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Alternative Data News. 27, May 2020

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Alternative Data News. 27, May 2020

The AltDataNewsletter by CloudQuant

Finding sources and uses for alternative data can be difficult. At CloudQuant we regularly read and search the internet for new sources of data that can be used in our mission to find alpha signals and build quantitative trading strategies. We recognize that we are technology and data junkies so we wrote our own crawler that specifically seeks out web pages, posts, and news articles that give us a snapshot of what is going on in the world of Alt Data. The following is a collection of articles that we think you will find interesting from the past week.


Daily Number of Flights at Top US Airports

From Reddit DataIsBeautiful
Data source: Flightradar24.com
Tools used: Matplotlib.
Exponentially weighted average with a span of 5 days is shown.
The visualization created for City-Data.com

2020-05-22 Read the full story…

CloudQuant Thoughts : A personal favorite for tracking the impact of the Covid-19 on flights is the TSA checkpoint travel numbers.

How to Import Historical Stock Prices Into A Python Script Using the IEX Cloud API

Python is one of the world’s most popular programming languages. Specifically, Python for finance is arguably the world’s most popular language-application pair. This is because of the robust ecosystem of packages and libraries that makes it easy for developers to build robust financial applications. In this tutorial, you will learn how to import historical stock prices from the IEX Cloud API and store them within your script in a pandas DataFrame.

  1. Create an IEX Cloud Account
  2. Import Pandas
  3. Select Your API Endpoint
  4. Ping the Endpoint and Store the Data in a pandas DataFrame
  5. Final Thoughts

2020-05-24 11:01:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.6347, Raw Interest Score: 1.5103,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2014, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

CloudQuant Thoughts : Interesting but nowhere near as easy to use as CloudQuant.

Master Data Becomes Incredible Differentiator For Countless Businesses

Forward-thinking companies realize that the use of master data sets them apart from the competition. Master data management or MDM enables companies to reconcile disparate data sources, helping them avoid duplication of efforts and making company-wide data analysis possible.

Master data services provide companies with new ways to organize their efforts. This differentiation can make companies more competitive in a crowded landscape.

Advantages of Master Data Management

Experienced master data managers like Profisee are able to reconcile company databases and draw out the inf…
2020-05-21 00:04:23+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.3839, Raw Interest Score: 1.2968,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2928, Negative Sentiment 0.1046

CloudQuant Thoughts : MDM (Master Darta Management) has been popping up a lot in recent weeks, definitely a trend to watch

BDQ Big Data Quarterly: Summer 2020 Issue – PDF after registration

editor’s note – Joyce Wells – It All Comes Down to the Data
BIG DATA BRIEFING – Key news on big data product launches, partnerships, and acquisitions from the BDQ and DBTA websites
Insights – Jon Roskill – Avoiding Unscrupulous Data and Business Practices Among Cloud Software Vendors
Insights – Scott Zoldi – Artificial Intelligence Grows Up in 2020
Trending Now – Ethical AI: Q&A With Fractal Analytics’ Suraj Amonkar
Insights – Nikita Ivanov – The In-Memory Computing Landscape in 2020
Insights – Patrick Lastennet – Security Factors to Take into Consideration in a Multi-Cloud World
The Voice of Big Data  – Improving Database Change: Industry Leader Q&A With Datical’s Dion Cornett
8 Feature Article – Joe McKendrick – Reversing the 80/20 Ratio in Data Analytics
Big Data By the Numbers – Infographic: New Requirements Spur Data Quality and Data Integration
Data Science Playbook – Jim Scott – Advancing Data Science for Emergency Management and Public Health Response
Data Directions – Michael Corey & Don Sullivan – Pandemics Happen—AI and Machine Learning Can Provide the Cures
Governing Guidelines – Kimberly Nevala – Stemming Your Data Contagion
The Iot insider – Bart Schouw – IoT and Data Power the Next Generation of Clean Energy

2020-06-15 00:00:00 Read the full story…

Weighted Interest Score: 4.5038, Raw Interest Score: 2.5249,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1530, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

CloudQuant Thoughts : A magazine for Big Data Users! Excellent!

AllegroGraph v7 Powers Distributed Semantic Knowledge Graph

A new press release reports, “Franz Inc., an early innovator in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and leading supplier of Semantic Graph Database technology for Knowledge Graph Solutions, today announced AllegroGraph 7, a breakthrough solution that allows infinite data integration through a patented approach unifying all data and siloed knowledge into an Entity-Event Knowledge Graph solution that can support massive big data analytics. AllegroGraph 7 utilizes unique federated sharding capabilities that drive 360-degree insights and enable complex reasoning across a distributed Knowledge Graph. Hidden connections in data are revealed to AllegroGraph 7 users through a new browser-based version of Gruff, an advanced visualization and graphical query builder.”

2020-05-27 07:15:31+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.4214, Raw Interest Score: 2.1046,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3007, Negative Sentiment 0.1203

Chetwood Financial hires chief data officer, head of people, and chief risk officer

Chetwood Financial has announced the appointment of a new Chief Data Officer, Head of People and Chief Risk Officer.

Jessica Rusu has been appointed as Chief Data Officer and has been brought on board to further Chetwood’s mission of making customers better off with technology. As an established analytics and data leader, Rusu has 20 years of industry experience, most recently heading up Advanced Analytics and Customer Insight teams at eBay.

Sarah Hosker joins as Head…
2020-05-27 09:50:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.0257, Raw Interest Score: 1.5129,
Positive Sentiment: 0.5043, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

Indonesian startup Delman raises $1.6 million to help companies clean up data – TechCrunch

Delman, a Jakarta-based data management startup, has raised $1.6 million in seed funding. The round was led by Intudo Ventures, with participation from Prasetia Dwidharma Ventures and Qlue Performa Indonesia, and will be used to establish a research and development center and hire software engineers and data scientists.

Delman was founded in 2018 by chief executive officer Surya Halim, chief product officer Raymond Christopher and chief technology officer Theo Budiyanto, who were classmates at the University of California, Berkeley. After graduation, they worked at tech companies in Silicon Valley, including Google and Splunk, before deciding to focus on the Indonesian market. Originally launched as an end-to-end big data analytics provider, Delman shifted its focus to data preparation and management after talking to clients in Indonesia, said Halim. Many companies said they had budgeted for expensive data analytics solution, but then realized their data was not ready for analysis because it was spread across multiple formats. Delman’s mission is to make it easier for data engineers and scientists to do their jobs by cleaning up and preparing data. Halim says many large companies in Indonesia typically spend up to $200,000 to clean and warehouse data, but Delman gives them a more cost-efficient and faster alternative.

2020-05-26 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.6913, Raw Interest Score: 1.6329,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2419, Negative Sentiment 0.0302

Scaling the Analytics Team: Developing Key Roles

n an enterprise analytics team, different roles exist to fill different needs, and those needs must be met in order to be successful. Launching an analytics program doesn’t necessarily require a massive influx of personnel before producing usable insights from data, yet it’s important that critical roles are filled, whatever the size of the team. Multiple options exist for starting small and scaling up an analytics program, according to Evan Terry, VP of Operations at CPrime and co-author of Beginning Relational Data Modeling, in his presentation titled Roles in Enterprise Analytics at the DATAVERSITY® Enterprise Analytics Online Conference.

Data scientists often explore data independently, but the reality is that an entire support team is necessary for this type of exploration, he said. Data Science operates less like a rock climber and more like a baseball team, where all nine individuals with different specialized roles are on the field at the same time working together, all necessary to compete successfully.

2020-05-26 07:35:09+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.2438, Raw Interest Score: 1.2350,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1791, Negative Sentiment 0.1508

How Cinelytic is using AI to help Hollywood reboot for the streaming wars

While Hollywood giants have plunged into the streaming wars with massive vaults of content, they still face a yawning consumer data deficit as they try to catch up to industry leader Netflix. Cinelytic wants to help them level the playing field.

The L.A.-based startup has compiled a broad array of data to fuel its platform that helps studios understand in real time how choices ranging from scripts to actors could impact a project’s risk profile and revenue potential. While Hollywood studios have been making bets based on box office data and audience surveys for decades, they still have nowhere near the audience insight that Netflix has at its fingertips.

With subscription-based streaming set to become the primary way consumers discover and experience Hollywood’s content, traditional film and TV producers will eventually be awash in new forms of behavioral data. Studios are starting to turn to AI to help manage and analyze the data in a way that can actually drive more effective and profitable decisions.

2020-05-26 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.0964, Raw Interest Score: 1.0125,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1997, Negative Sentiment 0.1569

The Four Data Management Mistakes Derailing Your BI Program

If there’s one thing I’ve learned as a BI consultant, it’s that Data Management problems, like speeding tickets and jury duty, are terribly common but somehow still feel unlikely to happen to you.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen BI implementations drag on for months and months because issues around data extraction, modeling, aliasing, and stewardship weren’t resolved or even considered at the onset of the project. It’s never fun to put in the time upfront, but it’s a lot less painful than having to backtrack.

That said, I’ve also seen companies give serious consideration to their Data Management strategy from the start and get their BI implementation in front of customers well within their deadline. Data Management may sound like optional busy work for paper pushers, but let me assure you, it’s critical to your success, especially if you offer BI.

2020-05-25 07:35:40+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 1.3680, Raw Interest Score: 0.9155,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1473, Negative Sentiment 0.3788


This news clip post is produced algorithmically based upon CloudQuant’s list of sites and focus items we find interesting. We used natural language processing (NLP) to determine an interest score, and to calculate the sentiment of the linked article using the Loughran and McDonald Sentiment Word Lists.

If you would like to add your blog or website to our search crawler, please email customer_success@cloudquant.com. We welcome all contributors.

This news clip and any CloudQuant comment is for information and illustrative purposes only. It is not, and should not be regarded as investment advice or as a recommendation regarding a course of action. This information is provided with the understanding that CloudQuant is not acting in a fiduciary or advisory capacity under any contract with you, or any applicable law or regulation. You are responsible to make your own independent decision with respect to any course of action based on the content of this post.

The post Alternative Data News. 27, May 2020 appeared first on CloudQuant.


AI & Machine Learning News. 01, June 2020

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AI & Machine Learning News. 01, June 2020

The Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Newsletter by CloudQuant

The Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning News clippings for Quants are provided algorithmically with CloudQuant’s NLP engine which seeks out articles relevant to our community and ranks them by our proprietary interest score. After all, shouldn’t you expect to see the news generated using AI?


Why Data Literacy Is Not Just A Math Skill But A Life Skill

Communicating data is an essential skill and it is not just about doing complex coding. Data literacy is about deriving value from data and Dr Kirk Borne who is a data scientist and an astrophysicist and also a leading AI influencer spoke at plugin 2020 about the importance of being data literate for the future of work. He addressed how it is important for both individuals and to organizations to be data literate.

He addressed five aspects of it — data awareness (what is it?), data relevance (why me?), data literacy (show me how), data science (where’s the science?), and the data imperative (create and do something with data). He also discussed why it is important for data scientists to lead the efforts to build data literacy in society, in schools, and in professional development activities for organizations.
2020-05-30 16:10:15+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.5158, Raw Interest Score: 2.2590,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0466, Negative Sentiment 0.1630

CloudQuant Thoughts : We have lead with Dr Borne’s video “Introduction to Data Literacy and Storytelling” that he made for Industry Innovation Virtual AI Conference last week. Enjoy!

AI replaces journalists at Microsoft; 50 employees handed pink slips

Microsoft is reportedly laying off at least 50 news production workers and replacing them with artificial intelligence (AI)-based algorithms to perform their editorial duties. According to a report in the Seattle Times on Saturday, the roughly 50 employees contracted through staffing agencies Aquent, IFG and MAQ Consulting have been notified “that their services would no longer be needed beyond June 30”. These news production contractors work with Microsoft News, the company’s news content arm that operates MSN.com and other properties.

A Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement that like all companies, they evaluate business on a regular basis. “This can result in increased investment in some places and, from time to time, redeployment in others. These decisions are not the result of the current pandemic,” said the Microsoft spokesperson. Some employees told Seattle Times that “MSN will use AI to replace the production work they’d been doing”.
2020-05-31 07:33:00+05:30 Read the full story (at IBTimes)…
2020-06-01 00:00:00 Read the full story (at ProActiveInvestors)…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.7692, Raw Interest Score: 1.1547,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0770, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

CloudQuant Thoughts : OK, contract employees, not full time employees but still, it is a chilling decision. It would be interesting to see a side by side demonstration of the AI output vs the Human, I assume they tried that before making this decision! This plus the Uber story below and the “Are We Seeing The Data Science Bubble Burst?” further down suggests that Data Scientists are not immune to the effects of Covid-19 on the jobs market.

Uber cuts 3,700 more jobs including entire AI Lab

Uber is cutting 3,700 more jobs less than two weeks after an initial round of layoffs, CNBC confirmed Monday.

In an email to employees Monday, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said Uber would also be shutting or consolidating 45 offices around the world and it is considering cuts to other businesses, such as freight.

Uber shares were up as much as 9% on the news, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. The stock ended the day up 3.5%.

2020-06-01 00:00:00 Read the full story…

CloudQuant Thoughts : The key statement for those of us interested in AI and ML was “Given the necessary cost cuts and the increased focus on core, we have decided to wind down the Incubator and AI Labs and pursue strategic alternatives for Uber Works.”

A Single Line of Python Code Scraping Dataset from Webpages

Hunting for API endpoints from webpages and downloads using Python

No matter what level of data science/analytics skills we have, you cannot do anything without datasets.

Indeed, there are many open-source datasets such as Kaggle and Data.world. However, they are more suitable to be used for exercises and learning purposes, but may not satisfy our general needs.
Usually, data scientist/analysts may have more or less web scraping skills, so it will be much easier to get datasets whenever you saw on the websites. After scraping the content from the websites, a series of transforming, extracting and cleansing manipulations will help us to get the clean dataset for the next step. This is one of the typical usages of Python because there are many excellent web scraping libraries available in Python such as Scrapy and Beautiful Soup.
2020-05-31 16:58:45.631000+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.7720, Raw Interest Score: 1.4316,
Positive Sentiment: 0.4242, Negative Sentiment 0.1060

CloudQuant Thoughts : Quite a lot of investigative work before you can create that one line of code but it is true, it is sometimes possible to write one line of code to fetch the data you need of a webpage.

HSBC Launches AI-Powered Index Family

HSBC today announced the launch of the AI Powered US Equity Index (AiPEX) family, the market’s first to use artificial intelligence (AI) as a method for equity investing. The AiPEX family of indices was developed by EquBot and leverages the AI capabilities of EquBot and IBM Watson™ to turn Big Data into investment insight.

AiPEX harnesses the power of IBM Watson and EquBot’s AI to ingest and learn from the vast amounts of publicly available and continuously generated data points. Data points could include a company announcement, a tweet, a satellite image of a store parking lot, or even the tone of language a CEO uses during an earnings presentation.

Applying what has been learned through Big Data and AI, AiPEX uses a rules-based process to objectively evaluate each of the 1,000 largest U.S. publicly traded companies and selects those whose stock prices are poised for growth, according to the AI. AiPEX rebalances its portfolio monthly, and to manage short-term volatility, AiPEX reallocates among chosen equity and cash on a daily basis. AiPEX selects companies with stock prices that may be poised for growth according to an objective selection process that is similar to a fundamental equity research approach, only thousands of times faster and broader in scope.

2020-06-01 10:28:24+00:00 Read the full story (at MarketsMedia)…
2020-06-01 00:01:00 Read the full story (at FinExtra)…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.6740, Raw Interest Score: 2.2406,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1965, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

CloudQuant Thoughts : Brave (or foolish?) to launch an AI based bot ETF in this market!

Tencent pledges $70 billion investment in high-tech areas as Beijing pushes digital infrastructure

Chinese technology giant Tencent will invest 500 billion yuan ($69.9 billion) over the next five years in areas from cloud computing to artificial intelligence, a move boosted by Beijing’s calls to push digital infrastructure.

The announcement comes after the company, known for operating popular messaging service WeChat, said on Monday it would issue up to $20 billion of new bonds to professional investors to raise capital. Already, $12 billion of bonds under this program are outstanding.
2020-05-27 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.7647, Raw Interest Score: 1.5882,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2353, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

Scale AI Launches PandaSet To Promote Urban Driving Situations

Recently, the data platform for AI, Scale AI launched one of the popular large scale datasets for autonomous driving, PandaSet. According to the Scale AI team, this dataset is the first open-source dataset made available for both academic and commercial use.

Amid the pandemic, the collaboration in AI and research communities have witnessed a spike in solving the pressing issues. However, due to the lockdown, some of the industries like autonomous vehicle (AV) are witnessing difficulties in developing new technologies at scale as testing on roads is suspended for the time being to ensure the safety of those involved.

According to the Scale team, various AV organisations have turned to complementary techniques and simulated data to continue their work, but there is often no substitute for high-quality data that captures the complex and often messy reality of driving in the real world. This particular condition inspired the Scale AI team to release the PandaSet amid the crisis for training machine learning models for autonomous driving.
2020-06-01 07:30:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.8052, Raw Interest Score: 1.6985,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2972, Negative Sentiment 0.1486

New Requirements Spur Data Quality and Data Integration

A combination of factors is heightening the need for high-quality, well-governed data. These include the need for trustworthy data to support AI and machine learning initiatives, new data privacy and data management regulations, and the appreciation of good data as the fuel for better decision making.

Multiple Data Sources, Governance, and High Volume Are Top Data Quality Challenges’

  1. The top 3 challenges companies face when ensuring high quality data are multiple sources of data (70%), applying data governance processes (50%), and volume of data (48%).
  2. About three-quarters (78%) of companies have challenges profiling or applying data quality to large datasets.
  3. 29% say they have a partial understanding of the data that exists across their organization, while 48% say they have a good understanding.

2020-05-28 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.8480, Raw Interest Score: 2.7050,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3165, Negative Sentiment 0.2878

Why Is Data Strategy Important To Drive Data Science And AI Initiatives

The importance of data in today’s world is well known. While it is extremely crucial to strategise data to be used for AI, ML or other applications, there are still many businesses that do not realise its importance. Every enterprise generates a huge amount of data which oftentimes is not leveraged to derive the best result out of it. Sateesh Rai, head of analytics at Orient Electric takes us through the importance of data strategy and why storing data and planning to use it in an efficient manner can bring about tremendous business transformation. It is an important framework for companies to derive useful insights.
2020-05-29 14:58:11+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.5033, Raw Interest Score: 2.1015,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2729, Negative Sentiment 0.4367

Contribute photos to help developers build AI models with new Microsoft Garage project Trove

Every day, developers and researchers are finding creative ways to leverage AI to augment human intelligence and solve tough problems. Whether they’re training a computer vision model that can spot endangered snow leopards or help us do our business expenses more easily when we scan pictures of receipts, they need a lot of quality pictures to do it. Developers usually crowd source these large batches of pictures by enlisting the help of gig workers to submit photos, but often, these calls for photos feel like a black box. Participants have little insight into why they’re submitting a photo and can feel like their time was lost when their submissions are rejected without explanation. At the same time, developers can find that these sourcing projects take a long time to complete due to lower quality and less diverse inputs.

We’re excited to announce that Trove, a Microsoft Garage project, is exploring a solution that can enhance the experience and agency for both parties. Trove is a marketplace app that allows people to contribute photos to AI projects that developers can then use to train machine learning models. Interested parties can request an invite to join the experiment as a contributor or developer. Trove is currently accepting a small number of participants in the United States on both Android and iOS.

2020-05-27 15:53:43+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.1151, Raw Interest Score: 1.0821,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3978, Negative Sentiment 0.1591

This AI Can Judge Personality Based on Selfies Alone

Could this neural network really be better at predicting personality traits than humans?

