April Newsletter

Posted bypiersstobbsPosted inUncategorized

Hi everyone-

The news from Ukraine is truly devastating and brings a huge dose of perspective to our day to day lives in the UK. I know I for one care rather less about fixing my python package dependencies when I see the shocking scenes from Mariupol… However, those of us more distant from the war do at least have the option to think about other things, and hopefully the data science reading materials below might distract a little…

Following is the April edition of our Royal Statistical Society Data Science and AI Section newsletter. Hopefully some interesting topics and titbits to feed your data science curiosity. Check out our new ‘Jobs!’ section… an extra incentive to read to the end!

As always- any and all feedback most welcome! If you like these, do please send on to your friends- we are looking to build a strong community of data science practitioners. And if you are not signed up to receive these automatically you can do so here.

Industrial Strength Data Science April 2022 Newsletter

RSS Data Science Section

Committee Activities

We have all been shocked and saddened by events in the Ukraine and our thoughts and best wishes go out to everyone affected

The committee is busy planning out our activities for the year with lots of exciting events and even hopefully some in-person socialising… Watch this space for upcoming announcements.

Louisa Nolan (Chief Data Scientist, Data Science Campus, ONS) is helping drive the Government Data Science Festival 2022, a virtual event running from 27 April to 11 May 2022. This exciting event is a space for the government and UK public sector data science community, and colleagues in the academic sector, to come together to learn, discover, share and connect. This year’s theme is: The Future of Data Science for Public Good. Register here!

Anyone interested in presenting their latest developments and research at the Royal Statistical Society Conference? The organisers of this year’s event – which will take place in Aberdeen from 12-15 September – are calling for submissions for 20-minute and rapid-fire 5-minute talks to include on the programme.  Submissions are welcome on any topic related to data science and statistics.  Full details can be found here. The deadline for submissions is 5 April.

Janet Bastiman (Chief Data Scientist at NapierAI) recorded a podcast with Moodys on “AI and transparent boxes”, looking at the use of AI in detecting financial crime and explainability- will post the link once it is published.

Giles Pavey (Global Director Data Science at Unilever) was interviewed for the Data Storytellers podcast about his career in data science – check it out here.

Martin Goodson (CEO and Chief Scientist at Evolution AI) continues to run the excellent London Machine Learning meetup and is very active with events. The next event is on April 13th when Martha White, (Associate Professor of Computing Science at the University of Alberta), discusses her research on “Advances in Value Estimation in Reinforcement Learning“. Videos are posted on the meetup youtube channel – and future events will be posted here.

As we highlight in the Members and Contributors section, Martin was interviewed by the American Statistical Association (ASA) about Practical Data Science & The UK’s AI Roadmap

This Month in Data Science

Lots of exciting data science going on, as always!

Ethics and more ethics…
Bias, ethics and diversity continue to be hot topics in data science…

"The notion of a killer robot—where you have artificial intelligence fused with weapons—that technology is here, and it's being used,” says Zachary Kallenborn, a research affiliate with the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START).
That short-lived saga could be the first weaponized use of deepfakes during an armed conflict, although it is unclear who created and distributed the video and with what motive. The way the fakery unraveled so quickly shows how malicious deepfakes can be defeated—at least when conditions are right.

Not all people targeted by deepfakes will be able to react as nimbly as Zelensky—or find their repudiation so widely trusted. “Ukraine was well positioned to do this,” Gregory says. “This is very different from other cases, where even a poorly made deepfake can create uncertainty about authenticity.”
While debates are heating up on AI campaigning, the National Election Commission (NEC) is yet to determine whether it is legitimate or not. "It is difficult to make a finding on whether it is against the laws governing campaigning or not because it is uncertain how the technologies will be used in the campaign," an NEC official said.
Just as clickable icons have replaced obscure programming commands on home computers, new no-code platforms replace programming languages with simple and familiar web interfaces. And a wave of start-ups is bringing the power of A.I. to nontechnical people in visual, textual and audio domains.

