Data Science Weekly Newsletter

Issue

176

April 6, 2017

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Editor's Picks

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'Reverse Prisma' AI turns Monet paintings into photos
Impressionist art is more about feelings than realism, but have you ever wondered what Monet actually saw when he created pieces like Low Tide at Varengeville (above)? Thanks to researchers from UC Berkeley, you don't need to go to Normandy and wait for the perfect light. Using "image style transfer" they converted his impressionist paintings into a more realistic photo style...

DeepMind Solves AGI, Summons Demon
This morning, a group of research scientists at Google DeepMind announced that they had inadvertently solved the riddle of artificial general intelligence (AGI). Their approach relies upon a beguilingly simple technique called symmetrically toroidal asynchronous bisecting convolutions. By the year’s end, Alphabet executives expect that these neural networks will exhibit fully autonomous self-improvement. What comes next may affect us all...

Analyzing Scrabble Games
Learnings from watching and analyzing robots play scrabble...

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Turn your data into a beautiful interactive map

With SimpleMaps, customizing a map is as easy as filling out a spreadsheet. Tell your story with our zoomable, responsive, mobile-friendly maps. Technical users can extend our maps with JavaScript and SVG editors. See examples and learn more at SimpleMaps.com
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Catching Lottery Cheats with Data Science
Recently I came across the paper “Statistics and the Ontario Lottery Retailer Scandal” written by Dr Jeffrey S. Rosenthal on a statistical study he carried out that uncovered a lottery fraud perpetrated by the clerks of retailer shops selling the lottery tickets at the expense of their clients...

Prediction Training
Taking a cue from ML Twitch employees train to predict the future by predicting key outcomes from the past. 97% of Twitch staff recommend the training that inspired these exercises. See if you can predict key statistics about Silicon Valley, while you deliberately practice forecasting the future for the first time...

Nesterov's Punctuated Equilibrium
Following the remarkable success of AlphaGo, there has been a groundswell of interest in reinforcement learning for games, robotics, parameter tuning, and even computer networking. In a landmark new paper by Salimans, Ho, Chen, and Sutskever from OpenAI, the authors show that a particular class of genetic algorithms (called Evolutionary Strategies) gives excellent performance on a variety of reinforcement learning benchmarks...

Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs
Our method enables very stable GAN training: for the first time, we can train a wide variety of GAN architectures with almost no hyperparameter tuning, including 101-layer ResNets and language models over discrete data...

Spam detection in the physical world
We’ve created the world’s first Spam-detecting AI trained entirely in simulation and deployed on a physical robot...

Will AI-Powered Hedge Funds Outsmart the Market?
Some hedge funds boast that AI algorithms make their trading decisions—but these systems might be more conventional than they seem...

One-Shot Imitation Learning
Imitation learning has been commonly applied to solve different tasks in isolation. This usually requires either careful feature engineering, or a significant number of samples. This is far from what we desire: ideally, robots should be able to learn from very few demonstrations of any given task, and instantly generalize to new situations of the same task, without requiring task-specific engineering. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning framework for achieving such capability, which we call one-shot imitation learning...

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Senior Data Analyst - VSCO - Oakland, CA
VSCO is a leading creative platform with a monthly audience of over 45 million and growing.
We are looking for a Senior Data Analyst to build data at VSCO from the ground up. You will design our data model for user behavior and content impression, and will mine the data to find insights that will influence the product roadmap. Expect to get your hands dirty with Redshift, Spark, and data visualization tools under the guidance of our Director of Data Science...

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deepcolor
Utilize the power of mathematical magic to automatically color a sketch or lineart...

The Best Resources for Learning D3.js
If you are serious about becoming an expert in data visualization, there is one tool that has become increasingly popular over the past few years, and is essential to your repertoire...

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Linear Algebra and Its Applications
"One of the best college textbooks ever! If I needed to miss a lecture, the book taught me everything I needed to know. I had no linear algebra background beforehand, and the book was very clear and easy to understand. Awesome for independent study."...

For a detailed list of books covering Data Science, Machine Learning, AI and associated programming languages check out our resources page...

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