A team of researchers from the Higher School of Economics University and Open University in Moscow, Russia claim they have demonstrated that an artificial intelligence can make accurate personality judgments based on selfies alone — more accurately than some humans. The researchers suggest the technology could be used to help match people up in online dating services or help companies sell products that are tailored to individual personalities.

That’s apropos, because two co-authors listed on a paper about the research published today in Scientific Reports — a journal run by Nature — are affiliated with a Russian AI psychological profiling company called BestFitMe, which helps companies hire the right employees. As detailed in the paper, the team asked 12,000 volunteers to complete a questionnaire that they used to build a database of personality traits. To go along with that data, the volunteers also uploaded a total of 31,000 selfies.

2020-05-22 Read the full story…

Assessing the Risks and Challenges on the Road to Owning Training Data

Artificial intelligence (AI) applications have an insatiable appetite for consuming data. Today’s AI models for business applications are built to ingest massive amounts of complex data sets. The cost of collecting and curating data for training AI models, however, can be staggering. In the context of the Internet of Things (IoT), for example, the costs of deploying sensors and other machinery in a network at a big data scale can be expensive.

But what if the training data that trains your AI products is accessible online to your users? Bad actors mimicking legitimate users can siphon off large amounts of the data you collected and then inexpensively build competing AI products using this training data. Losing data to competitors can translate to lost market share. In China, for example, a company invested heavily in attaching a network of sensors on buses to collect real-time bus location data. The company built a popular AI-powered app that predicted future bus times with high accuracy. The AI-powered app was trained using the real-time bus location data collected using the sensors. A competitor coded a bot that scraped the real-time bus location data to improve the accuracy of its competing AI-powered app. While this ultimately went to court, the company still suffered economic loss and damage to its brand as a direct result of losing its real-time bus location data to its competitor.

2020-05-29 07:35:37+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.3240, Raw Interest Score: 2.0348,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1584, Negative Sentiment 0.4874

Artificial Intelligence Essentials for Business Leaders

AI has become the need of the hour and all the industries are now integrating analytics and AI to drive the decision-making process. Bhagirath Kumar Lader, who is the Chief Manager (Business Information System) at GAIL led us through a session briefing Artificial Intelligence essentials for business leaders in today’s age. Lader is one of the key members of the digital transformation team at GAIL and carries huge knowledge about how AI, ML and DL are crucial to businesses. He gave us a quick overview of the motivation for AI, AI essentials, AI hype vs reality while taking us through use cases.

2020-05-29 10:37:01+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.1811, Raw Interest Score: 1.9428,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1737, Negative Sentiment 0.1895

Apple buys machine learning start-up Inductiv to improve Siri

Apple has bought a machine-learning start-up to bolster the abilities of its Siri voice recognition system. The iPhone-maker acquired US-based artificial intelligence (AI) business Inductiv for an undisclosed fee, Bloomberg reported. The deal adds to more than a dozen similar agreements struck by Apple in the past few years.

In a statement, the Cupertino giant said that it “buys smaller technology companies from time to time and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans”. Inductiv, an Ontario-based start-up, develops AI that can identify and correct errors in large data sets. Inductiv’s technology may be used to clean data collated from users, which can improve Apple’s machine learning capabilities and deliver better voice recognition through Siri.
2020-05-28 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.1638, Raw Interest Score: 2.1233,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2055, Negative Sentiment 0.1370

Ex-DeepMind engineers picked Seattle to launch new AI startup Phaidra

Phaidra aims to help industrial companies develop in-house AI solutions. The startup is still building out the beta version of its product. “We started Phaidra to broaden access to the technology by enabling industry practitioners to directly develop their own AI solutions,” Gao explained. “While many tools already exist for data scientists or software engineers, our experience suggests that domain expertise is the primary driver of AI performance. AI would be significantly more impactful and useful if the people who understand their domains best were the ones applying AI.”

The company also wants to help its customers maintain ownership of their data and intellectual property. Gao said companies usually partner with large tech companies to develop AI products — a “double-edged sword” because those companies can use the data themselves. “The root of the problem is that the world’s AI talent is concentrated in a few large companies,” Gao said. “If you could make AI more accessible to non-experts, you can solve this problem.”
2020-05-28 14:00:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.1608, Raw Interest Score: 1.5740,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1399, Negative Sentiment 0.1049

Building Better Prices — How AI is Improving Liquidity in Corporate Credit Markets

How many traders, desk analysts and quants does it take to price a corporate bond? If you were to answer that question even a few months ago, the number could be as high as a half-dozen. Parties on both sides of the trade would be tasked with checking whether the bond traded recently, analyzing current credit and business conditions, digging into individual bond attributes and taking the pulse of the marketplace to see if the other side of the trade agrees with the price. For a complex trade involving a large portfolio of corporate credits, the process could have taken days.

Today, a single trader can do all of that in seconds thanks to advances in machine learning technology which have made it possible to calculate reference pricing in seconds based on dynamic bond market data. And that is a huge step forward for liquidity in the $9.2 trillion U.S. corporate bond market.
2020-05-28 12:35:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.8998, Raw Interest Score: 1.9928,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1610, Negative Sentiment 0.1812

Data Scientist Salary: Starting, Average, and Which States Pay Most

What’s the average data scientist salary? As you might expect, those with the right combination of data-science skills and experience can earn quite a bit—especially if they’re in a position to advise a company’s senior management on strategy. Let’s break it all down, but before we do, let’s take a moment to trace out what a data scientist actually does.

Data scientists play a vital strategic role at the companies that employ them. They’re often tasked with mining their firm’s data for strategic insights that CEOs, CTOs, and other executives can use to plot a longer-term roadmap. No wonder it’s a notably fast-growing profession. Although the term ‘data scientist’ is often used interchangeably with ‘data analyst,’ it’s important to note that those roles technically aren’t the same; data analysts often focus on much more tactical problems than data scientists.
2020-05-26 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.8719, Raw Interest Score: 2.2624,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0543, Negative Sentiment 0.1086

Why Crypto needs robo-advisors?

Robotization coupled with artificial intelligence (AI) are reshaping every aspect of our lives. When we hear the term “robo-advisor”, our imagination is filled with images from science-fiction movies. But when we refer to robo-advisors, we mean things like bots, virtual robots or algorithms that automate different tasks. Robo-advisors grew out of the ashes of the 2008 financial crisis. Robo-advisors gained traction when people lost faith in trad…
2020-06-01 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.8158, Raw Interest Score: 1.3827,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1796, Negative Sentiment 0.1437

Seattle startup DefinedCrowd lands $50M to help Mastercard, BMW, others improve their AI services

Artificial intelligence services require mountains of reliable data to reach their full potential. Seattle startup DefinedCrowd is filling that need for Fortune 500 companies such as Mastercard and BMW — and investors like what they see so far. The company announced a $50.5 million Series B round Tuesday to fuel growth of its AI training data technology platform as it aims to be “the world’s best data company for AI.”

Founded in 2015, DefinedCrowd uses a combination of machine learning with a crowdsourced community of 290,000 human contributors to train AI systems in 50 languages across 195 countries. DefinedCrowd specializes in speech technology, natural language processing and computer vision, working with clients across industries such as automotive, energy, fintech, retail, media, and healthcare. Use cases include building voice assistants, improving facial recognition apps, automating utilities inspection, and more.

2020-05-26 14:00:00+00:00 Read the full story (at GeekWire)…
2020-05-27 00:00:00 Read the full story (at DBTA)…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.6961, Raw Interest Score: 1.6054,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1751, Negative Sentiment 0.1168

Determining the ROI of AI Projects A Key to Success

The best practices around determining whether your AI project will achieve a return for the business center around determining at the outset how the return on investment will be measured.

The evidence shows it will be time well spent. An estimated 87% of data science projects never make it to the production stage, and 56% of global CEOs expect it to take three to five years to see any real ROI on AI investments, according to a recent account in Forbes.

Like any other technology investment, business leaders need to define the specific goals of the AI projects, and commit to tracking it with benchmarks and key performance indicators, suggested author Mark Minevich, Advisor to Boston Consulting Group, venture capitalist and cognitive strategist. The company needs to think about the types of business problems that can be addressed with AI, so as not to set unrealistic expectations and not set the AI off in search of a business problem to solve.

2020-05-28 21:30:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.6784, Raw Interest Score: 1.2115,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2643, Negative Sentiment 0.4846

Are We Seeing The Data Science Bubble Burst?

COVID-19 has led to shifting priorities, and companies are re-assessing strategies across their business as resources are constrained. This has led to companies coming to terms with the reality of business value with data science.

The mass layoffs in the technology industry, including many data scientists, have many saying the talent bubble has finally popped. The pandemic gave a good reason for organisations to decrease the compensations for data scientists, which was earlier soaring high due to the rising demand. It is true that the number of candidates had been increasing exponentially in data science over the past five years.

It is expected that companies will now run for cost-cutting, business process optimisation and automation due to the pandemic, and this will ultimately decrease demand for data scientists in the coming future.

2020-05-30 12:19:25+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.2954, Raw Interest Score: 1.8308,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1831, Negative Sentiment 0.1831

Government presses ahead with Cummings’ data science revolution

A British artificial intelligence firm involved in the Vote Leave campaign has been handed a £400,000 contract to tap data from places such as social media sites to help steer the Government’s response to Covid-19.

Official documents from the Government show Faculty Science was awarded the contract by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) in April to provide data scientists who could set up “alternative data sources (e.g. social media, utility providers and telecom bills, credit rating agencies, etc.)”.

They would, the contract said, apply data science and machine learning to the data, which could help identify trends, and then develop “interactive dashboards” to inform policymakers.

2020-06-01 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.1690, Raw Interest Score: 1.6681,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0000, Negative Sentiment 0.0878

Statistical pitfalls in data science – How stereotypical results can alter data distributions in people’s minds

There are plenty of ways to infer a large and varied amount of results from a given dataset, but there are infinitely many ways to incorrectly reason from it as well. Fallacies can be defined as the products of inaccurate or faulty reasoning which usually leads to one obtaining incorrect results from the data given.

The good thing is that since numerous people have made these mistakes for so long and the results have been documented throughout history in a variety of fields, it is easier to identify and explain many of these statistical fallacies. Here are some statistical traps that data scientists should avoid falling into.
2020-06-01 04:32:32.278000+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.1058, Raw Interest Score: 1.3763,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1564, Negative Sentiment 0.3649

OnMobile Invests In AI-Based Firm rob0 To Acquire 25% Stake

OnMobile Global Limited, a Bengaluru-based mobile entertainment company, has announced the investment of ₹5.4 crores (approx) in rob0. With this, OnMobile will hold a 25 per cent stake in the AI-based analytics organisation rob0.

“We couldn’t have hoped for a better partner than OnMobile to help rob0 embody its vision and become an essential solution for game developers. We are thrilled to bring our expertise and participate in the success of OnMobile’s new gaming offer,” said Richard Rispoli, co-founder and CEO of Technologies rob0.

rob0 offers SDK to allow video game developers to gain insights on how the users are interacting with the game. This will help developers to understand the behaviours of the gamers, thereby assisting them in optimising the games with a clear goal in mind. rob0 utilises cutting-edge technologies such as machine learning to deliver insights into the data extracted from the games while users play. It reduces the time taken by traditional methods, where game developers used to check hours of footage to evaluate the gamers behaviours.

2020-05-25 12:29:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.0045, Raw Interest Score: 1.5539,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3008, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

Facebook AI Research applies Transformer architecture to streamline object detection models

Six members of Facebook AI Research (FAIR) tapped the popular Transformer neural network architecture to create end-to-end object detection AI, an approach they claim streamlines the creation of object detection models and reduces the need for handcrafted components. Named Detection Transformer (DETR), the model can recognize objects in an image in a single pass all at once.

DETR is the first object detection framework to successfully integrate the Transformer architecture as a central building block in the detection pipeline, FAIR said in a blog post. The authors added that Transformers could revolutionize computer vision as they did natural language processing in recent years, or bridge gaps between NLP and computer vision.

2020-05-28 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.8227, Raw Interest Score: 1.4187,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3153, Negative Sentiment 0.2522

The In-Memory Computing Landscape in 2020

As companies have evolved toward digital business models and undertaken digital transformation initiatives, they have increasingly faced two challenges. First, the data they need to drive their real-time business processes is typically spread across multiple, siloed datastores. Second, their existing applications often cannot scale to address the increase in end-user demands for real-time engagement.

Thanks to the relatively low cost of RAM today and the availability of open source solutions, in-memory computing technologies have progressed dramatically over the last few years, becoming a foundation for accelerating and scaling real-time business processes in support of the range of digital transformation and big data/fast data initiatives. As we move through 2020, in-memory computing will be particularly important in enabling data centers to accelerate the use of the following new strategies for supporting real-time business processes and analytics:
2020-05-28 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.8222, Raw Interest Score: 1.8516,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1941, Negative Sentiment 0.1941

Spending Surge Predicted for Factory Data Management

As big data goes, the industrial sector is among the largest producers, with sensors collecting data along assembly lines on everything from the status of manufacturing equipment to product inspection cameras.

Industrial Internet of Things deployments are therefore expected to boost manufacturers’ already hefty investments in data management and analytics tools as producers seek to up their game from merely collecting to organizing and gleaning insights from industrial data.

That trend is seen pushing industrial spending to new heights. For example, ABI Research last week forecast that manufacturers and industrial firms will spend $19.8 billion in 2026 on data management, data analytics and related digital services. Those investments will target operations ranging from predictive equipment maintenance to production line optimization.
2020-05-26 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.7405, Raw Interest Score: 1.6341,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0875, Negative Sentiment 0.1167

Top Cloud Data Warehouses for the Enterprise

Modern cloud architectures combine three essentials: the power of data warehousing, flexibility of Big Data platforms, and elasticity of cloud at a fraction of the cost to traditional solution users.

But which solution is the right one for you and your business? Download the eBook to see a side-by-side comparison of the leading cloud data warehouse vendors and explore:

The top cloud data warehouses at a glance – Amazon Redshift, Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, Google BigQuery, and Snowflake Cloud …
2020-05-27 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.7219, Raw Interest Score: 1.6568,
Positive Sentiment: 0.4734, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

The 37 Major Machine-Learning Tools For 2020

Enterprises need more artificial intelligence and machine-learning (ML) solutions to drive value, transform their businesses, and outperform the competition. But firms find it challenging to navigate the lifecycle of developing, deploying, and maintaining their ML models and AI solutions. A key problem? They don’t have the right PAML (predictive analytics and machine learning) solutions that make it possible to scale AI — in a rapid, reliable, repeatable, and governable fashion — across the organization.

Thankfully, there is a growing landscape of vendors offering PAML solutions designed to help enterprises rapidly develop custom AI and ML solutions and push them beyond proof-of-concept (PoC) purgatory to full-scale production. In our recently published report, “Now Tech: Predictive Analytics And Machine Learning, Q2 2020,” we’ve identified and researched the 37 major PAML vendors and categorized them into three segments based on their capabilities…
2020-05-27 17:16:14-04:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.6451, Raw Interest Score: 1.5195,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2669, Negative Sentiment 0.1027

Reproducibility in Data Analytics Under Fire in Stanford Report

Armed with the same data and told to test the same hypotheses, dozens of independent researchers instead came to widely different conclusions using a variety of analytics techniques, according to a new report from Stanford University that pushes the reproducibility crises in science into a new realm.

The study involved 70 independent research teams from around the world, who were all presented with the same data: functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of volunteers’ brains while they performed a monetary decision-making task.

2020-05-27 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.5253, Raw Interest Score: 1.3072,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0297, Negative Sentiment 0.1783

AI Cloud Developments Offer Remarkable Improvements in IT security

IT security is becoming more important as data breaches become more common. Fortunately, AI tools and cloud resources are offering new solutions. Cloud technology is creating a number of amazing changes in the way we live. Many of these trends are predicated on new advances in artificial intelligence.

One of the biggest ways that AI-driven cloud developments are important is with greater IT security. Cloud AI technology is going to be more important in stopping the growing number of data breaches that we have witnessed in recent years. Data breaches cost businesses an average of $3.92 million. If your business is attacked, you not only risk losing profits, but it could potentially ruin your reputation. You will have a hard time convincing your clients that they can trust you with their data. To prevent that, you need to be proactive and put in place necessary security measures. Cloud computing and AI have both proved to be a very effective ways for businesses to tackle security issues. It is not in vain that many companies choose to work with Amazon AWS. They understand the benefits that AI cloud tools have for the security of their data. Here are the ways cloud AI applications can improve your IT security.
2020-05-28 19:28:46+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.4622, Raw Interest Score: 1.1541,
Positive Sentiment: 0.4360, Negative Sentiment 0.3591

KgBase Aims to Close the Knowledge Gap

Organizations are discovering the power of knowledge graphs to extract useful information from unstructured data. But full-fledged graph databases can require specialized skills to interact with, while online spreadsheets can leave the user wanting more. Now a company called KgBase is hoping to split the gap between these two extremes with an affordable knowledge graph tool that doesn’t require programming.

KgBase was developed by ThinkNum Alternative Data, a company that provides alternative data, such as store locations, job listings, product pricing, and lists of active social media users. It was originally intended to be used as a mapping tool based on the open source Gremlin query language that allowed ThinkNum’s customer to interact with its alternative datasets in new and exciting ways.
2020-05-29 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.4085, Raw Interest Score: 1.2968,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2081, Negative Sentiment 0.0640

CFOs are driving the digital conversation in legal

The pathway to become digital involves a commitment to fundamentally evolve the company’s legal operating model. It entails a transition from manual to digitized processes to harness the power of data and fully embrace artificial intelligence (AI). In the context of the law department, many c-suite executives recognise this as digital legal transformation (DLX).

DLX enables law departments to change their operating models, transitioning certain costs from fixed to variable, with immediate up-front and ongoing cost savings. In leveraging digital, Legal gains insight across the spectrum of legal work to enable faster, better-informed business decisions, improved legal risk management capabilities, and enriched business processes that create expansive value across the enterprise.

2020-05-28 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.3849, Raw Interest Score: 1.3690,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3526, Negative Sentiment 0.0622

Jeff Bezos is buying a stake in UK digital supply chain startup Beacon

The Amazon CEO and world’s richest man is taking part in a Series A fundraising round worth $15 million for the British startup.

Freight forwarding is a trillion dollar industry, and Beacon aims to act as the booking agents between importers and exporters while facilitating trade logistics and finance through the use of AI, search optimization, data science, cloud and automation technologies, its website says.

Based in London and founded in 2018, Beacon’s investors already include executives from Uber, Google and Amazon, according to its site. Its chief technology officer, Pierre Martin, was formerly head of software engineering for Amazon’s package and freight transport technology.
2020-05-31 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.3099, Raw Interest Score: 1.5572,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1460, Negative Sentiment 0.1460

Big Data Is Offering Awesome Homework Solutions For Students

Big data is changing the way students learn by offering amazing homework solutions. Here’s what to know about what big data offers.

The education technology market is growing at a remarkable pace. One study found that it was worth $55 billion in 2019. Growth in the education technology market is largely attributed to advances in big data.

In our progressive world, Big Data is a social and economic phenomenon that is associated with the rapid development of new technological capabilities that aid in the analysis of huge amounts of data. This data is processed so that people can get particular results for further application. Let’s find out how Big Data is used in education.
2020-05-29 13:01:11+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.3050, Raw Interest Score: 1.3787,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1939, Negative Sentiment 0.1508

New AI technique speeds up language models on edge devices

Researchers at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab recently proposed Hardware-Aware Transformers (HAT), an AI model training technique that incorporates Google’s Transformer architecture. They claim that HAT can achieve a 3 times inferencing speedup on devices like the Raspberry Pi 4 while reducing model size by 3.7 times compared with a baseline.

