New data analysis competitions
- The Nature Conservancy Fisheries Monitoring, with up to $150,000 in prizes. Heavy image processing abilities needed.
How-to
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Benford's Law, everything (or almost everything) you always wanted to know.
Privacy
The FBI is using a Twitter tool called Dataminr to track criminals and terrorist groups, according to documents spotted by The Verge. In a contract document, the agency says Dataminr's Advanced Alerting Tool allows it "to search the complete Twitter firehose, in near real-time, using customizable filters." However, the practice seems to violate Twitter's developer agreement, which prohibits the use of its data feed for surveillance or spying purposes.
Tech
Not everyone can go out and grab thirty AI-happy astrophysicists. And if you can't do that, the talent pool becomes very small very quickly, since these machine learning techniques are so new and so different from standard software development. Even the big players talk about the tiny talent pool: Microsoft research chief Peter Lee says the cost of acquiring a top AI researcher is comparable to the cost of acquiring an NFL quarterback.
[...] Google has rolled out AI Experiments, an online collection of tools and games designed to help you understand the inner workings of machine learning.
Take the game, Quick, Draw! It works like Pictionary; the game gives you 20 seconds to draw an object on screen, and Google shouts out guesses as the time ticks down. And Google is good. It asked me to draw camouflage, a microwave, a hexagon, an umbrella, a baseball, and a crocodile, and the neural net guessed correctly every time.