… there are also obvious downsides, with the increased risk of miss-application a key one…

“If you’re using low-code, no-code, you don’t really have a good sense of the quality of the ingredients coming in, and you don’t have a sense of the quality of the output either,” he said. While low- and no-code software have value for use in training or experimentation, “I just wouldn’t apply it in subject areas where the accuracy is paramount”.
Surprisingly, we find that anger travels easily along weaker ties than joy, meaning that it can infiltrate different communities and break free of local traps because strangers share such content more often
When AI gets attention for recovering lost works of art, it makes the technology sound a lot less scary than when it garners headlines for creating deep fakes that falsify politicians’ speech or for using facial recognition for authoritarian surveillance.

Developments in Data Science…
As always, lots of new developments on the research front and plenty of arXiv papers to read… 

"I have rarely been as enthusiastic about a new research direction. We call them GFlowNets, for Generative Flow Networks. They live somewhere at the intersection of reinforcement learning, deep generative models and energy-based probabilistic modelling"
"µP provides an impressive step toward removing some of the black magic from scaling up neural networks. It also provides a theoretically backed explanation of some tricks used by past work, like the T5 model. I believe both practitioners and researchers alike will find this work valuable."
  • Ai Explainability continues to be a hot research topic. Most widely used approaches attempt to ‘explain’ a given AI output by approximating the local decision criteria. ‘CX-TOM‘ looks to be an interesting new approach in which it “generates sequence of explanations in a dialog by mediating the differences between the minds of machine and human user”
  • Speaking of ‘minds’ … useful summary of recent Neuroscience/ML research
Reading and being aware of the evolution and new insights in neuroscience not only will allow you to be a better “Artificial Intelligence” guy 😎, but also a finer neural network architectures creator 👩‍💻!
  • Comprehending images and videos is something we all take for granted as humans. However it is an incredible complex task for AI systems, and although we have got a lot better in recent years, even the best systems can still be easily led astray. So research continues, particularly in understanding actions and processes:
  • Even with the breakthroughs of GPT-3 and other large language models, comprehension and trust (almost “common sense”) are still huge challenges in natural language processing as well. Researchers at DeepMind have released GopherCite which adds a bit more “sense” to the responses given to factual questions (great quote below… emphasis mine!) 
“Recent large language models often answer factual questions correctly. But users can't trust any given claim a model makes without fact-checking, because language models can hallucinate convincing nonsense. In this work we use reinforcement learning from human preferences (RLHP) to train "open-book" QA models that generate answers whilst also citing specific evidence for their claims, which aids in the appraisal of correctness"
The standard model for sequential decision-making under uncertainty is the Markov decision process (MDP). It assumes that actions are under control of the agent, whereas outcomes produced by the environment are random ... This, famously, leads to deterministic policies which are brittle — they “put all eggs in one basket”. If we use such a policy in a situation where the transition dynamics or the rewards are different from the training environment, it will often generalise poorly.

We want to train a policy that works well, even in the worst-case given our uncertainty. To achieve this, we model the environment to not be simply random, but being (partly) controlled by an adversary that tries to anticipate our agent’s behaviour and pick the worst-case outcomes accordingly.
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is perhaps the most popular optimization algorithm for deep neural networks. Due to the non-convex nature of the deep neural network’s optimization landscape, different runs of SGD will find different solutions. As a result, if the solutions are not perfect, they will disagree with each other on some of the unseen data. This disagreement can be harnessed to estimate generalization error without labels:

1) Given a model, run SGD with the same hyperparameters but different random seeds on the training data to get two different solutions.
2) Measure how often the networks’ predictions disagree on a new unlabeled test dataset.

Real world applications of Data Science
Lots of practical examples making a difference in the real world this month!