Google’s Transformer is widely used in natural language processing (and even some computer vision) tasks because of its cutting-edge performance. Nevertheless, Transformers remain challenging to deploy on edge devices because of their computation cost; on a Raspberry Pi, translating a sentence with only 30 words requires 13 gigaflops (1 billion floating-point operations per second) and takes 20 seconds. This obviously limits the architecture’s usefulness for developers and companies integrating language AI with mobile apps and services.
2020-05-29 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.2618, Raw Interest Score: 1.3986,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2576, Negative Sentiment 0.1104

Scaling the Analytics Team: Developing Key Roles

In an enterprise analytics team, different roles exist to fill different needs, and those needs must be met in order to be successful. Launching an analytics program doesn’t necessarily require a massive influx of personnel before producing usable insights from data, yet it’s important that critical roles are filled, whatever the size of the team. Multiple options exist for starting small and scaling up an analytics program, according to Evan Terry, VP of Operations at CPrime and co-author of Beginning Relational Data Modeling, in his presentation titled Roles in Enterprise Analytics at the DATAVERSITY® Enterprise Analytics Online Conference.

Data scientists often explore data independently, but the reality is that an entire support team is necessary for this type of exploration, he said. Data Science operates less like a rock climber and more like a baseball team, where all nine individuals with different specialized roles are on the field at the same time working together, all necessary to compete successfully.
2020-05-26 07:35:09+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.2438, Raw Interest Score: 1.2350,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1791, Negative Sentiment 0.1508

It All Comes Down to the Data

Today, whether it is company leaders dealing with customer and business concerns or public health experts talking about the COVID-19 pandemic, what you hear again and again is that they are relying heavily on data. And, in this issue we look at the range of data management challenges and opportunities.

Preparing data for analysis remains a problem. While certainly not new, it is one that is becoming increasingly difficult to deal with due to the vast quantities of data being created and stored, and the variety of types and sources. In our cover story, BDQ writer Joe McKendrick looks at the challenges of data prep for integration and analysis, and shares insights from a wide range of industry executives on the topic. “Even the most ambitious data analytics initiatives tend to get buried by the 80/20 rule—with data analysts or scientists only able to devote 20% of their time to actual business analysis, while the rest is spent simply finding, cleansing, and organizing data,” McKendrick observes. “This is unsustainable, as the pressure to deliver insights in a rapid manner is increasing.”
2020-05-28 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.2067, Raw Interest Score: 1.1321,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2965, Negative Sentiment 0.4313

AI Autonomous Cars And The Problem Of Where To Drop Off Riders

Determining where to best drop-off a passenger can be a problematic issue. It seems relatively common and downright unnerving that oftentimes a ridesharing service or taxi unceremoniously opts to drop you off at a spot that is poorly chosen and raft with complications.

I remember one time, while in New York City, a cab driver was taking me to my hotel after my having arrived past midnight at the airport, and for reasons I’ll never know he opted to drop me about a block away from the hotel, doing so at a darkened corner, marked with graffiti, and looking quite like a warzone. I walked nearly a city block at nighttime, in an area that I later discovered was infamous for being dangerous, including muggings and other unsavory acts.

In one sense, when we are dropped off from a ridesharing service or its equivalent, we often tend to assume that the driver has identified a suitable place to do the drop-off. Presumably, we expect as a minimum:

  • The drop-off is near to the desired destination
  • The drop-off should be relatively easy to get out of the vehicle at the drop-off spot
  • The drop-off should be in a safe position to get out of the vehicle without harm
  • And it is a vital part of the journey and counts as much as the initial pick-up and the drive itself.

In my experience, the drop-off often seems to be a time for the driver to get rid of a passenger and in fact the driver’s mindset is often on where their next fare will be, since they’ve now exhausted the value of the existing passenger and are seeking more revenue by thinking about their next passenger.

2020-05-28 21:30:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.1833, Raw Interest Score: 0.7624,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1028, Negative Sentiment 0.3255

OpenAI debuts gigantic GPT-3 language model with 175 billion parameters

A team of more than 30 OpenAI researchers have released a paper about GPT-3, a language model capable of achieving state-of-the-art results on a set of benchmark and unique natural language processing tasks that range from language translation to generating news articles to answering SAT questions. GPT-3 has a whopping 175 billion parameters. By comparison, the largest version of GPT-2 was 1.5 billion parameters, and the largest Transformer-based language model in the world — introduced by Microsoft earlier this month — is 17 billion parameters.

OpenAI released GPT-2 last year, controversially taking a staggered release approach due to fear that the model could be used for malicious purposes. OpenAI was criticized by some for the staggered approach, while others applauded the company for demonstrating a way to carefully release an AI model with the potential for misuse. GPT-3 made its debut with a preprint arXiv paper Thursday, but no release details are provided. An OpenAI spokesperson declined to comment when VentureBeat asked if a full version of GPT-3 will be released or one of seven smaller versions ranging in size from 125 million to 13 billion parameters.
2020-05-29 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.1234, Raw Interest Score: 1.3839,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2570, Negative Sentiment 0.2570


This news clip post is produced algorithmically based upon CloudQuant’s list of sites and focus items we find interesting. We used natural language processing (NLP) to determine an interest score, and to calculate the sentiment of the linked article using the Loughran and McDonald Sentiment Word Lists.

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This news clip and any CloudQuant comment is for information and illustrative purposes only. It is not, and should not be regarded as investment advice or as a recommendation regarding a course of action. This information is provided with the understanding that CloudQuant is not acting in a fiduciary or advisory capacity under any contract with you, or any applicable law or regulation. You are responsible to make your own independent decision with respect to any course of action based on the content of this post.

The post AI & Machine Learning News. 01, June 2020 appeared first on CloudQuant.

Alternative Data News. 03, June 2020

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Alternative Data News. 03, June 2020

The AltDataNewsletter by CloudQuant

Finding sources and uses for alternative data can be difficult. At CloudQuant we regularly read and search the internet for new sources of data that can be used in our mission to find alpha signals and build quantitative trading strategies. We recognize that we are technology and data junkies so we wrote our own crawler that specifically seeks out web pages, posts, and news articles that give us a snapshot of what is going on in the world of Alt Data. The following is a collection of articles that we think you will find interesting from the past week.


How Stocks Are Performing in 2020 – The S&P 500 Companies

The swarm plot below shows year-to-date (YTD) returns for all S&P 500 companies organized by sector (color). The size of each circle is correlated with the company’s market capitalization.

Unsurprisingly, the airline industry, cruise lines, energy, and financials are all weighing heavily on the index. The chart also highlights a transformation in consumer preferences, as spenders abandon traditional retail in favor of online alternatives like Amazon, eBay, and PayPal.

Giant technology companies like Apple and Microsoft have done a lot to offset losses in the broader index. Other big winners include computer security, IT support, and hardware (e.g. Citrix, ServiceNow, AMD, Nvidia), as well as home entertainment (e.g. Netflix, Activision-Blizzard, Take-Two).

2020-04-29 Read the Full Story…

CloudQuant Thoughts : Again, a fabulous, beautiful Data Presentation from Reddit’s Data Is Beautiful.


Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Section

NN IP Launches ESG Fund For China A-Shares

Share Equities strategy. The NN (L) International China A-Share Equity fund targets both institutional and wholesale investors. The current market developments underline the importance of integrating Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) factors more than ever, making the fund well positioned to leverage on this opportunity in the Chinese market.

We are proud to announce that we have launched an ESG-integrated China-A Share Equities fund, together with our strategic partner #ChinaAMC . Read more: https://t.co/K4FIuN70Tn#ESG #ResponsibleInvesting pic.twitter.com/PTkseOER6O — NNInvestmentPartners (@NNIP) May 29, 2020
2020-06-01 10:10:26+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.4872, Raw Interest Score: 1.8104,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3520, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

Sustainable funds are outperforming their peers during the pandemic, BNP Paribas says

Investors have been “doubling down” on sustainability over the last quarter — and sustainable funds have actually outperformed the broader market, according to an analyst at BNP Paribas Asset Management. That’s a departure from historical precedents where people shifted their focus from sustainability to near-term profits in tough times, Gabriel Wilson-Otto, head of stewardship, Asia Pacific at the French bank. The first quarter of 2020 saw finan…
2020-06-02 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.2027, Raw Interest Score: 2.0076,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3346, Negative Sentiment 0.1434

Sustainable Finance – a treasurer’s brief – Why care about sustainable finance?

‘Sustainable’ is a buzzword right now: but why pay attention and what is all the fuss about?

If you are a treasurer who aspires to make corporate life socially and morally responsible, whilst also being at the heart of a capitalist machine, then sustainable finance is the opportunity to make a difference. As the strategic importance of the treasurer increases, it’s an opportunity to shape the overall strategic direction of the firm.

Sustainable Finance gives an opportunity to bring together environmental and social elements in a single debt issuance, supporting the principles of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) development and delivering ethical business.

2020-06-01 08:02:01 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.5929, Raw Interest Score: 1.4959,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2493, Negative Sentiment 0.1247

CloudQuant Thoughts : For a quality ESG Dataset for US Equities head over to our Catalog.


Cboe Global Markets acquires Trade Alert bolstering its suite of information solutions offerings

Cboe Global Markets, Inc. today announces the acquisition of Trade Alert, LLC, a real-time alerts and order flow analysis service provider based in New York.

Terms of the deal, which closed on June 1, 2020, were not disclosed. Cboe says it funded the acquisition with cash on hand. Cboe considers its acquisition of the Trade Alert business to be nominally accretive for 2020 and is optimistic about the potential for growth going forward.

The acquisition is immaterial from a financial perspective.

Trade Alert will integrate with Cboe Information Solutions’ comprehensive suite of data solutions, analytics and indices that help market participants understand and access financial markets. Cboe’s Information Solutions offering is designed to optimize the customer experience throughout the life cycle of a transaction, from pre-trade to at-trade to post-trade, by providing insights, alpha opportunities, portfolio optimizations and seamless workflows.

2020-06-02 16:44:32+03:00 Read the full story…
2020-06-02 18:19:54+00:00 Read the full story…
2020-06-02 21:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.0408, Raw Interest Score: 2.3146,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2746, Negative Sentiment 0.1177

CloudQuant Thoughts : CBOEs acquisition of Trading Alert is yet another example of an Exchange stepping into the data and data delivery field.

S&P Global Launches New Data Marketplace • Integrity Research

S&P Global recently announced the launch of its new data platform enabling clients to discover, and evaluate new datasets called the S&P Global Marketplace (Marketplace) which provides access to various data and tools from across S&P, as well as third-party alternative datasets.

S&P’s new Marketplace data platform grants customers access to more than 85 datasets from across all four of S&P Global’s divisions; alternative data from select third-parties; and additional tools, including those provided by S&P’s Kensho unit.

2020-06-01 12:30:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 5.3540, Raw Interest Score: 1.9251,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3500, Negative Sentiment 0.1400

CloudQuant Thoughts : And another one…

AI manoeuvres – Business lessons from the Pentagon

A SMALL REVOLUTION has just occurred in America’s armed forces. They have, for the first time, deployed artificial intelligence (ai) to determine when a thorough check-up of a Black Hawk helicopter is in order. The algorithm, trained on maintenance records and sensor data, calculates how long the aircraft can fly safely in, say, a desert, before its engines should be cleaned to prevent sand melting into glass that could cause them to fail.

Such predictive maintenance is the most tangible product so far of the Joint ai Centre (jaic). With 176 employees and an expected budget of $240m next fiscal year, up from $90m in this one, it lies at the heart of an ambitious effort to use machine learning and other ai to help the Pentagon run more efficiently and keep its technological edge, especially over China.

2020-05-28 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.4120, Raw Interest Score: 1.3476,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1497, Negative Sentiment 0.1497

CloudQuant Thoughts : Really? “REVOLUTION”? This type of article seems to pop up on a regular basis (I recall typing this same comment within the last year!) and yet the very first large scale application of AI and ML I ever saw was for the military, helping them to predict when parts would wear out on large vehicles (air and land) so that that spares would be available and to hand with as little down time as possible!

Alternative Data gained more trust and ML algorithms got good training

Efi Pylarinou is the founder of Efi Pylarinou Advisory and a Fintech/Blockchain influencer – No.3 influencer in the finance sector by Refinitiv Global Social Media 2019.

The conversation around the interaction between data, algorithms and humans is evolving. The COVID19 induced crisis of course, provides us with more data and experience on the topic of data, algorithms, investing etc.
2020-06-02 04:36:07+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 5.9716, Raw Interest Score: 2.2128,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1255, Negative Sentiment 0.2825

Using Artificial Intelligence in Big Data

Big Data, just as the phrase implies, is simply huge or large or broad or complex or a high amount of a specific set of information which can be understood by, and stored in a computer/ machine. Professionally, Big Data is a field that studies various means of extracting, analysing, or dealing with sets of data that are so complex to be handled by traditional data-processing systems. Such an amount of data requires a system designed to stretch its extraction and analysis capability.

The ideal and most effective means of handling Big Data is with AI Our world is already steeped in Big Data. There is a massive amount of data online and offline about any topic you can think of, ranging from people, their routine, their preferences, etc to non-living things, their properties, their uses, etc.
2020-06-03 10:25:32+05:30 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.8280, Raw Interest Score: 1.9597,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2550, Negative Sentiment 0.1745

Big Data Advances Lead To Impressive Fintech Opportunities

As big data continues to improve and advance, it has given way to epic fintech opportunities. Read on for more information.

The huge demand for innovation in finances resulted in a massive rise of fintech companies in Europe. They usually offer more user-friendly solutions supported by accessible web and mobile apps. Clients are happy, companies are thriving (just look at companies like Revolut, Transferwise or Klarna) – sounds like amazing conditions for developing a fintech now, right? Let’s find out.

Why Do Data-Driven Fintech Companies Pop Up Like Mushrooms? Big data is creating a massive change in the dynamics of the financial industry. Sound financial companies are finding new ways to leverage AI and big data, which is going to be beneficial for consumers and for financial providers across the continent.
2020-05-31 23:46:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 5.3047, Raw Interest Score: 1.6002,
Positive Sentiment: 0.5699, Negative Sentiment 0.0877

Bye Bye, BI: Why Companies Should Transition to AI for Better Business Monitoring

We’ve come to rely on business intelligence (BI) tools as an essential part of business decision-making. From dashboards to automated reports, BI tools allow us to cash in our data for top-level insights.

We won’t deny that using traditional BI tools can make tasks such as reporting much more efficient, but the reality is that they can create a false sense of security surrounding data awareness. BI has several critical shortcomings that prevent businesses from optimizing business monitoring and incident remediation.
2020-06-03 07:35:03+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.5831, Raw Interest Score: 1.5975,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2429, Negative Sentiment 0.3270

DAS Slides: Data Governance and Data Architecture – Alignment and Synergies

Governance consists of committee meetings and stewardship roles. To others, it focuses on technical Data Management and controls. Holistic Data Governance combines both of these aspects, and a robust Data Architecture and associated diagrams can be the “glue” that binds business and IT governance together. Join this webinar for practical tips and hands-on exercises for aligning Data Architecture and Data Governance for business and IT success.

2020-06-01 21:00:30+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.3333, Raw Interest Score: 1.9728,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1361, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

Government presses ahead with Cummings’ data science revolution

A British artificial intelligence firm involved in the Vote Leave campaign has been handed a £400,000 contract to tap data from places such as social media sites to help steer the Government’s response to Covid-19.

A British artificial intelligence firm involved in the Vote Leave campaign has been handed a £400,000 contract to tap data from places such as social media sites to help steer the Government’s response to Covid-19.

Official documents from the Government show Faculty Science was awarded the contract by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) in April to provide data scientists who could set up “alternative data sources (e.g. social media, utility providers and telecom bills, credit rating agencies, etc.)”.

They would, the contract said, apply data science and machine learning to the data, which could help identify trends, and then develop “interactive dashboards” to inform policymakers.
2020-06-01 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.1690, Raw Interest Score: 1.6681,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0000, Negative Sentiment 0.0878

Infogix and MANTA Team Up on a Universal Data Governance Solution

Infogix, a leading provider of data management solutions, and MANTA, a unified data lineage platform, today announced a new partnership that integrates Infogix’s all-inclusive data management solution, Data360®, with MANTA’s unified lineage platform.

Infogix’s Data360 integrated data intelligence platform combines automated capabilities across data governance, data quality and data analytics to streamline data management processes and quickly provide users with actionable insights based on trusted data. By combining Data360 with MANTA’s unified lineage, organizations take IT self-service to the next level, bridging the gap between business and technical users—enabling business users to quickly search and browse metadata harvested by MANTA and curated by Data360.

2020-05-29 07:15:38+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.1688, Raw Interest Score: 1.9221,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1558, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

ICE Sonia Futures Reach Record Volumes

Average daily trading volumes of futures based on Sonia, the UK’s new risk-free rate, reached a record at ICE last month as the transition from Libor is still set for the end of next year despite the current Covid-19 pandemic.

ICE three-month Sonia futures hit their highest average daily volume in April.

Steven Hamilton, global head of financial derivatives at ICE Futures, told Markets Media: “In the last six months we increased the functionality to be able to trade Sonia futures with similar functionality to our sterling Libor contracts by introducing ‘packs and bundles’.”

2020-05-28 15:23:23+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.0553, Raw Interest Score: 1.7696,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1346, Negative Sentiment 0.1539

6 Advanced Skills That Will Get Data Scientists Hired In The Post-COVID World

The COVID-19 pandemic outbreak has urged companies to transform their strategies in order to have business continuity in the post-lockdown world. This, in turn, provided opportunities for data scientists to upskill/reskill themselves with relevant skill sets to keep up their relevancy. Therefore, it has become imperative for data science professionals to rethink their career strategies.

Alongside the automation boom, several data science skills sets are getting obsolete for business outcomes. Consequently, companies are currently looking to hire professionals with knowledge of advanced skill sets, which would be relevant for businesses in the post-COVID-19 world. In fact, a recent LinkedIn survey stated that amid the challenging times, data science professionals are cautiously optimistic about job opportunities. However, 63% of respondents who are active job seekers, 65% of full-time employees, and 61% of self-employed professionals, have stated that there will be an increased dependency on upskilling to survive this crisis.

Also, Zairus Master, CEO of Shine Learning, an online learning platform for professional courses, stated to the media that the company had seen a sharp rise in the number of enrollees opting to upskill themselves in courses like data science, blockchain, and machine learning. “… With remote working increasingly becoming the norm, we may see more demand for specific talent in this field,” said Master. To survive the post-COVID world, data science professionals need to learn some advanced skills that would make them hireable post this pandemic, here are a few skills that organisations would look for:
2020-06-02 05:30:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.9369, Raw Interest Score: 1.4833,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3134, Negative Sentiment 0.2194

RIA in a Box, Morningstar Team With Fintech Firms to Assist Advisors: Tech Roundup

RIA in a Box said Tuesday it teamed with Morningstar and fintech firms Redtail Technology and Riskalyze to help new RIAs (Registered IOnvestment Agents) work remotely and more efficiently in the wake of COVID-19.

The new Path to Independence Promotion will enable advisors who partner with RIA in a Box to register a new RIA to use cloud-based technology from the supporting firms, free of charge, based on their unique business needs through December, RIA in a Box said.
“As the RIA industry adapts to the new remote work environment, RIA in a Box recognizes the important role technology plays in helping RIAs service their clients efficiently and effectively, especially during a firm’s genesis,” it said.

