In this 20 August edition, a wealth of data analysis papers, with many highly informative graphs. A call for China to better balance recognition for its junior scientists, another call for (US?) universities to treat bullying complaints in-depth rather than as a public relation exercise. The “compulsory” current status of the Trump 2.0 wreckage of US science with the Senate blocking the appointment of politicians for grant reviews. And with the absurd, ungrounded, health threatening split of the MMR vaccine. 
Another “compulsory” entry on climate change with a scary graph on the ocean surface temperatures rising way way above the confidence band represented by the previous measurements over 50 years. An interview (why?) of a CEO of the startup QED Science that claims an ability to automatically rank preprints and select the top 1% (why?!). Coïnciding with me receiving an email with a review by Claude of our Bayesian Adversarial Privacy paper! A report on the (defunct Starmer) UK Government cutting on fundamental physics projects. An article featuring the predicted rise in the use of exoskeletons, which I read on my way back from the lodge on Mount Fudji that was renting an exoskeleton to help with the climb! With an optimistic view on the consequences on people’s health and muscles. A short book review on Slobodian’s and Tarnoff’s Muskism, concluding that Musk(ism) lacks a coherent philosophy. (A Musk-read according to the Economist!) A long comment on the sleepless summer of the heatwaves, which led me clearly more tired than usual at the end of the summer break. (With a lot of should. And a focus on methodology.) Another one on the Middle East prospects as a sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) hub, which sounds paradoxical in the current geopolitic situation. It made me wonder how sustainable are these SAFs? True, they recycle oils, gases and biomass, rather than extracting “new” oils, but they still pollute the air. And, true, they can fill empty returning tankers, but they divert investment and research from more renewable and less polluting alternatives. Among the actual scientific articles, a long review on the safety and security of LLMs in healthcare (but useless pictures). 
One on the massive floods that occurred in Europe in 1342-1343, possibly caused by volcanic eruptions plus Arctic sea ice retreat, nothing that could occur today of course! With massive socio-economic consequences. (And a great graph, except I do not see the point for the 2D projections. Or for modern state borders.) 
An analysis of intergenerational mobility in Europe with the unsurprising conclusion that it impacts innovation. (Go, Erasmus!) With a multivariate regression I did not investigate (using NUTS but not Andrew’s NUTS!). And graphs of intergenerational mobility per European country, with too many colours to be readable (and the regression line to make sense?). Another data analysis of the Pakistan Genome Resource, with distinctive traits of the many ethnicities of Pakistan. And the discovery of many clinically relevant genes (with a massive avalanche of p-values!).
Archive for data analysis
max spacing between mass shootings [data graphics]
Posted in Books, R, Statistics with tags beta distribution, data analysis, data graphics, data journalism, Le Monde, Maine, mass shooting, maximum spacing, US politics, USA on January 11, 2024 by xi'an
Congrats, Dr. Robert!
Posted in Books, Kids, Travel, University life with tags Antilles, data analysis, disphagia, Fort-de-France, French West Indes, Hyppocrates, Martinique, medical doctor, medical intern, myopathy, thesis defence, Union régionale des médecins libéraux, Université des Antilles, URML on October 31, 2023 by xi'an
Contextual Integrity for Differential Privacy #4 [23w5106]
Posted in Books, Mountains, pictures, Running, Statistics, Travel, University life, Wines with tags 100th birthday, Arrowleaf Cellars, Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation, BIRS, British Columbia, Canada, Canadian wines, contextual integrity, covidtracker, data analysis, differential privacy, ethics, full moon, GDPR, information theory, Kelowna, Lake Okanagan, large language models, natural language processing, Okanagan Valley, Okanagan vineyards, philosophy of sciences, replicability, synthetic data, UBCO, winery, workshop on August 5, 2023 by xi'an
Mostly short talks. First talk by Thomas Seinke (Google) on interpreting ε, with a side wondering of mine on the relation between exp(ε) and the uncertainty that comes with Monte Carlo outcome. Which may relate to this 2022 paper by Ruobin Gong. Second talk by Gautam Kamath (U Waterloo) on large language models under privacy with “public” data. Questioning the appropriateness of ML benchmarks in terms of privacy. Third talk by Mark Bun (Boston U) on replicability, privacy and adaptive generalisation in machine learning, with a strange criticism of confidence intervals on the same parameter not intersecting for two independent studies. And proposing high probability replicable algorithms that can be put in duality with differentially private algorithms at the cost of lowering precision and effective sample size. We also had another group discussion on how to reach out about privacy guarantees, which made me realise there were GDPR compliance software available.
In the afternoon session, Shlomi Hod (Boston U) presented a practical case of designing a privacy preserving protocol for the Israeli birth record. With a strong opposition from stakeholders to use synthetic data, due to a semantic drift from synthetic to manipulated to fake, to lying. Wanrong Zhang did not talk about her stunning recent ICML paper but instead of another practical case connected with mobile based Covid case predictions, by adding minimal noise to mobility data. Nidhi Hegde (U Alberta) gave up talking on Thomson sampling with privacy protection, to focus on an ongoing health application for Alberta as more suited for the workshop. And Ria Safavi-Naini (U Calgary) drew a parallel between information theory and DP versus CI.
While the workshop was scheduled till Friday noon, in usual BIRS habits (!), the morning session was cancelled for most people leaving Kelowna in the morning.
Contextual Integrity for Differential Privacy #3 [23w5106]
Posted in Books, Mountains, pictures, Running, Statistics, Travel, University life, Wines with tags Arrowleaf Cellars, Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation, BIRS, British Columbia, Canada, Canadian wines, causal inference, contextual integrity, data analysis, differential privacy, ERC, ethics, Frind Estate winery, GDPR, George Box, John Maynard Keynes, Kelowna, Lake Okanagan, Maréchal Foch, mass spectrometer, Okanagan Valley, Okanagan vineyards, philosophy of sciences, pinot noir, record linkage, Syrah, UBCO, winery, workshop on August 4, 2023 by xi'anMorning of diverse short talks. First talk by Bei Jiang (Edmonton) on locally processed privacy for quantile estimation, which relates very much to our ongoing research with Stan, who is starting his ERC funded PhD on privacy. Randomised response, in having a positive probability of replacing indicators in the empirical cdf by a random or perturbed version whose bias can be corrected. I may have overdone the similarity though in confusing users with agents. Followed by a hacking foray by Joel Reardon (Calgary) into how much information is transmitted by apps on completely unrelated phone activity. (Moral: Never send a bug report.)
The afternoon break saw us visiting the Frind Estate winery on the other side of the lake. Meaning not only wine tasting (great Syrah!), and discovering an hybrid grape called Maréchal Foch, but also entering the lab with its mass spectrometer. (But no glimpse of the winemaking process per se…)