This analysis showed that different parts of the brain work together in surprising ways that differ from current neuroscientific wisdom. In particular, the study calls into question our current understanding of how brains process emotion
“Some operators have more robust responsible gambling programs than others,” says Lia Nower, director of the Center for Gambling Studies at Rutgers University. “But in the end there is a profit motive and I have yet to see an operator in the U.S. put the same amount of money and effort into developing a system for identifying and assisting at-risk players as they do developing A.I. technologies for marketing or extending credit to encourage players to return.”
  • Nowcasting is useful concept in the modern world – how can make the most of whatever information is currently available to understand the state of the world now or in the near future. Good progress in near-time precipitation forecasting. (“Alexa, should I bring an umbrella?” … “I don’t know, let me check my DGMR PySteps model”…)
Instead of relying on expert opinion, the computer scientists used a mathematical approach known as stylometry. Practitioners say they have replaced the art of the older studies with a new form of science, yielding results that are measurable, consistent and replicable.
"I too was pretty skeptical of Copilot when I started using it last summer.
However it is shockingly good for filling out Python snippets - ie smarter autocomplete when teaching.

Popular libraries like Pandas, Beautiful Soup, Flask are perfect for this.

About 80% time it will fill out the code exactly they way I would want. About 10% time it will be something you want to correct or nudge.

Then about 10% of time it will be a howler or anti-pattern."

How does that work?
A new section on understanding different approaches and techniques

I still struggle with the basic 4 dimensions of our physical world. When I first heard about 768-dimension embeddings, I feared my brain would escape from my ear. If you can relate, if you want to truly master the tricky subject of NLP encoding, this article is for you.
Surprisingly few software engineers and scientists seem to know about it, and that makes me sad because it is such a general and powerful tool for combining information in the presence of uncertainty. At times its ability to extract accurate information seems almost magical— and if it sounds like I’m talking this up too much, then take a look at this previously posted video where I demonstrate a Kalman filter figuring out the orientation of a free-floating body by looking at its velocity. Totally neat!
  • One thing we all do on a regular basis is load up some data and then try and get a feel for it- how big, how many dimensions, what are the characteristics of and relationships between the dimensions etc etc. I normally just plug away in pandas, but there are now various elegant ‘profiling’ packages that do a lot of the work for you, well worth exploring:
  • Airflow is a great open source tool for scheduling and orchestration, well worth getting to know – an introduction here
  • Useful lower level background on Deep Learning – understanding where to focus and what to focus on- from Horace He
  • If you are investigating Deep Learning, it is increasingly likely you will be using PyTorch. This looks like a very useful add on for recommenders (TorchRec), and this ‘NN template‘ could be useful in setting up your PyTorch projects.
  • This is very elegant – a visual introduction to machine learning
  • Finally, an excellent review of ML Competitions over the last year across Kaggle and other platforms from newsletter subscribers Harald Carlens and Eniola Olaleye (shorter version here) – lots of great insight into the libraries and approaches used.

Practical tips
How to drive analytics and ML into production

“In many industries where giant data sets simply don’t exist, I think the focus has to shift from big data to good data. Having 50 thoughtfully engineered examples can be sufficient to explain to the neural network what you want it to learn.”
  • How should you structure your data team? One role that is often overlooked is the data product manager – good discussion on why this role is so important
  • Ok… so you have your team setup, how should you run it? What principals should you adhere to? Great suggestions here (“0/1/Done Strategy”) from newsletter subscriber Marios Perrakis
  • When you have models, pipelines and decision tools in production, being used across the organisation, you need to know they are working… or at least know when something has gone wrong. That is where ‘observability’ comes in – incredibly useful if you can get it right.
  • Part of observability is understanding why something has changed. This is well worth a read- are there ways you can automatically explain changes in aggregations through ‘data-diff algorithms‘?
  • How Netflix built their ‘trillions scale’ real time data platform
  • We talk about MLOps on a reasonably regular basis – how best to implement, manage and monitor your machine learning models in production. Still struggling to figure out the right approach? You are definitely no the only one – “MLOps is a mess“
MLOps is in a wild state today with the tooling landscape offering more rare breeds than an Amazonian rainforest.

To give an example, most practitioners would agree that monitoring your machine learning models in production is a crucial part of maintaining a robust, performant architecture.

