Welcome to “This Week in Data”. My goal is to bring focus on broader data trends to data professionals and enthusiasts who are interested in data and its applications. Thank you for subscribing, and I would love any feedback to make this newsletter work better for you.
The battle for the soul of AI continues, with a few conflicts that make it look like AI Ethics is going to become a real war zone in the coming years. Reading Twitter, ML subreddits, ML journalism, and other sources help see where the battle lines are forming, which arguments are happening, and which organizations sit on which side.
A University of Washington AI Researcher has gone out guns blazing against ethics reviews in AI research papers in NeurIPS. This led to a number of twitter spats and a denounciation from the university itself. The articles always sanitize the bigotry of the tweets, so feel free to take a look at the source material.
Congress has gotten involved in the Timnit Gebru / Google saga, as MIT Tech Review reports that nine members of congress have sent a letter to Google clarifying the departure, led by Rep. Yvette Clark and Sen. Ron Wyden. There has been additional articles and interviews as the fallout continues.
The Trevor Project does a guest piece on TechCrunch about how they apply intersectional framework for their AI-driven efforts in suicide prevention and crisis intervention for LGBTQ youth. The article talks about why intersectionality matters, data challenges, and other adjustments.
World Economic Forum puts out some research on how different societies view the impact of AI in society. It also shows breakdowns on gender, age and education (tldr: young, educated males show the highest +∆ on believing AI is a net good for society)
Small Bytes
Airflow 2.0 is out. The new release features several key changes such as a TaskFlow API, HA-compatible scheduler, Task Groups (to replace SubDAGs), and new REST API.
Amazon releases HealthLake, a data warehouse for healthcare organizations to aggregate their information.
Sony AI unveils the Gastronomy Flagship Project, which is an AI powered app for recipes and robot that can help chefs with cooking.
The Marshall Project reports on COVID in prisons. They've identified that 1 in 5 prisoners across the US have been infected, with some states at over 50%.
AWS launches Grafana, Prometheus as managed services. Amazon has gotten in hot water fo co-opting open source into their own ecosystem without giving back, and are trying a different licensing model.
Datakin releases OpenLineage, an effort to create a lineage standard for the myriad of tools that are out there today.
Industry and Fundraising
iDriverPlus - $14.6M for autonomous street cleaners and cars
CoachHub - $30M for AI-driven analytics for business coaching
RingCentral acquires DeepAffects for its conversational AI capabilities.
“This Week in Data” is a weekly newsletter to help you stay up to date with developments in the data ecosystem. My goal is to bring focus on broader data trends to data professionals and enthusiasts who are interested in data and its applications. Topics include infrastructure, AI/ML, experimentation, analytics/BI, privacy, security.
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