New data analysis competitions
- One of these Halloween things: Spooky Author Identification. Identify horror authors by their writings. Up to $25,000 in prizes.
Privacy
- I'm probably late to this, but I've just discovered Firefox Focus, a browser always in private mode with ad and track blockers (hat tip to Chiens de garde).
Tech
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Tech Giants Are Paying Huge Salaries for Scarce A.I. Talent.
Typical A.I. specialists, including both Ph.D.s fresh out of school and people with less education and just a few years of experience, can be paid from $300,000 to $500,000 a year or more in salary and company stock, according to nine people who work for major tech companies or have entertained job offers from them. All of them requested anonymity because they did not want to damage their professional prospects.
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Measuring Racial Segregation in Urban Consumption Using Online Activity.
In recent research, we use business reviews posted by users of the website Yelp to study consumption segregation in New York City restaurants (Davis et al. 2017). While users of the website are not a representative sample of the population, their online activity provides rich details of their consumption patterns that are not available in other data sources. This allows us to describe how restaurant consumption depends on the characteristics of individuals, restaurants, and neighbourhoods and use our estimates to compute measures of consumption segregation. We find that restaurant consumption is considerably less segregated along racial and ethnic lines in New York City than residences are. As the body of digital exhaust grows, researchers will be able to measure segregation in other cities and other dimensions of economic life.
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Machine learning used to predict earthquakes in a lab setting.
A group of researchers from the UK and the US have used machine learning techniques to successfully predict earthquakes. Although their work was performed in a laboratory setting, the experiment closely mimics real-life conditions, and the results could be used to predict the timing of a real earthquake.
Visualizations
Data Links is a periodic blog post published on Sundays (specific time may vary) which contains interesting links about data science, machine learning and related topics. You can subscribe to it using the general blog RSS feed or this one, which only contains these articles, if you are not interested in other things I might publish.
Have you read an article you liked and would you like to suggest it for the next issue? Just contact me!