However when you get around to picking a provider I can name 6 different options without even trying: Fiddler, Arize, Evidently, Whylabs, Gantry, Arthur, etc. And we haven’t even mentioned the pure data monitoring tools.

Bigger picture ideas
Longer thought provoking reads – musing from some of the ‘OGs’ this month! – lean back and pour a drink!

"Comprehension is a poorly-defined term, like many terms that frequently show up in discussions of artificial intelligence: intelligence, consciousness, personhood. Engineers and scientists tend to be uncomfortable with poorly-defined, ambiguous terms. Humanists are not.  My first suggestion is that  these terms are important precisely because they’re poorly defined, and that precise definitions (like the operational definition with which I started) neuters them, makes them useless. And that’s perhaps where we should start a better definition of comprehension: as the ability to respond to a text or utterance."
"To think that we can simply abandon symbol-manipulation is to suspend disbelief. "
But the most important trend I want to comment on is that the whole setting of training a neural network from scratch on some target task (like digit recognition) is quickly becoming outdated due to finetuning, especially with the emergence of foundation models like GPT. These foundation models are trained by only a few institutions with substantial computing resources, and most applications are achieved via lightweight finetuning of part of the network, prompt engineering, or an optional step of data or model distillation into smaller, special-purpose inference networks
To summarise: suppose you have an unfair coin that lands on heads 3 times out of 4. If you toss this coin 16 times, you would expect to see 12 heads (H) and 4 tails (T) on average. Of course you wouldn’t expect to see exactly 12 heads and 4 tails every time: there’s a pretty good chance you’d see 13 heads and 3 tails, or 11 heads and 5 tails. Seeing 16 heads and no tails would be quite surprising, but it’s not implausible: in fact, it will happen about 1% of the time. Seeing all tails seems like it would be a miracle. Nevertheless, each coin toss is independent, so even this has a non-zero probability of being observed.

If we do not ignore the order, and ask which sequence is the most likely, the answer is ‘all heads’. That may seem surprising at first, because seeing only heads is a relatively rare occurrence. But note that we’re asking a different question here, about the ordered sequences themselves, rather than about their statistics

Fun Practical Projects and Learning Opportunities
A few fun practical projects and topics to keep you occupied/distracted:

"3. Treat research hypotheses like impressionist paintings

The big picture looks coherent but the details wash out when scrutinized. Use vague sciency sounding concepts that can mean anything. 

Don't show it to the statistician until the end of the study. its best as a surprise"

Covid Corner

Apparently Covid is over – certainly there are very limited restrictions in the UK now

  • However, no-one told the virus. The latest results from the ONS tracking study estimate 1 in 16 people (over 6%) in England have Covid. It’s worse in Scotland where the figure is 1 in 11. This is as bad as it has ever been in the whole 2+ years of the pandemic and a far cry from the 1 in 1000 we had last summer. Bear in mind in the chart below that the levels we had in February 2021 were enough to drive a national lockdown …

Updates from Members and Contributors

Jobs!

A new section highlighting relevant job openings across the Data Science and AI community (let us know if you have anything you’d like to post here…)

  • Holisticai, a startup focused on providing insight, assessment and mitigation of AI risk, has a number of relevant AI related job openings- see here for more details
  • EvolutionAI, are looking for a machine learning research engineer to develop their award winning AI-powered data extraction platform, putting state of the art deep learning technology into production use. Strong background in machine learning and statistics required
  • AstraZeneca are looking for a Data Science and AI Engagement lead – more details here
  • Lloyds Register are looking for a data analyst to work across the Foundation with a broad range of safety data to inform the future direction of challenge areas and provide society with evidence-based information.
  • Cazoo is looking for a number of senior data engineers – great modern stack and really interesting projects!

Again, hope you found this useful. Please do send on to your friends- we are looking to build a strong community of data science practitioners- and sign up for future updates here.

– Piers

The views expressed are our own and do not necessarily represent those of the RSS

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: