Issue #15: Technology Adoption, Bias in Speech, Fizz Buzz

Subscribe • Previous Issues

This edition has 710 words which will take you about 4 minutes to read.

“Most people who have the data are in power. And most people who are powerless do not have data.” – Cathy O’Neil

Data Exchange podcast

[Image: The Golden Spiral by IPBri]
 

Machine Learning tools and infrastructure

 

Virtual Conferences

  • NLP Summit  The preliminary program is out! Featured speakers include Clément Delangue (CEO at Hugging Face), Piero Molino (creator of Ludwig), Dirk Groeneveld (of AllenNLP), Joel Grus, Kira Radinsky, Amy Heineike and more. Paco Nathan will give a keynote on the results of our NLP Industry Survey. Marco Túllio Ribeiro (of Microsoft Research) will give a talk on a recent project which won a Best Paper Award at ACL 2020.
  • Applications of RL to business process simulation, automation, and optimization   A great overview by Max Pumperla, engineer at Pathmind and maintainer of Hyperopt.
  • Comprehensive Review of Deep Reinforcement Learning Methods and Applications in Economics   This 2020 survey paper lists an amazing number of use cases in stock pricing and investing, insurance, auctions, banking and online markets, macroeconomics, and financial risk management. The upcoming Ray Summit (a free, virtual conference) has numerous sessions from financial services companies, including a keynote by Manuela Veloso (Head of J.P. Morgan AI Research). Manuela will describe how they use RL in electronic trading models.

 

Work and Hiring

[Image: Chocolate Hills from Wikimedia]
 

Recommendations

  • A Thousand Cuts   This brilliant new documentary about social media disinformation centers around events in the Philippines and attacks against award winning journalist Maria Ressa and her team at Rappler. [Bonus: Official theme song by Ruby Ibarra]
  • Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World   A timely book in the era of increasingly sophisticated disinformation and gaslighting. As the authors describe it “New-school bullshit uses the language of math and science and statistics to create the impression of rigor and accuracy”. This is a must-read for those who have to attend meetings at large organizations.
  • Question → NLP → SQL  Previous Natural Language database query tools only seem to work well during demos. Hopefully this GPT-3 based demo is the start of something better.
  • Bias in machine learning … speech recognition edition   A new PNAS paper analyzed five state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition models (from Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM, and Microsoft) and found all of them exhibited substantial racial disparities.
  • Most popular YouTuber in each country   A set of graphics that list top YouTube personalities and estimates their annual take (millions of dollars each year for the most popular personalities).

Subscribe to our newsletter, our YouTube channel, and to the Data Exchange podcast.

%d