 qualified data scientists.

Students and teachers alike are beginning to see and apply data analytics in diverse fields. Be it entertainment, healthcare, business or something else, big data is relevant.

So what makes you a data scientist? According to senior research scientists Rachel Schutt, a data scientist is  “a hybrid computer scientist software engineer statistician”. You have to be curious, ask questions and you must be comfortable finding structure in exploding unstructured situations. While it does sound techy, it basically boils down to learning how to communicate. The field involves conversing not just through words but also visuals. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. You are expected to have an all round personality; employers want someone who can do it all.

The trick is to find the fine balance between being the norm and being the genius.  So, what will you conjure up in your next degree?

Reference Articles:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/education/edlife/universities-offer-courses-in-a-hot-new-field-data-science.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

As everyone tries to keep up with the pace of technology it's often easy to lose sight of what the actual cost has been for making our interconnectedness more convenient.

Fortunately the Eletronic Frontier Foundation is watching out for our interests as government bodies and corporations continue to want more access to data about every aspect of our lives for analytic and predictive purposes that are not always blatantly transparent, that can be fuzzy about how they impact our constitutional rights, and sometimes can be quite creepy and not in our best interests at all.

Take a look at this video from Ira "Gus" Hunt from the CIA, particularly at the 20:00 mark where he makes the case for collecting EVERYTHING and holding on to it forever:

Or how about how the following glossy video highlights the "awesomeness" of a company like Palantir partnering with LAPD to predict crime, Minority Report style:

Scared yet? There's more as more and more surveillance heads this way:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/fftransparent.html

So who's watching the watchers? The importance of this is highlighted in the following article:

http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2008/03/securitymatters_0306

and see how that's going in NY here:

http://www.salon.com/2013/04/02/big_brother_is_a_big_hypocrite/

Beside recommending openwatch.net to keep up to date and contribute to efforts to watch the watchers, Eva Galperin from the Electronic Frontier Foundation spoke via Skype at a recent Big Data survey course at The New School in NYC about these issues, the main takeaway being that there's a lot of data being collected, and wanting to be collected, from companies and government bodies and we have to ensure this doesn't infringe upon our constitutional rights. The scariest fact Eva conveyed was that methods people use to maintain anonymity online become useless when big data can be used to identify people simply by the way (i.e. their signature behaviors) they use the internet and interact with the world (it's surprising how much behavioral data can be gleaned even from a cell phone that has been switched off). Indirect identification from context analysis of big data can thus take over when direct, more explicit, identification criteria dead ends. And that's something we need to be wary of, which the EFF is working hard to do.

You can support EFF in their efforts at

https://www.eff.org/action

or contact Eva at @evacide if you have questions.

In the meanwhile here are a few things you can do to reduce the efficacy of questionable pervasive surveillance and analysis of your online data:

Analyse your own browser configuration to see how unique you are presenting yourself when you surf online:

https://panopticlick.eff.org/

and encrypt your communications from end to end with tools such as:

https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere

and

http://gpg4usb.cpunk.de/

to reduce the effectiveness of ubiquitous surveillance methods.

You can also look into articles like the following for more tips:

http://www.slashgeek.net/2012/06/15/how-to-be-completely-anonymous-online/

Ultimately a lot of us have exchanged a cost to our privacy in exchange for convenience in the use of services on the internet. But while many of us don't worry too much about this cost, companies don't exactly make it easy or transparent what those costs are for us to truly make informed decisions. Not many people read the terms and conditions of the websites we access, often because we don't have the time, and because they are often written in language that can be obfuscatory. Fortunately initiatives like

https://www.eff.org/pages/when-government-comes-knocking-who-has-your-back

help keep track of who's doing the most to be on the side of consumers in the Big Data maelstrom and sites like

http://www.tosback.org/timeline.php

keep track of changes in ToS so you can be more aware of changes in corporate policies that you might not always hear about and probably need to be informed about.

Technological progress and globalisation have profoundly changed the way our data is collected, accessed and used. The European Commission has proposed a comprehensive reform of the EU’s 1995 data protection rules to strengthen online privacy rights and boost Europe’s digital economy. Leading ICT journalist, Jennifer Baker, talks to European Parliament rapporteur on the General Data Protection Regulation, Jan Philipp Albrecht MEP (Greens).

Our friends at DataKind are hosting a Meetup tonight that we are incredibly excited about (and on our way over to right after we attend the opening of The Public Private). We'll be tweeting and posting photos, so more after the jump. See details below from the DataKind meetup site. (Both Data Kind and UN Global Pulse will be guest speakers this Spring at our Big Data survey course at The New School).  

The United Nations Global Pulse... is an innovation initiative within the UN that is tasked with using real-time analytics and data science to understand human well-being, track emergent threats, and better prepare the world for shocks.  Anoush Tatevossian will tell us about the ways this socially conscious skunkworks is scraping, munging, and sifting through the globe's data to make the world a better place from right here in New York.

Tonight, BDS will be attending the highly anticipated exhibition The Public Private, the first New York exhibition of contemporary art to explore the impact of social media and the new technologies on the relationship between the public and private realm. Curated by Christian Paul, an Associate Professor in the School of Media Studies at The New School and Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Kellen Gallery, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, 2 West 13th Street (free

More after the jump.

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'BIG DATA' - An Etymology

Check out Steve Lohr's great piece in the NYT, The Origins of 'Big Data': An Etymological Detective Story.

Words and phrases are fundamental building blocks of language and culture, much as genes and cells are to the biology of life. And words are how we express ideas, so tracing their origin, development and spread is not merely an academic pursuit but a window into a society’s intellectual evolution.

Digital technology is changing both how words and ideas are created and proliferate, and how they are studied. Just last month, for example, the Library of Congress said its archive of public Twitter messages has reached 170 billion tweets and rising, by about 500 million tweets a day.

The Library of Congress archive, resulting from a deal struck with Twitter in 2010, is not yet open to researchers. But the plan is that it soon will be. In a white paper, the Library said that social media promises to be a rich resource that provides “a fuller picture of today’s cultural norms, dialogue, trends and events to inform scholarship, the legislative process, new works of authorship, education and other purposes.”

Listen to On The Media's fantastic Podcast: On Privacy

OUR BIG DATA COURSE AT THE NEW SCHOOL IS A GO!!!!

It was the bold title of a conference this month at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and of a widely read article in The Harvard Business Review last October: “Big Data: The Management Revolution.”

21 Heroes of Data Visualization