When registering with RIA in a Box, new advisors will gain free access to the proprietary MyRIACompliance cybersecurity platform that it said “empowers RIAs to efficiently construct, implement, and document a robust cybersecurity compliance program with a single solution.”

2020-06-02 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.8577, Raw Interest Score: 1.2098,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3967, Negative Sentiment 0.0397


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AI & Machine Learning News. 08, June 2020

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AI & Machine Learning News. 08, June 2020

The Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Newsletter by CloudQuant

The Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning News clippings for Quants are provided algorithmically with CloudQuant’s NLP engine which seeks out articles relevant to our community and ranks them by our proprietary interest score. After all, shouldn’t you expect to see the news generated using AI?


Why TikTok made its user so obsessive? The AI Algorithm that got you hooked.

Tick Tok is taking the world by storm. According to Sensor Tower, the short video app has been downloaded more than 2 billion times globally on the App Store and Google Play. What’s the magic behind this sensational App that got you so obsessive? Not surprised, the answer is ML backed Recommendation Engine. Apart from the growth hacking strategy, this 60-second short video app is filled with memes, comedy, dancing, and talents. Equipped with one of the best Recommending Engine in the industry, You don’t need to search or know whom to watch. Personalized feed was provided at a click away.

Today, we are going to discuss how did TikTok use machine learning to analyze users’ interests and preferences through the interactions then display a personalized feed for different users. The recommendation engine is not new to the Data Science community. Instead, some consider it as the old generation AI system due to a lack of dizzying effects like image recognition or language generation.

2020-06-07 13:44:00.960000+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.5344, Raw Interest Score: 1.1716,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1400, Negative Sentiment 0.1400

CloudQuant Thoughts : The top 4 accounts on Tik Tok have a combined follower total of 190m yet, unless you are under 20, you probably do not know any of them (@charlidamelio 61.5, @zachking 44.4, @addisonre 44.2, @lorengray 43.9). This Chinese company is shaping the thoughts of our youth in 15 second bytes. Their AI algorithm just works. They have been researching presenting news and can read 5000 news sources and create a personlized news article for any user in 2 seconds. On Tik Tok you don’t choose, you just like or dislike and the feed keeps coming.

South Korea unveils US$62B ‘New Deal’ to reshape post-virus economy

The South Korean government unveiled a 76 trillion won (US$62 billion) ‘New Deal’ spending plan to reshape the economy in the aftermath of the pandemic after slashing its growth forecast for the year.

The plan, first outlined by Moon in April, aims to refocus the economy through 2025 by supporting job growth and new industries. It will partly be funded by a third extra budget now being drafted, according to a statement on the policy outlook for the second half.

The focus is to promote the use of fifth generation wireless networks and artificial intelligence across industries and foster digitalization in South Korea’s least developed areas. Investment will also support startups focusing on green technologies, while the country seeks to make its manufacturing sector more energy-efficient.
2020-05-28 Read the full story…

CloudQuant Thoughts : As we (hopefully) come out of this Covid lockdown with the damage it has done to our economies, this is what we should be doing. We should be making major steps forwards in technology, aligning our spending with a better future and positioning ourselves at the very front of AI and ML.

Widespread face mask use could make facial recognition less accurate

Amazon’s widely sold facial recognition technology is ‘robust’ enough to counter face masks, but Apple’s technology falls short of the mark

As more people began to wear masks in public to help prevent the spread of coronavirus, iPhone owners quickly spotted a problem. With people’s noses and mouths covered, the phone’s facial recognition system used to unlock its devices stopped functioning, frustrating users.

Apple issued a quick fix. Now iPhones instantly recognise if a person is wearing a mask, and asks them to enter a passcode, instead of attempting the facial recognition system. But the original inconvenience demonstrated a greater problem.

Like Apple’s Face ID, which requires eyes, nose and mouth to be visible in order for it to work, many algorithms that are trained on publicly available datasets tend to focus on all of our facial features, typically with emphasis on the lower region around the lips. It is these algorithms, largely used by smartphones, that will continue to fail while people are wearing face masks, experts say.

2020-06-04 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.5113, Raw Interest Score: 1.0169,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1977, Negative Sentiment 0.3107

CloudQuant Thoughts : Chinese facial recognition is already working through masks and with this recent Deep Learning white paper claiming to be able to accurately reproduce a face from an image of that persons ear, ML and AI appear to be leapfrogging the problem.

Automation, Algos, AI Rebound in Fixed Income Trading

One step back, two steps forward.

That was the path for automation, algorithms and artificial intelligence applications in fixed income trading over the past few months.

Extreme volatility in March amid the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic prompted some traders to back off newer, less proven trading technologies in favor of old-fashioned telephone transactions. But as vol subsided, automation, algos and AI reclaimed a front burner — and market participants and observers say the tumult made the technologies stronger ahead of the next disruption.
2020-06-04 19:23:11+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 6.3033, Raw Interest Score: 2.1317,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1895, Negative Sentiment 0.1421

CloudQuant Thoughts : The only learning I can see coming out of the Bond markets and Fixed Income Trading is that one should watch trading volume over volatility. Write yourself a FED detection routine so you know when the FED is stepping in.

ARK Invest: AI training costs dropped 100-fold between 2017 and 2019

Machine learning systems are cheaper to train now than ever before. That’s the assertion of ARK Invest, which today published a meta-analysis indicating the cost of training is improving at 50 times the pace of Moore’s law, the principle that computer hardware performance doubles every two years.

In its report, ARK found that while computing devoted to training doubled in alignment with Moore’s law from 1960 to 2010, training compute complexity — the amount of petaflops (quadrillions of operations per second) per day — increased by 10 times yearly since 2010. Coinciding with this, training costs over the past three years declined by 10 times yearly; in 2017, the cost to train an image classifier like ResNet-50 on a public cloud was around $1,000, while in 2019, it was around $10.

2020-06-04 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.4365, Raw Interest Score: 1.2768,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2043, Negative Sentiment 0.2298

CloudQuant Thoughts : This is both staggering and totally expected. And as AI improves and begins to design both its own software and hardware, we will see massive steps forward in performance and cost (both $ and energy).

Arduous Hurdles To Overcome In Scaling Up Of AI Autonomous Cars

Scaling up is abuzz.

What does it mean to seek or reach scale? Generally, for start-ups, the notion is that you sometimes start relatively small, perhaps making a prototype or a minimally viable product (MVP), and show it off to gain attention and funding. Potential investors and actual investors are usually of the belief that the one-time version of your product can become a mass-produced one. This is not always the case or might be exorbitantly costly to achieve. Something that you might have hand-crafted could be terribly difficult and expensive to recreate and produce on any sizable volume. Furthermore, your product might work for a handful of situations that you tested, but once it is put into wider use, you could unexpectedly discover that it has limitations or flaws of a fatal kind or that constrain your market potential for the product.

Here’s then the question for the day: Will AI-based self-driving driverless autonomous cars be able to scale? Many outside the driverless car industry are assuming that if you can make one self-driving car, you can make zillions of them. This assumption is not necessarily the case.

2020-06-04 21:30:06+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.3975, Raw Interest Score: 0.8817,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1126, Negative Sentiment 0.2189

Why the buzz around DeepMind is dissipating as it transitions from games to science

DeepMind shot to fame in 2016 when it built a computer program called AlphaGo that learned how to play the board game Go and became better than any human. The London AI lab, which is owned by Alphabet, is now going through a quieter period, with far less media attention. DeepMind is shifting its focus from building “AI agents” that can play games to building AI agents that can have real world impact, particularly in areas of science like biology.

DeepMind’s army of 1,000 plus people, which includes hundreds of highly-paid PhD graduates, continues to pump out academic paper after academic paper, but only a smattering of the work gets picked up by the mainstream media. The research lab has churned out over 1,000 papers and 13 of them have been published by Nature or Science, which are widely seen as the world’s most prestigious academic journals. Nick Bostrom, the author of Superintelligence and the director of the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute described DeepMind’s team as world-class, large, and diverse.

2020-06-05 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.0816, Raw Interest Score: 0.9776,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2834, Negative Sentiment 0.1700

How I passed the TensorFlow Developer Certification Exam – And how you can too

Curriculum — what I studied to build the skills necessary for passing the exam

It should be noted that before I started studying for the exam, I had some hands-on experience building several projects with TensorFlow.

The experienced TensorFlow and deep learning practitioner will likely find they can go through the following curriculum at about the same pace I did (3 weeks total), maybe faster.

2020-06-07 02:37:34.940000+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.2735, Raw Interest Score: 1.2747,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0000, Negative Sentiment 0.0524

The Essential Guide to Training Data (PDF Behind Registration Wall)

There’s a saying: “Garbage in, garbage out.” It’s common knowledge that every machine learning solution needs a good algorithm powering it, but what gets far less press is what actually goes into these algorithms — the training data itself. Your model is only as good as the data it’s trained on. The Essential Guide to Training Data covers everything you need to know about creating the training data necessary to drive successful machine learning projects.
2020-06-05 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 5.1836, Raw Interest Score: 1.9608,
Positive Sentiment: 0.6536, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

Nasdaq Invests in Automated Financial Crime Investigator

Nasdaq Ventures Invests in Automated Financial Crime Investigations Firm Caspian

“Caspian’s proven solution solves a huge pain point in the industry, dramatically increasing analyst productivity and resulting in meaningful cost-savings for bank compliance teams,” said Chris Brannigan, CEO, Caspian, “Our machine learning technology is validated through production use at global financial institutions, making risk decisions that are fully explainable and regulator friendly. Through the investment and partnership with Nasdaq we are excited to expand our offering at a global scale.”

2020-06-04 13:14:13+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.7683, Raw Interest Score: 2.0688,
Positive Sentiment: 0.6179, Negative Sentiment 0.5373

How good are the pollsters? Analyzing Five-Thirty-Eight’s dataset

We analyze the pollster ranking dataset from the venerable political prediction website Five-Thirty-Eight.

This is an Election Year and polling scene around the elections (both General Presidential and House/Senate) is heating up. This will become more and more exciting in the coming days, with tweets, counter-t…
2020-06-07 19:26:49.741000+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 1.9532, Raw Interest Score: 0.7894,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1619, Negative Sentiment 0.1316

Artificial Intelligence Is Dumb Without The Elasticity Quotient

How much has your business really changed since implementing AI? I’m not asking about lift for discrete metrics such as customer loyalty, campaign revenue, or even process optimization. Was the DNA of your enterprise altered by tweaking the edges? Of course not, because the elasticity quotient was not met.

The elasticity quotient links the KPIs of the business with economic and market behaviors, letting enterprises expand, contract, and adapt at will for seen and unforeseen events.

Forrester’s analysis of more than 100 case studies provided by software vendors and service providers shows a disconnect. AI leads to measurable improvement in process outcomes, but less than 10% of firms demonstrated AI implementations affecting overall business revenue, profitability, and shareholder value. In one case, the board of directors of a transportation company asked why they should be investing more in AI after three years with no significant overall return.
2020-06-02 19:04:55-04:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.6183, Raw Interest Score: 1.7262,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2877, Negative Sentiment 0.2877

5 Essential Papers on AI Training Data

Many data scientists claim that around 80% of their time is spent on data preprocessing, and for good reasons, as collecting, annotating, and formatting data are crucial tasks in machine learning. This article will help you understand the importance of these tasks, as well as learn methods and tips from other researchers.

Below, we will highlight academic papers from reputable universities and research teams on various training data topics. The topics include the importance of human annotators, how to create large datasets in a relatively short time, ways to securely handle training data that may include private information, and more.

2020-06-05 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.1553, Raw Interest Score: 2.1545,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2428, Negative Sentiment 0.1365

Essential Artificial Intelligence Trends That Can Shape The Future

These important artificial intelligence trends can help shape the future, and they can play a key role in planning for 2020 and beyond.

It goes without saying that everybody is interested in adopting Artificial Intelligence and that too on a larger scale. However, based on global surveys, almost 70 percent of newer startups aren’t using a lot of AI tools with their absence having minimal impact on the growth of the concerned organizations. That said, while some aren’t sure about the effectiveness of this technology, we feel that this untapped resource isn’t being utilized in a desirable manner. This is why we thought of sharing our insights regarding the latest and upcoming AI trends that could be strategic inclusions, especially in the next few years to come.
2020-06-05 14:57:36+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.0101, Raw Interest Score: 1.5310,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3682, Negative Sentiment 0.2907

OpenAI and Dota 2 Change the Face of Gaming Forever

Elon Musk has unveiled OpenAI, a new AI project that is disrupting the gaming industry. How will it all play out?

We learn from our mistakes, and artificial intelligence is the same. AI learns best when it is beaten. Elon Musk has founded an AI lab that has developed a squad of AI bots to compete in the game of Dota 2 and some other games as well.

Video games lack the intellectual reputation of chess and Go, but they are much harder for computers to compete in. Video games are more complex, and ever-changing, especially MOBAs like Dota 2. At first “OpenAI five” (as the AI team is called) beat the current reigning champions 2-0…

2020-06-01 18:01:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.8731, Raw Interest Score: 1.0930,
Positive Sentiment: 0.5886, Negative Sentiment 0.2803

Why Crypto needs robo-advisors?

Robotization coupled with artificial intelligence (AI) are reshaping every aspect of our lives. When we hear the term “robo-advisor”, our imagination is filled with images from science-fiction movies. But when we refer to robo-advisors, we mean things like bots, virtual robots or algorithms that automate different tasks. Robo-advisors grew out of the ashes of the 2008 financial crisis. Robo-advisors gained traction when people lost faith in trad…
2020-06-01 00:00:00 Read the full story (subscription required)…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.8158, Raw Interest Score: 1.3827,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1796, Negative Sentiment 0.1437

BNP Paribas Securities Services uses NLG to write client exec summaries

BNP Paribas Securities Services is using Natural Language Generation (NLG) to write one-page executive summaries for its custody clients.

The bank says NLG allows it to transform large amounts of structured global custody data into “concise and insightful commentaries”. Clients will receive their traditional monthly statistics reports providing in-depth data on their operations but will now also get the brief summary.

This will alert them to unusual patterns and highlight areas for improvement and best practices, boosting oversight, controls and efficiency, says BNP. For example, the summary points to the percentage of corporate actions instructions received after deadline or to manual instructions rates and suggests specific actions.
2020-06-05 14:52:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.7827, Raw Interest Score: 2.5292,
Positive Sentiment: 0.4864, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

What Are The Pros And Cons Of Artificial Intelligence?

The pros and cons of artificial intelligence are important to consider as the technology grows. Here’s what to know about it.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a hot topic these days, but it’s not a perfect technology. AI is like almost anything else in that it has both advantages and downsides. What are the pros and cons of artificial intelligence? Here’s what people bring up most often.

  1. It Boosts Efficiency
  2. It Improves Forecasting
  3. It Enhances Quality Control
  4. It Makes Humans Too Trusting in Technology
  5. It Shows Biases
  6. It Lacks Universal Ethical Standards

2020-06-08 10:30:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.5066, Raw Interest Score: 1.2459,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3250, Negative Sentiment 0.2979

The AI community says Black Lives Matter, but more work needs to be done

This week, as thousands of protestors marched in cities around the U.S. to bring attention to the death of George Floyd, police brutality, and abuses at the highest levels of government, members of the AI research community made their own small gestures of support. NeurIPS, one of the world’s largest AI and machine learning conferences, extended its technical paper submission deadline by 48 hours. And researchers pledged to match donations to Black in AI, a nonprofit promoting the sharing ideas, collaborations, and discussion of initiatives to increase the presence of black people in the field of AI.

“NeurIPS grieves for its Black community members devastated by the cycle of police and vigilante violence. [We] mourn … for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Regis Korchinski-Paquet, and thousands of black people who have lost their lives to this violence. [And we stand] with its black community to affirm that, today and every day, black lives matter,” the NeurIPS board wrote in a statement announcing its decision.
2020-06-05 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.3767, Raw Interest Score: 1.3263,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2002, Negative Sentiment 0.3504

The Logical Data Fabric: A Single Place for Data Integration

The ability to provide a single place for instantaneous data access can mean business continuity or closure. Many nations found this out during the recent global crisis, as countries needed to know the number of tests taken and the infection rate in order to determine both the virus’ spread and who to quarantine. Unfortunately, the required data did not become available in time to prevent a widespread lockdown, shuttering many businesses. Simultaneously, demands for immediate integrated critical data only increased.

Getting high-quality data now, for discovery and solutions, is a top priortiy for Ravi Shankar, the Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer for Denodo. In a recent DATAVERSITY® interview, Shankar explained how data virtualization technologies are evolving and creating a logical data fabric, putting data all into one place and enabling better and faster business decisions.
2020-06-04 07:35:27+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.3695, Raw Interest Score: 1.8913,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2113, Negative Sentiment 0.1308

DeepMind Releases Acme – A Framework To Decrease Complexities In AI Workflows

DeepMind, on 1st June, released Acme — a framework for building reliable, efficient, research-oriented RL algorithms. According to the researchers, the idea behind building the Acme framework was to decrease complexities in ML-based solutions, as well as help researchers and firms, to scale effortlessly.

While we have witnessed major advancements in deep learning and computational power, complexities in developing robust solutions have also increased rapidly. Such challenges, according to the authors of the paper, has increased the difficulties for researchers to rapidly prototype ideas, thereby causing serious reproducibility issues.

Reproducibility has brought numerous criticism to the AI-based models as it has decreased trust among the users. However, with Acme, the researchers of DeepMind believe that the framework will mitigate the challenges of reproducibility and simplify the process for researchers to develop novel and creative algorithms. With Acme, one will able to scale while ensuring RL agents deliver desired results.
2020-06-04 14:14:01+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.2588, Raw Interest Score: 1.3514,
Positive Sentiment: 0.4660, Negative Sentiment 0.2330

Citi just launched a new team that will apply data science to dealmaking. It shows how much tech is changing investment banking.

Citigroup is forming a new investment banking team, combining the firm’s activism and shareholder defense, data science, and corporate finance advisory groups. The group aims to infuse data science into specialized teams to bolster dealmaking advice and make it more accessible across the division. The new global unit, called strategic advisory solutions, will number more than 80 bankers and will be led by top activism defense banker Muir Paterson.
2020-06-05 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.0600, Raw Interest Score: 1.6235,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1635, Negative Sentiment 0.0934

Now’s the time to look at best practice around risk modelling

Using advanced mathematical modelling for calculating, predicting and evaluating risk is nothing new. Financial institutions of all kinds have long been using numerical libraries, whether home-grown or from a third party, containing mathematical, statistical and — increasingly — machine learning algorithms. However, the increasing complexity, market evolution, economic challenges and sheer scale of the data involved all mean that risk modelling is more imperative yet more challenging than ever before. Now may be the ideal time to evaluate and even re-think the processes and tools being used for risk analysis.

Given the potential impact on a business, everyone within a financial services firm benefits from having some understanding of the best practice strategy around risk analysis: get it wrong and the organisation is vulnerable; get it right, and it can be more confident in their decision-making and forward-planning.

2020-06-08 13:51:27 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.0355, Raw Interest Score: 1.6721,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2306, Negative Sentiment 0.2306

Making the Most of Your Investment in Hadoop (White Paper behind Registration Wall)

Hadoop is a popular enabler for big data. But with data volumes growing exponentially, analytics have become restricted and painfully slow, requiring arduous data preparation. Often, querying weeks, months, or years of data is simply infeasible, and organizations succeed in analyzing only a fraction of their data.

The now expensive nodes you need to support are strained, and the complex data architecture built around Hadoop struggles to bring business insights.

Download the whitepaper to learn:

  • How to deal with the exponential growth of data
  • How to reduce time spent on data preparation
  • How to generate insights faster from ad-hoc queries of raw data

2020-06-02 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.9940, Raw Interest Score: 1.7964,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3992, Negative Sentiment 0.3992

What Is a Data Cloud? And 11 Other Snowflake Enhancements

Snowflake has changed how the industry thinks about data warehouses with its cloud-native offering, which has been adopted by 4,000 organizations, including 2,000 in the last year alone. Now the company is taking the concept one step further with the introduction of a data cloud, which the company is positioning as a one-stop shop where organizations can execute a full range of data-oriented tasks – not just data warehousing and SQL analytics, but also machine learning, data engineering, and monetization of third-party data.

According to Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman, the origins of the data cloud concept began with the rise of public clouds from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, which Snowflake sits atop. Simultaneously, the rise of software as a service (SaaS) applications, or “application clouds,” from the likes of Salesforce, Workday, and SAP, have provided transactional data to process on the clouds.

But getting the transactional data into the public cloud so they can work together in a harmonious manner is much easier said than done, Slootman says.
2020-06-02 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.7260, Raw Interest Score: 1.6381,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2694, Negative Sentiment 0.1293

Discover the Power of DataOps

A new methodology is on the rise at insights-hungry enterprises looking to bring improved quality and reduced cycle times to data analytics. Borrowing from Agile Development, DevOps and statistical process control, DataOps is poised to revolutionize data analytics with its eye on the entire data lifecycle, from data preparation, to reporting.

However, improving the flow of data between managers and consumers within an organization through greater communication, integration and automation is no simple task, and it requires cultural changes as well as enabling technologies. DBTA recently held a roundtable webinar featuring Dan Potter, VP of product marketing, Qlik; Douglas McDowell, chief strategy officer, SentryOne; and Chris Bergh, CEO and head chef, DataKitchen, who discussed key success factors and emerging best practices in the DataOps space.

2020-06-03 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.7027, Raw Interest Score: 1.4742,
Positive Sentiment: 0.5265, Negative Sentiment 0.1053

What is machine learning, and how does it work? (Video Explainer 4m)

At Pew Research Center, we collect and analyze data in a variety of ways. Besides asking people what they think through surveys, we also regularly study things like images, videos and even the text of religious sermons.

In a digital world full of ever-expanding datasets like these, it’s not always possible for humans to analyze such vast troves of information themselves. That’s why our researchers have increasingly made use of a method called machine learning. Broadly speaking, machine learning uses computer programs to identify patterns across thousands or even millions of data points. In many ways, these techniques automate tasks that researchers have done by hand for years.

2020-06-04 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.6852, Raw Interest Score: 1.5858,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0000, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

Expanding Your Data Science and Machine Learning Capabilities (Webinar Registration)

Expanding Your Data Science and Machine Learning Capabilities

SPECIAL DBTA ROUNDTABLE WEBINAR THURSDAY, JUNE 25, 2020 – 11:00 am PT / 2:00 pm ET

Surviving and thriving with data science and machine learning means not only having the right platforms, tools and skills, but identifying use cases and implementing processes that can deliver repeatable, scalable business value. The challenges are numerous, from selecting data sets and data platforms, to architecting and optimizing data pipelines, and model training and deployment. In responses, new solutions have emerged to deliver key capabilities in areas including visualization, self-service and real-time analytics. Along with the rise of DataOps, greater collaboration and automation have been identified as key success factors.
2020-06-25 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.5744, Raw Interest Score: 1.7004,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2429, Negative Sentiment 0.0810

20 Developer Roles with Notably High Salaries

Which types of developer roles result in the biggest salaries? That’s a vital question for developers who are plotting out their career trajectory, and questioning whether they should aim for a management role at some point.

This year’s Stack Overflow Developer Survey is a good place to start. Based on 8,006 responses, the survey’s data shows that, at least in the United States, engineering managers make the most money (at an average of $152,000 per year) followed by specialists in various development categories such as data science, machine learning, and DevOps. Check out the chart:
2020-06-08 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.4937, Raw Interest Score: 1.8644,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1271, Negative Sentiment 0.1695

Semiconductor Miniaturisation Is Running Out Of Steam. Time To Focus On Smarter Algorithms

Recently, a team of researchers from MIT CSAIL recommended that researchers should focus on three key areas that prioritise to deliver computing speed-ups, which are new algorithms, higher-performance software and more specialised hardware, and the need for moving away from focusing on creating only smaller hardware.

The researchers stated that semiconductor miniaturisation is running out of steam as a viable way to grow computer performance, and industries will soon face challenges in their productivity. However, the opportunities for growth in computing performance will still be available if the researchers focus more on software, algorithms, including hardware architecture.

2020-06-07 02:30:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.4562, Raw Interest Score: 1.4319,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3420, Negative Sentiment 0.1496

ZoomInfo raises $887M in blockbuster IPO, rings virtual Nasdaq bell

Another company is zooming onto Wall Street, signaling that the window for initial public offerings is opening up even amid a fragile period for the global economy.

ZoomInfo Technologies, a Vancouver, Wash.-based software company that uses machine learning to help more than 15,000 customers drive sales and marketing programs, raised $887 million as the 13-year-old company sold shares at $21 per share. The 1,287-person company — led by co-founder and CEO Henry Schuck and originally known as DiscoverOrg — is starting trading today on Nasdaq under the ticker ZI.

2020-06-04 15:21:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.4374, Raw Interest Score: 1.2696,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1336, Negative Sentiment 0.2339

What is the Difference Between CNN and RNN?

Convolutional Neural Networks and Recurrent Neural Networks are commonly used in ML today. However, they are often used for completely different use cases.

In machine learning, each type of artificial neural network is tailored to certain tasks. This article will introduce two types of neural networks: convolutional neural networks (CNN) and recurrent neural networks (RNN). Using popular Youtube videos and visual aids, we will explain the difference between CNN and RNN and how they are used in computer vision and natural language processing.

2020-06-08 04:00:37.540000+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.3790, Raw Interest Score: 1.3259,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1535, Negative Sentiment 0.0977

The Long (and Artificial) Arm of the Law: How AI is Used in Law Enforcement

Artificial intelligence. Nowadays, it seems like it’s everywhere. From the computers we use at work, to the cars we drive, to the self-checkout stations and ATMs we use practically every day.

Now, not only do we speak to, and through, our technology, but our technology is also speaking back. It helps us in our banking, our healthcare, our entertainment, and beyond.

But today, new uses are being found for artificial intelligence (AI), uses designed to keep us safe and well. In fact, it may well turn out that what AI is actually best at is not keeping us productive or occupied. It may be that what AI is best at is keeping us, as well as our men and women in blue, alive. For example, AI might be used to help police officers identify high-risk areas, individuals, or situations, using applications already proving highly effective in the healthcare industry.

2020-06-03 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.2651, Raw Interest Score: 0.9582,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1825, Negative Sentiment 0.4563

BMC Unveils AIOps for the Modern Mainframe

BMC, which just completed the purchase of Compuware, has unveiled BMC AMI Operational Insight, an AI-driven solution that uses machine learning to detect anomalies and maximize lead time for remediation to mitigate mainframe issues before they become business problems.

BMC offers a full suite of mainframe software development, delivery, and performance solutions that empower organizations to scale Agile and DevOps with a fully integrated toolchain.

2020-06-15 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.1748, Raw Interest Score: 1.6336,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3112, Negative Sentiment 0.5834

Trends In Business Intelligence And Data Science For Retail

When it comes to retail, it’s important to watch for trends in business intelligence and data science.

Succeeding in retail isn’t easy. Shifting customer tastes, shrinkage risks and reduced traffic at physical stores are just some of the challenges retailers may face as they try to operate profitably. Many are relying on data science and business intelligence (BI) tools to get ahead of competitors and stay resilient in a challenging marketplace.

Here are five trends in business intelligence and data science for retail worth knowing:

2020-06-05 09:30:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 1.9749, Raw Interest Score: 1.0083,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2486, Negative Sentiment 0.2348


This news clip post is produced algorithmically based upon CloudQuant’s list of sites and focus items we find interesting. We used natural language processing (NLP) to determine an interest score, and to calculate the sentiment of the linked article using the Loughran and McDonald Sentiment Word Lists.

If you would like to add your blog or website to our search crawler, please email customer_success@cloudquant.com. We welcome all contributors.

This news clip and any CloudQuant comment is for information and illustrative purposes only. It is not, and should not be regarded as investment advice or as a recommendation regarding a course of action. This information is provided with the understanding that CloudQuant is not acting in a fiduciary or advisory capacity under any contract with you, or any applicable law or regulation. You are responsible to make your own independent decision with respect to any course of action based on the content of this post.

The post AI & Machine Learning News. 08, June 2020 appeared first on CloudQuant.

Alternative Data News. 10, June 2020

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Alternative Data News. 10, June 2020

The AltDataNewsletter by CloudQuant

Finding sources and uses for alternative data can be difficult. At CloudQuant we regularly read and search the internet for new sources of data that can be used in our mission to find alpha signals and build quantitative trading strategies. We recognize that we are technology and data junkies so we wrote our own crawler that specifically seeks out web pages, posts, and news articles that give us a snapshot of what is going on in the world of Alt Data. The following is a collection of articles that we think you will find interesting from the past week.


Corporate Flight Tracker from Reddit – Data is Beautiful

Data Sources : FAA Registry, Open-Sky Network

Tools : Python

I built a tool that tracks flights by executive private jets. Data that hedge funds buy in order to predict corporate mergers is now available to you for free.

In April 2019, a jet owned by Occidental Petroleum Corp. touched down in Omaha. Two days later, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway made a $10 billion investment in the company.

Hedge funds have been using corporate flight data to predict M&A activity and investments for years, but existing data providers are too expensive for non-institutional investors, sometimes costing upwards of $100,000 a year.

I built this free dashboard using publicly-available data from the FAA and the Open-Sky Network.

The way that the planes are tracked is by recording information sent from their ADS-B, which periodically broadcasts the plane’s position. This can be used to calculate the plane’s velocity, direction, and it is how we are able to accurately estimate points of departure and arrival.

2020-06-08 Read the full story… 

CloudQuant Thoughts : Alternative Data is not the exclusive resource of experts. QuiverQuant was set up by a couple of students in February 2020 to take advantage of freely available data and present it in an easy to view and use way. Also check out their tracker of Robin Hood users’ trading activity. Kudos!

Data science in the age of accelerations – Diary of a Data Scientist

How data scientists, their managers, and their executives can stay on the accelerating treadmill of data science.

In 2004, Google published a white paper describing MapReduce, an innovative programming model for parallel processing of large data. As a data scientist in 2013, my company paid for me to take a course on MapReduce. But by 2014, Google had abandoned MapReduce as its primary processing model for large data, leading to questions like, is MapReduce already obsolete or outdated? Is there any benefit of using it over newer alternatives? Is there still a future for MapReduce?

In only 7 years as a data scientist, I’ve watched many technologies come and go. Some, like MapReduce, I got to on their decay into obsolescence. Others, like computational notebooks, I caught on as a practitioner and continue using to this day. Yet for new ones, like deep learning frameworks, it’s the data scientists I manage who have had the time and exposure to master them while I only offer strategic advice on their implementation and deployment. Part of the accelerated lifecycle of these technologies is due to the infancy of data science and my progression into management, but much of it reflects a radical, structural shift in how our world works. As Thomas Friedman argues in Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations, the world is experiencing a series of accelerations — across technology, globalization, and climate change — that require people to adapt more and faster as the world changes across many domains. And data science as a profession is no exception.
2020-06-10 02:48:54.684000+00:00 Read the full story…

Weighted Interest Score: 3.7581, Raw Interest Score: 2.2222,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1434, Negative Sentiment 0.2509

CloudQuant Thoughts : An interesting article, who’s main thrust is that most Data Scientists know next to nothing about the subjects they are tasked to investigate, they learn on the job. And that the most successful companies recognize that and allow their data scientists breathing room and support to both learn and educate. An interesting article, pity it is behind the Medium.com paywall.

Coatue’s $350 million quant hedge fund pulled money out of the market in a move that exposes the dangers of data-driven trades

At billionaire Philippe Laffont’s Coatue Management, a new $350 million quant fund significantly reduced its exposure to the markets starting in early April, sources tell Business Insider. The fund relies on real-time data feeds to inform its investment process, but the global shutdown that slammed many quant funds distorted the feeds. The fund is still active and trading, but not at the level it was before the pandemic hit, sources said.
2020-06-03 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 6.0562, Raw Interest Score: 2.4030,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0000, Negative Sentiment 0.4343

CloudQuant Thoughts : You are only as good as your historical data, and if current market activity bears no relation to anything in history then you cannot complain that the data driven model didn’t work!

Hedge funds continue fightback, as equity managers soar amid lockdown-easing and activists seize on dislocation

Hedge funds are continuing to recover from sharp losses suffered earlier this year, notching up positive returns for the second successive month in May as economies slowly reopen following the coronavirus lockdown, new data from Hedge Fund Research shows. All long/short equity hedge fund strategies clawed back profits last month, including sector-specialist managers such as technology and materials, while activist and special situations funds are making hay amid widespread global market dislocations.

The HFRI Fund Weighted Composite Index – which tracks the performance of more than 1,400 single manager funds of various strategies globally – gained 2.5 per cent in May, with equity hedge funds and event driven strategies leading the pack. The rise follows a 4.79 per cent advance in April – the index’s first positive return of 2020 and its biggest monthly rise since the 5.15 per cent gain in May 2009.
2020-06-08 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 5.3640, Raw Interest Score: 2.4377,
Positive Sentiment: 0.4382, Negative Sentiment 0.3561

CloudQuant Thoughts : As one rises, another falls, Zero Sum Game. Discretionary Traders and Hedge Fund Managers have been able to spot and quickly adapt to the new normal. No model could predict the massive injection of cash by the FED into Bonds (and now Bond related ETFs) but human discretionary traders were able pivot rapidly to the new normal.

Online Brokers Launch New Products and Features as Markets Rally

While bullish retail traders continued to place online transactions at a record pace amid a historical rally for stocks, online brokers and fintech developers are rolling out new products and features. Early statistics for trading in May show continued trading surges compared to the same month in 2019, though they are flat compared to April.

More Outages on Big Trading Days – A surge in trading the morning of June 5 caused a number of problems for online trading platforms, peaking around 9:30AM Eastern time. Downdetector reported1 issues at Charles Schwab, E*TRADE, Fidelity, Merrill, Robinhood, and TD Ameritrade. On Twitter, customers of M1 Finance, and thinkorswim were complaining. Customers who lodged complaints with their brokers on Twitter were asked to call support lines.

2020-06-05 22:07:22.920000+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.0889, Raw Interest Score: 1.4826,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0710, Negative Sentiment 0.2042

CloudQuant Thoughts : Most traditional software development takes advantage of new hardware power to the maximum of its benefit. Stock Trading is one of those unusual beasts where, if you do follow this model, come the Grey/Black Swan events, your software WILL FAIL.

What Investors Should Look For In AI Startups?

The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically deranged the economic activity globally, and the startup ecosystem hasn’t been spared as well. Majority of them have been struggling with their cash inflows as investors have been hesitant in spending their money, which, in turn, has diminished startups’ ability to continue their businesses. In fact, in a recent NASSCOM report, it has been revealed that approximately 3 to 40 percent of the tech startups have temporarily paused their business operations or are scrambling to continue it all together. A lot of this could be attributed to the short runway time that majority of these tech startups come with.

However, this pandemic has been a hopeful prospect for AI startups as the majority of the investors are currently looking to tap into the opportunities this disruption has created. With businesses getting halted amid this lockdown, many of them, from a range of industries, are relying on data science to keep up their relevance in the market. Many of them are also embracing artificial intelligence to automate their processes, cut their costs and stable their finances amid this crisis.
2020-06-10 02:30:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.7135, Raw Interest Score: 2.0300,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1986, Negative Sentiment 0.3199

CloudQuant Thoughts : Quoting a Barclays report, “40% of AI startups, in reality, do not use artificial intelligence in the core of their business process”. “26% of companies only use AI for chatbots, whereas other 21% only use it for cyber-attack protection”. This is annoying yet it should not be a surprise and should provide succor to those of us in honest AI and ML research.


ESG Section

Are Sustainable Investment Options Coming to Your 401(k)?

Go green in more ways than one with responsible retirement investing.

You recycle, ride a bike whenever possible, avoid products with excessive packaging, and never let the faucet run while brushing your teeth. Given the opportunity, you’d love to align your eco-conscious approach with your financial goals by supporting companies that prioritize sustainability. But the last time you looked, your 401(k) fund options ranged from target-date funds to index funds — without a hint of sustainability to be found.

The good news is that may be changing. Sustainable investing is on the rise, and only partly because more people care about corporations’ environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practices. The other factor is an increasing recognition that companies with solid ESG track records can also produce competitive financial results.
2020-06-09 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.1344, Raw Interest Score: 1.9846,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2426, Negative Sentiment 0.2426

CloudQuant Thoughts : “According to Morningstar, 89% of its ESG indexes outperformed their broader market counterparts in the first quarter of 2020”. 401k’s are still stuck in the past mindset that Environment = Poor Financial Performance. There is no doubt that the current and upcoming generations are more aggressive about the Environment, Social and Governance behavior of the companies they work for and buy from. CloudQuant seeks out high quality data sets, tests them and makes them available (with source code and access to data so the results can be confirmed). Head over to our Catalog page for more information.

ESG Fund Ratings: Not Perfect, but Still Valuable

Critics of environmental, social and governance fund ratings often cite numerous reasons as to why the ratings lack validity. While the ratings aren’t perfect, we explore some of the reasons why we believe they are worthwhile and how they may continue to improve.

Rating ESG Funds – One common argument regarding the validity of ESG ratings is that there are hundreds of ESG data, analytics and research providers, and that their scores are sometimes conflicting, making it difficult to draw conclusions. The reality is that there are only a handful of prominent ESG research firms, most notably Sustainalytics and MSCI.

These firms have long played an important role in gathering and assessing information about companies’ ESG practices. This has been and remains a considerable challenge. Company disclosures on ESG practices have always been voluntary, are rarely audited, and are not standardized. But the quality and quantity of ESG data continue to evolve and improve. And, as companies realize that risks to their brands and reputations could harm their social license to operate, they are increasingly disclosing their ESG practices. In fact, in 2011, only 20% of companies in the S&P 500 published a sustainability report, increasing to 86% in 2018.
2020-06-09 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.7071, Raw Interest Score: 1.5094,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2012, Negative Sentiment 0.3019

Investors Don’t Want to Shun Companies With Sustainability Issues: Survey

One in three U.S. investors in a survey released Monday by Newton Investment Management said they wanted their fund managers to actively engage with management of companies with sustainability issues rather than invest just in sustainable ones.

This preference showed up a stark difference between generations, with 43% of millennials wanting engagement versus only 19% of investors older than 50.
“We believe that ESG is not a label, it’s finance 101,” Andrew Parry, head of sustainable investment at Newton Investment Management, said in a statement.

“That is, environmental, social and governance insights are not add-ons, but part of the mosaic of inputs that influence good investing decisions. That’s a message that’s resonating more and more with investors, and one we believe the study findings help to underscore.”

2020-06-09 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.6844, Raw Interest Score: 1.7802,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1695, Negative Sentiment 0.1978

Jacqueline Loh: Keeping green and impact in focus

Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen. Good morning. Thank you for inviting me to the eighth AVPN Conference. I am very glad that AVPN has pressed on with this flagship event virtually in these unprecedented times.

Global investments that factor in environmental, social and governance (ESG) considerations have increased by 70% between 2014 and 20185.
2020-06-10 03:44:53+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.9491, Raw Interest Score: 1.7778,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3686, Negative Sentiment 0.2060


Wilshire Liquid Alternative Index returns 1.54 per cent in May

The Wilshire Liquid Alternative Index, which provides a representative baseline for how the broad liquid alternative investment category performs, returned 1.54 per cent in May, outperforming the 1.44 per cent monthly return of the HFRX Global Hedge Fund Index. The Wilshire Liquid Alternative Index family aims to deliver precise market measures for the performance of diversified liquid alternative investment strategies implemented through mutual fund structures, backed by a proprietary classification methodology.

“Markets continued to rally in May as optimism surrounding the development of a COVID-19 vaccine and the steady re-opening of the economy encouraged investors,” says Jason Schwarz, Chief Operating Officer of Wilshire Associates. The Wilshire Liquid Alternative Multi-Strategy Index, which includes both single and multi-manager funds, returned 1.36 per cent in May.

2020-06-09 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.7335, Raw Interest Score: 2.8711,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3501, Negative Sentiment 0.1751

Microsoft Wants To Speed Up The Growth Of Indian Agritech Startups With Azure Platform

Microsoft has announced the launch of a program for agritech startups in India that are committed to driving transformation in agriculture. The Microsoft for Agritech Startups program is designed to help startups build industry-specific solutions, scale and grow with access to deep technology, business and marketing resources.

Agritech startups in India are transforming agriculture by developing innovative digital solutions to maximize productivity, improve market linkages, increase supply chain efficiency and provide greater access to inputs for agri-businesses. In its efforts to bolster the country’s startup ecosystem, this program offers the best-in-class tech and business enablement resources to help agritech startups innovate and scale fast.

Startups can also get access to Azure FarmBeats, which can help them focus on core value-adds instead of the undifferentiated heavy lifting of data engineering. Available on the Azure Marketplace, Azure FarmBeats enables aggregation of agricultural datasets across providers and generation of actionable insights by building AI/ML models based on fused datasets.

2020-06-03 09:25:30+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.9574, Raw Interest Score: 2.2831,
Positive Sentiment: 0.4947, Negative Sentiment 0.0381

Sentieo Redistributes 10,000+ Third Bridge Research Reports • Integrity Research

San Francisco-based financial search, data and research platform, Sentieo, recently announced that it has signed a deal to enable its investor and corporate clients to access more than 10,000 of Third Bridge’s research reports through its platform.

Sentieo’s platform is designed to streamline the workflow of buy-side analysts, using AI to scan financial documents. It replicates an equity data terminal, offering data visualization, financial models, company valuation and comps tables, as well as transcripts, reported financial statements with links to notes and indexed access to key filings/presentations, all organized by ticker. The platform offers search capabilities powered by machine learning and natural language processing to sort through SEC documents, earnings call transcripts, press releases and other financial documents, now including news articles.

2020-06-08 07:30:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.8130, Raw Interest Score: 1.9033,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1903, Negative Sentiment 0.2474

Data Governance for 2020 and Beyond

Companies have short attention spans when it comes to data governance. Even for organizations with sustained programs, the continuous push and pull of new regulations, projects, or data and analytics investments create constant disruption. To address these expansions, data owners either search for the simple approach or re-educate on data governance 101.

Here is the truth: There is nothing simple or basic about data governance. Effective data governance grows out of data management maturity. It is why, to make progress, organizations are hiring chief data officers and activating strategic and unified data, analytics, and data governance competency centers. Data governance policies and procedures designed to herd your organization’s “data cats” require experience and expertise.
2020-06-10 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.7589, Raw Interest Score: 2.1673,
Positive Sentiment: 0.4064, Negative Sentiment 0.0339

What Are The Pros And Cons Of Artificial Intelligence?

The pros and cons of artificial intelligence are important to consider as the technology grows. Here’s what to know about it.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a hot topic these days, but it’s not a perfect technology. AI is like almost anything else in that it has both advantages and downsides. What are the pros and cons of artificial intelligence? Here’s what people bring up most often.

  1. It Boosts Efficiency
  2. It Improves Forecasting
  3. It Enhances Quality Control
  4. It Makes Humans Too Trusting in Technology
  5. It Shows Biases
  6. It Lacks Universal Ethical Standards

2020-06-08 10:30:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.5066, Raw Interest Score: 1.2459,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3250, Negative Sentiment 0.2979

5 Essential Papers on Sentiment Analysis

To highlight some of the work being done in the field, here are five essential papers on sentiment analysis and sentiment classification.

From virtual assistants to content moderation, sentiment analysis has a wide range of use cases. AI models that can recognize emotion and opinion have a myriad of applications in numerous industries. Therefore, there is a large growing interest in the creation of emotionally intelligent machines. The same can be said for the research being done in natural language processing (NLP). To highlight some of the work being done in the field, below are five essential papers on sentiment analysis and sentiment classification.

  1. Deep Learning for Hate Speech Detection in Tweets
  2. DepecheMood++: a Bilingual Emotion Lexicon
  3. Expressively Vulgar: The Socio-dynamics of Vulgarity
  4. Multilingual Twitter Sentiment Classification: The Role of Human Annotators
  5. MELD: A Multimodal Multi-Party Dataset for Emotion Recognition

2020-06-05 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.4408, Raw Interest Score: 1.3525,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1643, Negative Sentiment 0.0632

Xignite enhances two cloud APIs to streamline delivery of news headlines and company earnings

Xignite has enhanced two of its financial data cloud APIs. Now offering functionality built for greater speed and specificity, these APIs enable fintechs to provide their users with the ability to follow worldwide business news and track upcoming earnings announcements.

Demand for these capabilities has increased significantly since the pandemic started as Covid-19 has had a dramatic impact on corporate financials.

Unlike other financial data APIs, Xignite’s APIs are cloud native and offer a robust selection of use case-based end points. These end points are ready-to-use pieces of code that developers can easily integrate into their product or app, regardless of type, amount or frequency of data, without the need for any complex integration logic. In addition, Xignite APIs offer institutional-quality data and global coverage. They are endlessly scalable, offer multiple delivery options and include flexible, use case-based pricing and unlimited usage, adding up to a transformative financial and market data solution that fintechs can leverage in countless ways to build a better experience for their end users.

2020-06-09 00:00:00 Read the full story (Hedgeweek)…
2020-06-09 14:48:54+00:00 Read the full story (TradersMagazine)…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.4215, Raw Interest Score: 1.6796,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3421, Negative Sentiment 0.1244

6 Important Big Data Future Trends, According To Experts

These big data future trends as predicted by experts are key to watch for in the coming future. Here’s what to expect down the line.

Many people agree that big data is here to stay and not a mere fad. Something that is not so clear-cut to everyday individuals concerns the future trends of big data analytics. These technologies are quickly evolving. What does that mean for the businesses that use them now or will soon?

What is big data in simple terms? It encompasses both the structured and unstructured information kept by an entity that is collectively too large for traditional systems and techniques to process. It also relates to the speed of the processing capability. Some businesses need insights in virtually real-time, and big data software can provide them, whereas traditional methods could not.

Understanding what’s ahead for big data technologies and use cases is more straightforward if people tune in to what experts have to say. Here are some glimpses into what’s possible, based on their perceptions.

  1. A Sharper Focus on Data Governance
  2. Augmented Analytics Will Speed Decision-Making
  3. Big Data Will Supplement — Not Replace — Researchers’ Work
  4. Cloud Data Will Shape Customer Experiences
  5. The Increasing Coexistence of Public and Private Clouds
  6. Cloud Technology Will Make Big Data More Accessible

2020-06-09 09:05:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.5419, Raw Interest Score: 1.5291,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1133, Negative Sentiment 0.0566

20 Developer Roles with Notably High Salaries

Which types of developer roles result in the biggest salaries? That’s a vital question for developers who are plotting out their career trajectory, and questioning whether they should aim for a management role at some point.

This year’s Stack Overflow Developer Survey is a good place to start. Based on 8,006 responses, the survey’s data shows that, at least in the United States, engineering managers make the most money (at an average of $152,000 per year) followed by specialists in various development categories such as data science, machine learning, and DevOps. Check out the chart:

Burning Glass also estimates the median data analyst salary at $78,676, below Stack Overflow’s numbers—but as with software engineers, data analysts’ compensation rises considerably with education and experience.

Machine learning engineer, a very highly specialized position, always seems to pay well, even for those without much experience in the workforce (presumably, they’ve learned most of the skills they need to effectively do the job in school).

2020-06-08 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.4937, Raw Interest Score: 1.8644,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1271, Negative Sentiment 0.1695

IIT Madras Is Offering Stipend Up To ₹60,000 For Internship In AI Research

IIT Madras through its Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (RBCDSAI) offers a Post-Baccalaureate Fellowship Program to aspirants who are interested in research.

Founded in 2017, the idea of Post-Baccalaureate Fellowship Program is to provide facilities for AI research to graduates to blaze a trail in the cutting-edge technologies. However, the fellowship is only for aspirants who have been graduated within the last two years. On selection, one can be involved in the internship for up to two years. The stipend varies for the internship but is between ₹40,000 to ₹60,000 per month.

To apply, aspirants would be required to submit their CV, short research proposal (300-500 words), list of interesting research areas (keywords), relevant courses completed (Coursera, NPTEL, or others), and a research proposal (300-500 words).

2020-06-09 14:10:21+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.3465, Raw Interest Score: 1.2987,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0999, Negative Sentiment 0.0000


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AI & Machine Learning News. 15, June 2020

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AI & Machine Learning News. 15, June 2020

The Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Newsletter by CloudQuant

The Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning News clippings for Quants are provided algorithmically with CloudQuant’s NLP engine which seeks out articles relevant to our community and ranks them by our proprietary interest score. After all, shouldn’t you expect to see the news generated using AI?


Synthesia.io – Create your own AI Video as easily as sending an email…

CloudQuant Thoughts : I pulled this company out of the post below (8 AI Companies Generating Creative Advertisign Content). Synthesia.io appear to have created a number of products using deepfake-like technology. I particularly like their phone app‘ to ‘smart office based rep‘ video, I could use that for my instruction videos and Zoom meetings! Translate all of your instructional videos into multiple languages using one service. Very impressive.

8 AI Companies Generating Creative Advertising Content

After the introduction of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) in 2014, a whole new era for AI image synthesis began. The latest GAN architectures can generate high-resolution, realistic, and colorful images that are almost impossible to distinguish from the real photographs. So, why spend time on exhausting and expensive photoshoots and video-shoots, if you can use an image or video of an automatically generated AI model who is the perfect fit for your brand? That’s the solution that the most technologically advanced marketing teams are turning to nowadays.

However, AI capabilities are not limited to the generation of visual content. The advances in natural language processing (NLP) and natural language generation (NLG) of the last few years have made artificial intelligence a part of copywriter teams. The marketing messages generated with AI-driven solutions are not only plausible but also data-driven – the text can reflect the brand’s voice and be tailored to specific audiences.

In this article, we feature companies that are leveraging cutting-edge AI research for generating marketing visuals and ad copy.
2020-06-08 15:39:29+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.0447, Raw Interest Score: 1.4495,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2675, Negative Sentiment 0.0863

CloudQuant Thoughts : In other top articles this month we cover how AI seems to be struggling to make a space in writing and journalism. However, in the world of digital video, particularly the creation of artificial humans, AI is racing ahead.

OpenAI Releases Commercial API That It Earlier Deemed Too Dangerous

One of the prominent AI research labs, OpenAI, has recently launched the beta version of an API for accessing new AI models developed by the company. The API allows searching over documents based on the natural-language meaning of queries rather than keyword matching.

With the advancement of machine learning and other emerging technologies, the ultimate goal of this journey is to achieve Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). According to the researchers, the API will serve as a revenue source to help them cover costs in further AI research as well as assist in advancing the technology and making it usable in the real world.

The API is designed to be simple for anyone to use but also flexible enough to make machine learning teams more productive. While providing any text prompt, the API will yield a text completion and attempts to match the pattern that the user provides.
2020-06-15 12:30:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.2557, Raw Interest Score: 2.0017,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2812, Negative Sentiment 0.1323

CloudQuant Thoughts : Shameless fake PR or genuine concern. With last week’s article that Microsoft were laying off dozens of journalists at MSN and Microsoft News to replace them with AI one would think that the writing was on the wall. OpenAI claimed to be worried that their neural network would be used by extremist groups and for spam & fishing. Well, if your bar to beat is Nigerian Princes and Tweets from Russian Operatives then your product is probably not that great. Try it out yourself.

AI Can Save Journalism, or AI Will Replace Journalists

AI can potentially save journalism, or AI is going to take over some writing and take away even more jobs – which is it?

In the optimistic view, the future of journalism could lie in AI, according to a new book from Francesco Marconi, a professor of journalism at Columbia University in New York, Newsmakers, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Journalism. He was head of the media lab at the Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press, one of the largest news organizations in the world.

The journalism world is not keeping pace with new technologies, so newsrooms need to use what AI can offer and come up with a new business model, suggests Patrick White, a professor of journalism at the University of Quebec, writing about Marconi’s book in The Conversation. White was the founder of the Quebec edition of Huffington Post, which is managed from 2011 to 2018. He has a range of experience in Canadian print and television journalism.
2020-06-11 21:30:21+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.4808, Raw Interest Score: 1.4087,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0927, Negative Sentiment 0.1112

CloudQuant Thoughts : If you believe journalism is the cold hard reporting of facts then maybe AI can be a better journalist (assuming we don’t load it with too many biases). In my opinion, the writing in good journalism has to engage and move the reader, something I have yet to see an AI algo acheive. Go on.. move me.

Work Underway to Assess and Rate AI Model Transparency

We hold these truths to be self-evident: a machine learning model is only as good as the data it learns from. Bad data results in bad models. A bad model that identifies butterflies when it should be recognizing cats is easy to spot.

Sometimes a bad model might be more difficult to spot. If data scientists and ML engineers that trained the model selected a subset of available data with an inherent bias, the model results could be skewed. Or the model might not have been well-trained enough, or it could have issues with overfitting or underfitting.

If there are many ways the model could fail, how are we to trust the model? asks a recent account in Forbes on AI transparency and explainability by Ronald Schmelzer.

2020-06-11 21:30:23+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.9214, Raw Interest Score: 1.9890,
Positive Sentiment: 0.4167, Negative Sentiment 0.1894

CloudQuant Thoughts : We are still very much in the “Human Review” stage of AI, people outside the industry think you just throw data at AI and it works everything out itself. Reviewing the AI’s decision at the end or parallel running the process with the original human process tends to make us feel better about the outcome. Unfortunately we humans have biases and we are often the source of the bias expressed by our AI algos.

Covid-19 Crisis Unlikely to Affect Impact Investing

Most impact investors recently surveyed by the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) expect to maintain or boost their commitment to impact investments this year in response to the coronavirus pandemic, and most plan to stick to strategies focused on addressing the U.N.’s sustainable development goals.

The responses were an addendum to the GIIN’s 10th annual survey of impact investors, which was released Thursday morning. The survey was conducted in February and March with 294 respondents, before most sheltering-in-place orders took hold, and the extent of the pandemic’s impact on global economies was not yet known. To better understand how the Covid-19 crisis would affect attitudes, the GIIN reached out later in the spring, receiving responses from 122 investors.

“One of the things that’s really clear about this crisis is that it underscores the need for investment capital to play a role in driving positive impact,” says Amit Bouri the GIIN’s CEO and co-founder. “As the dust settles on the shock of the crisis, and people have more energy to think about how to build back and recover, impact investing as an approach and the thinking behind it, will have a much greater interest among investors.”

2020-06-11  Read the full story…

CloudQuant Thoughts :  GIIN is a non-profit which promotes social & environmental impact alongside a financial return. This is another arm of ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance), a huge current driver of investment as data scientists seek useful alternative data sources. Part of CloudQuant’s role is to curate alternative data sources, we also test them and make the data and code used available for reproduction of the test results. Head over to our Data Catalog for more information.


BIG THREE DROP OUT OF FACIAL RECOGNITION MARKET

Three Big Tech Players Back Out of Facial Recognition Market

In the span of 72 hours, both IBM and Amazon backed out of the facial recognition business this week. It’s a chess match on the geopolitical playing board, with AI ethics and data bias in play. IBM moved first, closely followed by Amazon. (And then two days later Microsoft announced its intention to also exit the market; see below.)

The moves came after demonstrations were held across both the US and the world, in response to police mistreatment of black Americans. Facial recognition software has been called out by privacy and AI ethics groups as having higher error rates for people of color.
2020-06-11 21:30:59+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.3890, Raw Interest Score: 1.0815,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0755, Negative Sentiment 0.4904

COVER STORY: IBM, Amazon and Microsoft Abandon Law Enforcement Face Recognition Market

Three global tech giants — IBM, Amazon, and Microsoft — have all announced that they will no longer sell their face recognition technology to police in the USA, though each announcement comes with its own nuance.

The new policy comes in the midst of ongoing national demonstrations in the US about police brutality and more generally the subject of racial inequality in the country under the umbrella of the Black Lives Matter movement.

While the t…
2020-06-15 01:44:39+10:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.1902, Raw Interest Score: 0.9290,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0555, Negative Sentiment 0.3050


Researchers find racial discrimination in ‘dynamic pricing’ algorithms used by Uber, Lyft, and others

A preprint study published by researchers at George Washington University presents evidence of social bias in the algorithms ride-sharing startups like Uber, Lyft, and Via use to price fares. In a large-scale fairness analysis of Chicago-area ride-hailing samples — made in conjunction with the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) data — metrics from tens of millions of rides indicate ethnicity, age, housing prices, and education influence the dynamic fare pricing models used by ride-hailing apps.

The idea that dynamic algorithmic pricing disproportionately — if unintentionally — affects certain demographics is not new. In 2015, a model used by the Princeton Review was found to be twice as likely to charge Asian Americans higher test-preparation prices than other customers, regardless of income. As the use of algorithmic dynamic pricing proliferates in other domains, the authors of this study argue it’s crucial that unintended consequences — like racially based disparities — are identified and accounted for.

“When machine learning is applied to social data, the algorithms learn the statistical regularities of the historical injustices and social biases embedded in these data sets,” paper coauthors assistant professor Aylin Caliskan and Ph.D. candidate Akshat Pandey told VentureBeat via email. “With the starting point that machine learning models trained on social data contain biases, we wanted to explore if … [the] algorithmic ride-hailing data set exhibits any social biases.”
2020-06-12 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.8205, Raw Interest Score: 1.1650,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0601, Negative Sentiment 0.2642

It’s Time to Adopt a “Data Quality Over Quantity” Mindset

Today’s marketing leaders strive to collect, process, and activate large amounts of data in an effort to improve data-driven decision-making, execute personalization at scale and activate a myriad of use cases.

The power of data and analytics is well documented and cannot be overemphasized. Highly data-driven organizations are three times more likely to report improvement in their decision-making, according to PwC research. However, too many marketers are focused on the quantity, rather than the quality, of the data they are working with. Companies will not reap the maximum benefit of data if they are working from a foundation of inaccurate information—or, worse, they will do more harm than good by making choices based on faulty intel. The problem becomes more severe when bad data is used to train machine learning models, since the resulting models are only as good as the data used to train them; without a good dataset, predictive analytics becomes merely calculated randomness.

2020-06-10 11:00:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.5210, Raw Interest Score: 1.3280,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2353, Negative Sentiment 0.3866

ESG Fund Ratings: Not Perfect, but Still Valuable – ESG data is more robust than many critics think, and it’s improving over time.

Critics of environmental, social and governance fund ratings often cite numerous reasons as to why the ratings lack validity. While the ratings aren’t perfect, we explore some of the reasons why we believe they are worthwhile and how they may continue to improve.

One common argument regarding the validity of ESG ratings is that there are hundreds of ESG data, analytics and research providers, and that their scores are sometimes conflicting, making it difficult to draw conclusions. The reality is that there are only a handful of prominent ESG research firms, most notably Sustainalytics and MSCI.

These firms have long played an important role in gathering and assessing information about companies’ ESG practices. This has been and remains a considerable challenge. Company disclosures on ESG practices have always been voluntary, are rarely audited, and are not standardized.
2020-06-09 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.7071, Raw Interest Score: 1.5094,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2012, Negative Sentiment 0.3019

AI and Human Operators Combine to Train Robots

Ever since the first crude cinematic robot first arrived on the scene in the 1927 movie Metropolis, humans have been fixated on the fear that they would come to rue the day artificial intelligence (AI) was summoned into existence and that, eventually, the masters would become slaves to these superior automated brains.

But from the vantage point of nearly a full century later, it seems like there might be another way this could go in which humans and AI — and AI’s close cousin machine learning (ML) — might find a way forward with a symbiotic relationship that stands to benefit humanity and not end in the subjugation or ultimate destruction of the human race.

Maybe we’ve come to the point in time when AI and human operators can combine forces to build and train better robots.

2020-06-12 07:30:42+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.4974, Raw Interest Score: 1.2241,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3350, Negative Sentiment 0.3350

AI Tool Turns Blurry Human Photo Into Realistic Computer-Generated HD Faces

Duke University researchers have announced that they have developed an artificial intelligence-based tool that can turn blurry and unrecognisable images of people’s faces into perfect computer-generated portraits in high definition.

According to the reports, traditional methods can only scale up a human face image up to eight times than its original resolution; however, the researchers from the Duke University have developed this AI tool called PULSE, which can create a realistic-looking image which is 64 times the resolution of the input photo. This tool searches through artificial intelligence-generated high-resolution faces images as an example and analyses facial features like fine lines, eyelashes and stubble to match ones that look similar to the input image after actual size compression.

2020-06-15 07:39:58+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.0882, Raw Interest Score: 1.0886,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0294, Negative Sentiment 0.1177

What Are The Markers Of A Genuine Data Scientist?

A data scientist is a professional who deals with a colossal amount of information, analyses it, and helps organisations to derive actionable insights from data. However, with a high median base salary and being the sexiest job of the century, the role of a data scientist is getting a lot of attraction from individuals as well as businesses. In fact, according to Glassdoor research, the average base pay of a data scientist is ₹988K per year, and therefore many professionals are marketing themselves as data scientists despite lacking actual skills with data.

Alongside, the job profile of a data scientist is quite complex, and therefore many of the business leaders don’t understand the core of it. Consequently, many think that any professional who deals with data are data scientists. However, that’s not the case. To be a real data scientist one needs to have much more skill sets apart from just knowing the data. Also, with inadequate skill sets, a so-called data scientist can make ineffective data models, which in turn would affect the company’s bottom line.
2020-06-14 14:30:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.1958, Raw Interest Score: 2.0839,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2378, Negative Sentiment 0.2098

These 12 artificial intelligence startups are poised for success, particularly in a post-COVID world, according to experts

Demand for artificial intelligence technology has been growing over the last five years and is poised to grow even faster due to the COVID-19 crisis, experts say.
As businesses adapt to major changes caused by the crisis, they’ll likely turn to AI technology to streamline operations and become more efficient, analysts and investors said.
AI technology has helped businesses with tasks like making long-term sales growth projections to automating routine, time-consuming tasks.
Two VCs say industry-specific AI software is especially poised to see strong growth and increased investment.
Here are 12 startups that well-positioned to grow in a post-COVID world, including Tempus, Replicant, and Olive.

2020-06-14 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.2888, Raw Interest Score: 1.7525,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2861, Negative Sentiment 0.3219

DataRobot Adds to its AI Toolbox

DataRobot, the automated machine learning software vendor, continued its string of acquisitions this week with a deal to buy Boston Consulting Group’s AI technology platform. The companies also announced a strategic partnership that would combine consulting services with DataRobot’s intellectual property.

The AI acquisition and partnership seek to address the growing number of unsuccessful enterprise AI deployments. Missing is the ability to build, deploy and monitor machine learning models that produce actual results and return on investment.

Hence, the partners said Tuesday (June 9) they will collaborate to help customers build “industrial-grade” AI platforms. To that end, high-flying DataRobot will acquire the business consultant’s Source AI technology. The platform is designed to free data scientists to write restriction-free code used that combines human and technical expertise.

2020-06-09 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.9746, Raw Interest Score: 2.1204,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1272, Negative Sentiment 0.1272

Banking industry affects due to Covid-19

The term Artificial Intelligence is nothing but a computer program embedded with aspects of human intelligence i.e the ability to think like human beings. In the upcoming years, AI along with machine learning, data analytics and deep learning would be a major thing across industries. One such industry that has been revolutionized by AI is the financial sector. Amongst the financial sector, AI in banking will become more prominent given the current situations of Covid-19. AI technology has transformed the financial sector in many ways such as:
2020-06-12 05:57:28 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.9462, Raw Interest Score: 1.6934,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3474, Negative Sentiment 0.6513

Should a Data Scientist Know How to Code?

A closer look into different types of data scientists

A data scientist can be many things, and a coder could one of them. Over the course of my career in data science, I have seen a wide array of professionals using the tiniest amount of coding. But on the other hand, I have seen people write books of code to explain their model. Really, what it comes down to is what type of…
2020-06-15 00:48:38.522000+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.8251, Raw Interest Score: 2.0767,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0913, Negative Sentiment 0.0228

Emergence of Conversational Agents in Investment Banking

Investment banks continue to be under pressure due to regulatory changes, declining revenues, and rising costs. Revenues generated by 12 biggest investment banks from trading and advisory operations are down by 11% for first six months of 2019, according to Financial Times article. COVID-19 pandemic will impact investment banks due to significantly reduced economic activity globally, and a potential economic recession may put pressure on revenues of investment banks. In this context, a majority of the Investment Banks are increasingly adopting technology driven business innovations as one of the key strategies to achieve business goals of revenue growth, Customer delight, improved operational efficiency, and regulatory compliance. Some of the key emerging technologies being explored include Artificial Intelligence, Cloud Computing, Blockchain, and Quantum computing. One of the areas being explored using Artificial Intelligence are Conversational Agents for superior Customer experience and improving operational efficiency.
2020-06-10 12:55:06 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.6316, Raw Interest Score: 1.8702,
Positive Sentiment: 0.4173, Negative Sentiment 0.1236

Effort to Fund National Research Cloud for AI Advances

A bipartisan group of legislators in the US House and Senate proposed a bill in the first week of June that would direct the federal government to develop a national cloud computing infrastructure for AI research. This idea originated with a proposal from Stanford University in 2019.

The legislation was introduced by Sens. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, and Martin Heinrich, D-NM, is called the National Cloud Computing Task Force Act. It would convene a mix of technical experts across academia, industry and government, to plan for how the US should build, deploy, govern and maintain a national research cloud for AI. “With China focused on toppling the United States’ leadership in AI, we need to redouble our efforts with a sustained commitment to the best and brightest by developing a national research cloud to ensure our technical researchers get the tools they need to succeed,” stated Portman, according to an account in Nextgov. “By democratizing access to computing power we ensure that any American with computer science talent can pursue their good ideas.”

2020-06-11 21:30:41+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.6036, Raw Interest Score: 1.7900,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2059, Negative Sentiment 0.1267

C-Suite Banking Execs Believe AI Will Set Winning Institutions Apart

Increasing investment in AI and cloud computing will usher in new opportunities for consumers and businesses, says Temenos/Economist research. Another finding: North American financial institutions are catching up on the cloud front as regulators’ attitudes warm up.

More than three quarters (77%) of senior banking executives in a worldwide survey believe artificial intelligence capabilities will increasingly spell the difference between success and being an also-ran. Of that total figure, 32% strongly agreed with the statement: “Unlocking value from AI will be the key differentiator between winning and losing banks.” 46% agreed with the statement. Belief in AI’s potential was even stronger among North American institutions taking part in the study with 87% in agreement overall and 38% strongly agreeing.
2020-06-09 13:51:29+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.2365, Raw Interest Score: 1.4582,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1894, Negative Sentiment 0.1894

Game-Changing Technologies in the Data Environment of 2020

AI and machine learning were cited by several industry leaders as the most important technologies shaping today’s data environments. “We’re starting to see more success in specific use cases of machine learning, such as anomaly detection with system events, natural language processing, entity extraction, and classification technologies,” said Ranga Rajagopalan, vice president of product management for Commvault.

AI is critical to competing in the emerging economy, as it “makes it possible to go beyond what the human eye can detect and focus on a range of bad behaviors,” said David Ngo, vice president of product and engineering at Metallic. “It helps predict, identify, address, and solve our data needs.”
2020-06-10 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.2142, Raw Interest Score: 1.7033,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2241, Negative Sentiment 0.2689

Australia joins world-first AI group to tackle ethics, commercialisation

Australia will join forces with 11 other countries and the European Union to form the world’s first multilateral forum dedicated to fostering responsible development and innovation in artificial intelligence.

The forum, known as Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI), will seek to tackle issues such as the use of artificial intelligence in policing and surveillance, which came to a head last week when IBM, Amazon and Microsoft all said they would delay or cease work on the technology in light of the Black lives Matter protests in the US.

Speaking to The Australian Financial Review, Professor Huntington said the group would not only aim to prevent the irresponsible use of AI, but further its use for social good.

2020-06-14 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.1104, Raw Interest Score: 1.4014,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2180, Negative Sentiment 0.0623

DATA SCIENCE IN PRACTICE: FIVE COMMON APPLICATIONS (Whitepaper behind registration wall)

Learn how real companies use data science to exponentially improve products and day-to-day operations
See five concrete examples — with real use cases — of how your company can use data science in ways that won’t just help your business, but will also thrill your data scientists
See how the data science life cycle works and how you can more effectively get models into production so they can start making waves

Data science is a complicated discipline, but that doesn’t mean non-data scientists can’t understand the magic and, more importantly, the value behind the science. Walk away clearly knowing how to use data science to optimize processes and improve functions across the business — leading to more promotions and fist bumps along the way.

2020-06-10 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.0612, Raw Interest Score: 1.6582,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3827, Negative Sentiment 0.1276

Gaining Insight into the New World of Database Technologies at Data Summit Connect 2020

Database technologies are constantly changing and adding new options for enterprises. To take advantage of the new world of database technologies, enterprise and database managers need to be open to new possibilities.

Thomas Cook, director of sales, Cambridge Semantics, then offered a primer on graph database technology and the rapid growth of knowledge graphs, in a presentation titled, “AnzoGraph DB: Driving AI and Machine Insights with Knowledge Graphs in a Connected World.” Knowledge graphs are undergoing rapid adoption because they have the advantages of linking and analyzing vast amounts of interconnected data. The promise of graph technology has been there for a decade. However, the scale, performance, and analytics capabilities of AnzoGraph DB, a graph database, is a key catalyst for knowledge graph adoption, Cook said. Setting the stage for why knowledge graphs are coming to the fore, Cook cited current trends, including increasing data volumes, demand for AI and machine learning, and the increasingly complex data ecosystem.
2020-06-10 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.0587, Raw Interest Score: 1.6678,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2513, Negative Sentiment 0.0457

Revolutionizing Data Collaboration with Federated Machine Learning

We now live in a world that’s becoming more data-driven every day. Organizations across a wide range of industries are using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies to tap into complex data sets, unearth valuable insights and drive innovation. From healthcare and government to the financial sector and beyond, advanced data science models and big data projects are unlocking insights that can deliver everything from novel approaches to preventing and treating disease to highly effective financial fraud detection and more.

But these projects aren’t without their challenges. Organizations looking to embark on data collaboration initiatives must overcome obstacles such as data ownership issues, compliance requirements for a variety of regulations and more. In today’s data-filled world, ensuring privacy and security is paramount, and the measures to which organizations must go to achieve this can make collaborative data science difficult. The potential consequences of sustaining any kind of privacy or security breach (noncompliance, fines, reputational damage, etc.) can cause organizations to shy away from sharing data sets that could spark the next life-saving medical treatment or momentous public service program.

2020-06-12 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.9271, Raw Interest Score: 1.6560,
Positive Sentiment: 0.4095, Negative Sentiment 0.3917

Data Summit Connect 2020 Presents an Introduction to Knowledge Graphs Pre-Conference Workshop

Data Summit Connect 2020 launched Monday with a full day of pre-conference workshops, followed by a free 3-day series of data-focused webinars. As part of the virtual conference hosted by DBTA and Big Data Quarterly, Joe Hilger and Sara Nash presented the first workshop, titled “Introduction to Knowledge Graphs.”

Hilger, who is COO and co-founder of Enterprise Knowledge, LLC, and Nash, who is a technical analyst with the consultancy, covered what a knowledge graph is, how it is implemented, and how it can be used to increase the value of data.

Knowledge graphs are becoming an increasingly important tool that organizations are using to manage the vast amounts of data they collect, store, and analyze. An enterprise knowledge graph’s representation of an organization’s content and data creates a model that integrates structured and unstructured data, and leverages semantic and intelligent qualities to make them “smart.”

2020-06-08 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.8755, Raw Interest Score: 1.4515,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1643, Negative Sentiment 0.1232

Researchers propose framework to measure AI’s social and environmental impact

In a newly published paper on the preprint server Arxiv.org, researchers at the Montreal AI Ethics Institute, McGill University, Carnegie Mellon, and Microsoft propose a four-pillar framework called SECure designed to quantify the environmental and social impact of AI. Through techniques like compute-efficient machine learning, federated learning, and data sovereignty, the coauthors assert scientists and practitioners have the power to cut contributions to the carbon footprint while restoring trust in historically opaque systems.

2020-06-12 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.8533, Raw Interest Score: 1.3323,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3089, Negative Sentiment 0.1738

Expanding Your Data Science and Machine Learning Capabilities (Webinar – behind registration wall)

Surviving and thriving with data science and machine learning means not only having the right platforms, tools and skills, but identifying use cases and implementing processes that can deliver repeatable, scalable business value. The challenges are numerous, from selecting data sets and data platforms, to architecting and optimizing data pipelines, and model training and deployment. In responses, new solutions have emerged to deliver key capabilities in areas including visualization, self-service and real-time analytics. Along with the rise of DataOps, greater collaboration and automation have been identified as key success factors.
2020-06-25 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.8463, Raw Interest Score: 1.8130,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2863, Negative Sentiment 0.0954

Charting Your Course to Cloud Analytics Success (Webinar – behind registration wall)

The cloud is increasingly becoming the go-to destination for data analytics at enterprises today. Looking to capitalize on the promise of reduced costs and greater scalability and flexibility, more and more organizations are adopting hybrid and multicloud strategies to break down data silos, increase collaboration and equip decision-makers with faster access to actionable business insights. However, success means creating a data management strategy and supporting it with technologies that enable you to easily span multiple clouds to ensure flexible data connectivity and access, eliminate single points of failure and maintain acceptable performance and security.

2020-06-16 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.8116, Raw Interest Score: 1.4438,
Positive Sentiment: 0.6839, Negative Sentiment 0.1520

DBTA 100 2020: The Companies That Matter Most in Data

Today, there is a constantly evolving list of data management issues that organizations are contending with. In addition to pressures of exploding data volumes, there is urgent demand for real-time, data-driven insights as well as more widespread data access. Expanding regulatory mandates also demand greater data quality and governance, as do cybersecurity threats.

The myriad, and sometimes conflicting, requirements facing data managers were highlighted in a 2020 survey report released by Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc., and sponsored by Dell EMC (“2020 Quest-IOUG Database Priorities Survey”). For roughly two out of three data managers, mundane, administrative tasks consume a substantial part of their budgets. According to Unisphere analyst Joe McKendrick, maintaining system stability—patching, fixing, upgrading—is considered by 66% of respondents to be the costliest part of their jobs. In addition, 61% indicated that much of their budget goes to maintaining uptime and availability. For 49%, security consumes sizable portions of their time.

2020-06-10 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.6779, Raw Interest Score: 1.6080,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2297, Negative Sentiment 0.3063

Tech vets lead Panda AI, a secretive new spinout from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence

Veteran tech execs are heading up a stealthy new startup formed inside the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) in Seattle.

Panda AI isn’t yet sharing many details about its technology or products. The company is led by CEO Aaron Goldfeder, who previously co-founded EnergySavvy, an enterprise analytics company acquired by Uplight in 2019. His co-founder and CTO is Yue Ning, a former software engineer at Amazon, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Qualtrics, where he led teams focused on text analytics. Ning also previously founded Seattle-based natural language processing startup Civet AI.

Both Goldfeder and Ning joined AI2 as entrepreneur-in-residences late last year. Here’s how Goldfeder described Panda in an email to GeekWire: “PANDA is a stealth mode B2B startup enabled by very recent breakthroughs in AI. Our goal is to help teams win more, work less, and be happier. PANDA is a next generation solution for problems that many millions of knowledge workers experience daily. Our approach was born out of personal frustration with the current generation toolset available to us while running EnergySavvy. Early adopters love PANDA and we are having a blast building it.”

2020-06-12 15:21:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.6396, Raw Interest Score: 1.4089,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2684, Negative Sentiment 0.1342

IIT Madras Is Offering Stipend Up To ₹60,000 For Fellowship In AI Research

IIT Madras through its Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (RBCDSAI) offers a Post-Baccalaureate Fellowship Program to aspirants who are interested in research.

Founded in 2017, the idea of Post-Baccalaureate Fellowship Program is to provide facilities for AI research to graduates to blaze a trail in the cutting-edge technologies. However, the fellowship is only for aspirants who have been graduated within the last two years. On selection, one can be involved in the research internship for up to two years. The stipend varies for the research internship but is between ₹40,000 to ₹60,000 per month.

To apply, aspirants would be required to submit their CV, short research proposal (300-500 words), list of interesting research areas (keywords), relevant courses completed (Coursera, NPTEL, or others), and a research proposal (300-500 words).

2020-06-09 14:10:21+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.5917, Raw Interest Score: 1.4188,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0978, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

AWS Upgrades SageMaker Labeling Tool

Amazon Web Services has added a 3D visualization capability to its SageMaker data labeling tool used to build training data sets for machine learning models.

AWS said this week its SageMaker data labeling service called Ground Truth introduced in 2018 now includes a workflow for labeling of point clouds, a set of data points generated by tools like 3D scanners or Lidar sensors. Among the applications is labeling huge 3D data sets used to train models incorporated into self-driving car navigation systems. Those data sets can grow to hundreds of megabytes, making labeling extremely arduous. The new 3D point cloud labeling tool is billed as a custom workflow that includes a built-in editor and new “assistive” labeling features.
2020-06-10 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.5698, Raw Interest Score: 1.5096,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0000, Negative Sentiment 0.0368

Modern Data Warehousing: Enterprise Must-Haves (Webinar – registration wall)

To fit into modern analytics ecosystems, legacy data warehouses must evolve – both architecturally and technologically – to deliver the agility, scalability and flexibility that business need to thrive in today’s data-driven economy. Alongside new architectural approaches, a variety of technologies have emerged as key ingredients of modern data warehousing, from data virtualization and cloud services, to Hadoop and Spark, and machine learning and automation. To educate IT decision makers and data warehousing professionals about the must-have capabilities for modern data warehousing today – how they work and how best to use them – DBTA is hosting a special roundtable webinar on November 19th.

2020-11-19 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.5448, Raw Interest Score: 1.6053,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0944, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

6 Important Big Data Future Trends, According To Experts

These big data future trends as predicted by experts are key to watch for in the coming future. Here’s what to expect down the line.

Many people agree that big data is here to stay and not a mere fad. Something that is not so clear-cut to everyday individuals concerns the future trends of big data analytics. These technologies are quickly evolving. What does that mean for the businesses that use them now or will soon?

What is big data in simple terms? It encompasses both the structured and unstructured information kept by an entity that is collectively too large for traditional systems and techniques to process. It also relates to the speed of the processing capability. Some businesses need insights in virtually real-time, and big data software can provide them, whereas traditional methods could not.

Understanding what’s ahead for big data technologies and use cases is more straightforward if people tune in to what experts have to say. Here are some glimpses into what’s possible, based on their perceptions.

2020-06-09 09:05:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.5419, Raw Interest Score: 1.5291,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1133, Negative Sentiment 0.0566

Kerala-Based Enterprise Automation Startup Raises $18 Million Funding

Kerala-based enterprise automation startup Jiffy.ai has announced that the company has raised $18 million in their Series A funding led by Nexus Venture Partners. This funding has been done in participation with Rebright Partners and W250 Venture Fund for developing products as well as expanding into newer markets around the world.

Run by Malayali entrepreneur and a former president of Thiruvananthapuram-based IT company ‘Envestnet’ Babu Vinod Sivasdasan, Jiffy.ai, a brand of Paanini Inc, is a company that uses technologies like RPA, machine learning and artificial intelligence to help businesses in automating their tasks and processes that are usually performed with manual intervention. Their solutions are designed to make their customers’ operations more time and cost-efficient. Alongside, the platform also includes a design studio for no-code application development, and a configurable analytics dashboard to monitor automated processes.

2020-06-15 06:12:53+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.4951, Raw Interest Score: 1.4921,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0649, Negative Sentiment 0.0973

A/B Testing Machine Learning Models in Production Using Amazon SageMaker (Discussion)

A/B Testing Machine Learning Models in Production Using Amazon SageMaker (Discussion)

Thinking about A/B Testing ML Models in Production with a Potential Real-time Inference ML Workflow

Kieran Kavanaugh, David Nigenda, and I, recently wrote a post for the AWS Machine Learning Blog about A/B Testing ML models in production using Amazon SageMaker. I recommend reading the post, and also checking out our accompanying Jupyter notebook (A/B Testing with Amazon Sagemaker).
2020-06-15 00:44:24.918000+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.4727, Raw Interest Score: 1.9042,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0577, Negative Sentiment 0.1154

Can Australia become known for safe and ethical AI?

Liesl Yearsley and Hanno Blankenstein have more in common than merely being overseas-born founders of promising Australian technology start-ups.

Both of them have founded companies that use artificial intelligence (AI) to help create an edge for their customers. Yearsley’s company, Akin, is using AI to create bots that can converse with humans in a lifelike way. Blankenstein’s company, Unleash Live, uses AI for real-time analysis of video footage.

Such AI-based surveillance systems, says Toby Walsh, a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of NSW, are now at risk of becoming “toxic assets” for the companies that develop and sell them, to the point where many companies will be forced to abandon the technology altogether.

“Face recognition, along with other misuses of surveillance, is going to be a topic that will trouble us increasingly. These won’t be the last tech companies that decide to get out, and rightly so…
2020-06-14 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.4091, Raw Interest Score: 0.8530,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2095, Negative Sentiment 0.3143

What To Expect When You Start A Job As A Junior Data Scientist?

If you are beginning your career as a data scientist, this article could give you a general idea of what to expect from the first job. There are factors to consider when starting a data science job, like whether a company uses machine learning or business analytics; the kind of tools the company uses for data science/analytics, or finally whether it is a large company or a small startup. Such variables are important in making the initial decisions on what to learn and where to focus on to advance your career.

When beginning a fresh job, whether you are a new hire or an experienced professional, try to lower your expectations initially and then slowly adjust to the work pace and processes. But this is true for any job role in any sector, and not specific to data science, or IT. As a junior data scientist, you may have stronger skills in statistics than in programming, and therefore, you may need a lot of learning in the first few years of your career. Even if you understand machine learning statistics and Python, you may still need to expand your knowledge in tools and libraries such as containers, PyTorch, Keras and further improve programming.
2020-06-15 10:30:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.3724, Raw Interest Score: 1.3679,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1680, Negative Sentiment 0.1920

How to Use Angular To Deploy TensorFlow Web Apps

Using Python-built models in Angular-built web apps

In the new age of machine learning and AI, Python is undoubtedly the go-to language for any budding engineer. Clean, pseudocode looking syntax — and the biggest scientific computing and machine learning communities in the world have produced the perfect language for developers looking to make their machines a little smarter. However, deploying anything built with Python to the masses is not easy.
2020-06-14 13:11:54.205000+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.1918, Raw Interest Score: 1.3049,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3434, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

U.S. Special Ops Launches $600M Analytics Effort

U.S. Special Operations Command plans to field a “global analytics platform” that would add data science and machine learning tools to intelligence analysts’ workflow while running on upgraded micro-services infrastructure.

Special Ops Command released a contract notice on June 5 seeking suppliers for the analytics platform. According to the notice, the analytics contract could be worth as much as $600 million over the next decade.
2020-06-09 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.1292, Raw Interest Score: 1.3226,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1470, Negative Sentiment 0.2204

Dream Forward Acquired as Retirement Plan Tech Consolidation Heats Up

In light of the greater importance being placed on scalable communication technology, and in the face of recent pandemic-related lockdowns, 401(k) provider and chatbot provider Dream Forward is being acquired by Expand Financial.

Best known for its technology licensing business, particularly its white-labeled chatbot, Dream Forward entered the 401(k) business four years ago. Its tech, which is used by record-keepers and retirement plan–focused financial advisors, “can explain all of the nuances of saving for retirement and 401(k)/403(b) rules and regulations,” Kahn said.

2020-06-11 19:58:53+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.0914, Raw Interest Score: 0.9737,
Positive Sentiment: 0.6329, Negative Sentiment 0.3408

Leverage the Power of Data as a Strategic Currency (Registration Wall)

Now more than ever, data is crucial to informing critical decisions and business growth. However, without analytics, data is just noise. But with analytics, data becomes insight. Learn how a modernized data system powered by AI, machine learning, and cloud-enabled architecture from Insight and Microsoft Azure Synapse can amplify the power of data as strategic currency by providing analytics at blazing speeds and significantly lower costs.
2020-06-09 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 5.5928, Raw Interest Score: 3.3937,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2262, Negative Sentiment 0.4525


This news clip post is produced algorithmically based upon CloudQuant’s list of sites and focus items we find interesting. We used natural language processing (NLP) to determine an interest score, and to calculate the sentiment of the linked article using the Loughran and McDonald Sentiment Word Lists.

If you would like to add your blog or website to our search crawler, please email customer_success@cloudquant.com. We welcome all contributors.

This news clip and any CloudQuant comment is for information and illustrative purposes only. It is not, and should not be regarded as investment advice or as a recommendation regarding a course of action. This information is provided with the understanding that CloudQuant is not acting in a fiduciary or advisory capacity under any contract with you, or any applicable law or regulation. You are responsible to make your own independent decision with respect to any course of action based on the content of this post.

The post AI & Machine Learning News. 15, June 2020 appeared first on CloudQuant.

Alternative Data News. 17, June 2020

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Alternative Data News. 17, June 2020

The AltDataNewsletter by CloudQuant

Finding sources and uses for alternative data can be difficult. At CloudQuant we regularly read and search the internet for new sources of data that can be used in our mission to find alpha signals and build quantitative trading strategies. We recognize that we are technology and data junkies so we wrote our own crawler that specifically seeks out web pages, posts, and news articles that give us a snapshot of what is going on in the world of Alt Data. The following is a collection of articles that we think you will find interesting from the past week.


The Reason You’re Frustrated when Trying to Become a Data Scientist – The hidden skill that separates the best from the rest

How many times have we seen the post “5 things you need to become a Data Scientist”, “How to become a Data Scientist in 2020”, or the images of the Venn diagrams? Don’t feel bad if when you read the requirements you curled up into a ball, sucked your thumb and procrastinated even harder on your goals because it’s unlikely you’re alone in this situation. If you are frustrated, its arguably not entirely your fault as to why you are feeling this way.

Data Science is a large field with many cross sections to other disciplines, but I think we have complicated the criteria for becoming a Data Scientist with many complex prerequisites, which are required further down the line, but are not what will keep you going in the long run. Anyone can become a Data Scientist. All it takes is the will to do it and the desire to carry out whatever it takes. Two traits of which every human can realize.
2020-06-16 14:00:05.391000+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.4960, Raw Interest Score: 1.6280,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1732, Negative Sentiment 0.2425

CloudQuant Thoughts : “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those that cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn” — Alvin Toffler. Consider for a moment that throughout our development as humans we were expected to learn one set of skills, from our parents, skills needed to help us survive. Hunting, cooking, building and making clothing and tools. Even as time marched on and farming, overproduction and village markets came into existence, one still learned one skill. This is the reason some people have surnames like Cooper and (Black)Smith. Yet, in the 20th and 21st centuries, the rate at which we are expected to learn a new skill only to ‘dump it’ and learn another new skill has accelerated to a potentially unhealthy level. That the rise of the automated machine, and its ability to take over the monotonous work, may not be the destruction of our work lives but the saviour.

Alternative Data Is The New Guidance

By creating insights derived from disparate datasets and expertly synthesized by alternative data analysts, operators and investors have granular visibility into company business operations. With company executives now at a loss to forecast even their own key performance indicators, investors are left looking into the abyss with little to no guidance from management teams. This affects visibility and decision-making on every side of strategy and planning. If decision-makers aren’t making data-driven decisions in investment strategies or operations, they are at a disadvantage.

Exit traditional data, enter alternative data, and decision-makers now have a near real-time solution to a growing market need. By leveraging unique data that offers glimpses into company performance, and aggregating those individual perspectives at scale via technology, analysts are able to provide real-time snapshots and insights.
2020-06-16 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.2546, Raw Interest Score: 1.4332,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3272, Negative Sentiment 0.2025

CloudQuant Thoughts : Forbes Opinion piece or M Science advert? Yes, companies are reluctant to give guidance in a time when most of us do not know what we will be doing next week. Yes Alternative data and particularly cumulative alternative data can help. But anyone who works in data knows that cookie cutter data is only useful if you want to follow a herd. Collate the data YOU think has value and create your own data points.

Using Advanced Scouting Data to Find Liverpool a Timo Werner Alternative

Some of world football’s smartest transfer strategies are anchored and driven by data analysis.

Liverpool are a top-line example; their work with numbers and models flagged up Philippe Coutinho and Mohamed Salah (among others) as ideal additions to the team. That’s brought them goals, profit and trophies—in that order.

But most of Europe’s top order are incorporating advanced data and algorithms into their hunt for signings in some way, either using their own data-analysis staff or hiring an outside firm.

2020-06-11 Read the full story…

CloudQuant Thoughts : Its like a FIFA video game on steroids!

Space and the profusion of data – the new development frontier?

Space is not just for astronauts. It’s the next frontier for tackling humanity’s most intractable problems such as food security, climate change and social inequality, as revealed at the first World Space Forum late last year.

Developing countries are crossing over the space frontier with a growing number of maiden satellite launches and inaugural space initiatives. Yet many lack capabilities to navigate through the vast profusion of data acquired by space technologies, namely through satellite Earth observation, and satellite positioning systems, as well as to effectively utilize satellite communications.

To avoid a leap into the dark and to reap long-term benefits from emerging space programmes, developing countries need to address their capacity constraints in processing the tide of raw data that flows from satellites. The process of filtration, refinement and modelling for translating data into usable information in forecasting models requires huge computing capacities and appropriate skills in machine learning and artificial intelligence.

2020-06-10 Read the full story…

CloudQuant Thoughts : A great article about the huge volumes of data about to hit our planet from outer space!!


ESG Section

How COVID-19 Has Redefined What Investors Want

The coronavirus pandemic has changed the way we work, play, and invest. Working from home is the new normal. Outdoor walks, at a safe distance from family and friends, have replaced sporting events, happy hours, and backyard barbecues. And investing has evolved, too, as more investors demonstrate an increased appetite for companies with good records on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practices.

According to Morningstar, more than $10 billion, net, flowed into 314 different open-end and exchange-traded ESG funds in the first quarter of 2020. That’s an increase of more than 20% relative to the fourth quarter of 2019. The increase alone is impressive, but the timing is even more so. It was also during the first quarter of this year that the S&P 500 lost about 30% of its value. The average ESG fund, however, fell only 12.2%, according to a Bloomberg analysis.
2020-06-17 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.4926, Raw Interest Score: 1.5998,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2479, Negative Sentiment 0.2929

CloudQuant Thoughts : Don’t forget, CloudQuant has a range of datasets which we have pre-screened for you. We can supply a white paper of the performance result, the Python code used and give you access to the data so you can reproduce the results. One of our datasets is an ESG dataset which we have confirmed has positive influence. Head over to our Data Catalog to find out more.

‘Next Generation’ Of Smart Sustainable ETFs Launch

Stephane Degroote, head of ETFs & derivatives EMEA at FTSE Russell, said sustainability is involved in all the discussions the index, data and analytics provider is having regarding exchange-traded funds. Degroote told Markets Media: “Demand has become more sophisticated as issuers use factors to achieve specific environmental, social and governance exposures.”

Lida Eslami, head of business development for exchange traded products and international order book at London Stock Exchange, told Markets Media there has been more demand for ESG ETFs. “We currently list 19 sustainable ETFs and they have made up a quarter of new listings,” she added.
2020-06-15 17:31:37+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.7995, Raw Interest Score: 1.8675,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0865, Negative Sentiment 0.0346

ESG Fund Ratings: Not Perfect, but Still Valuable

Photo: Robert_s/Shutterstock

Critics of environmental, social and governance fund ratings often cite numerous reasons as to why the ratings lack validity. While the ratings aren’t perfect, we explore some of the reasons why we believe they are worthwhile and how they may continue to improve.

Rating ESG Funds

One common argument regarding the validity of ESG ratings is that there are hundreds of ESG data, analytics and research providers, and that their scores are someti…
2020-06-09 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.7071, Raw Interest Score: 1.5094,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2012, Negative Sentiment 0.3019

XBRL: Nowcasting, restaurants in lockdown and ESG reporting in melt-up (Registration required)

Here is our pick of the 3 most important XBRL news stories this week.

  1. Traditionally, quant strategies have focused on forecasting prices, based on price time-series dynamics (e.g., stat arb), or based on cross-sectional data (e.g., factor investing). Forecasting made a lot of sense years…

2020-06-11 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.7687, Raw Interest Score: 1.0200,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0364, Negative Sentiment 0.1821


53.3% Data Scientists Prefer Python, According To PlaTo Survey By AIM

According to a recent report by Analytics India Magazine, the most preferred Data Science programming language used across organisations is Python, with 53.3% of the respondents utilising the language. Other languages that follow are R, Matlab, SAS, Scala, Java and more.

The report titled Analytics Platforms and Tools (PlaTo) Survey was conducted to understand the stack of platforms and tools adopted by leading Analytics, AI, & Data Science organisations. It included surveys across a wide range of platforms and tools including open source and commercial analytics platforms.

The survey was sent across the data science community to understand the adoption and usage of various Cloud Service providers, BI tools, Data Science platforms, AI frameworks, DevOp tools, distributed ML platforms, AutoML tools, Data Lake tools, and more. Respondents included a large spectrum of occupations and vocations including students, research scholars, entrepreneurs and senior professionals from various industries such as Domestic IT, BFSI, FMCG, Fintech, Fashion & Apparel and more.

2020-06-15 09:19:37+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.1430, Raw Interest Score: 1.8015,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1150, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

Armchair epidemiologists” and “data bros”: Inside the DIY world of Covid-19 research

Science used to be done by a select few in high-tech laboratories and dusty university offices. But this was before we had a pandemic on our hands

Science used to be done by a select few in high-tech laboratories and dusty university offices. Studies would go on for years, and when they were published, results would be locked behind journal paywalls, ready to be read by a handful of fellow specialists. But this was before we had a pandemic on our hands.

Now, everyone from billionaire Elon Musk to your high school friend on Facebook is an “armchair epidemiologist.” Data, analyses and opinions on Covid-19 are flooding social media feeds and news sites. And why not? Even public health experts are struggling to make sense of this extremely unusual situation. This crisis affects everyone, so why not offer your views on how to dampen the R rate?

But, according to the World Health Organisation, we are fighting not only a pandemic; we are also fighting an infodemic. And, it’s much harder to identify fake news than previously thought. Most of the Covid-19 misinformation contains some truth and authority, blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction.

2020-06-14 Read the full story…

Top 8 Algorithms For Object Detection One Must Know

Object detection has been witnessing a rapid revolutionary change in the field of computer vision. Its involvement in the combination of object classification as well as object localisation makes it one of the most challenging topics in the domain of computer vision. In simple words, the goal of this detection technique is to determine where objects are located in a given image called as object localisation and which category each object belongs …
2020-06-16 07:30:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.8661, Raw Interest Score: 1.6450,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2663, Negative Sentiment 0.0783

How Analytics Professionals Can Improve Their Business Acumen Amid This Crisis

Well, it has already been established that learning technical skills, including tools and languages like Python, Hadoop, SQL, and data visualisation, will indeed get you a data science job. However, it is also vital for a data scientist to have business knowledge in order to survive in this competitive landscape. Having a business understanding will not only help data scientists and analytics professionals to know the elements of a business model but will also be valuable for businesses to maximise their returns. With business knowledge, analytics professionals can effectively use the understanding for collecting and interpreting data.

In fact, in a recent event, the global service delivery head of analytics at Wipro, Sohini Mehta has stated that, with so many automated machine learning platforms in the market, most of the jobs have become easy and quite simple to perform. “It no longer needs just the technical expertise, but there is a lot of business knowledge too that comes into play.”
2020-06-16 05:16:52+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.8154, Raw Interest Score: 1.6777,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3386, Negative Sentiment 0.1231

Evolution of data science: How it will change over the next decade

Although data science, as an academic discipline, has been around for more than 50 years, it wasn’t until around 2010 that it entered the mainstream consciousness. It happened as a new wave of businesses recognized that data was the key to mastery of modern markets and started making it their strategic focus. In the years since, the field of data science has seen explosive growth as well as some fast-paced developments as higher demand has spurred innovation.

As far as the field of data science has come since 2010, there’s every reason to believe that the next decade will bring even more change. With simultaneous advances in related technology fields and new approaches by the best and brightest minds in the industry, data science in 2030 will bear little resemblance to the state of the art today. Here’s a look at how data science is set to evolve over the next decade.
2020-06-16 10:33:57+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.8079, Raw Interest Score: 1.4761,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2312, Negative Sentiment 0.1601

6 Important Big Data Future Trends, According To Experts

Many people agree that big data is here to stay and not a mere fad. Something that is not so clear-cut to everyday individuals concerns the future trends of big data analytics. These technologies are quickly evolving. What does that mean for the businesses that use them now or will soon?

What is big data in simple terms? It encompasses both the structured and unstructured information kept by an entity that is collectively too large for traditional systems and techniques to process. It also relates to the speed of the processing capability. Some businesses need insights in virtually real-time, and big data software can provide them, whereas traditional methods could not.

Understanding what’s ahead for big data technologies and use cases is more straightforward if people tune in to what experts have to say. Here are some glimpses into what’s possible, based on their perceptions.
2020-06-09 09:05:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.5419, Raw Interest Score: 1.5291,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1133, Negative Sentiment 0.0566

Why Is That Entrepreneur Raising So Much More Than Me?

How much to raise is both an art and a science, a topic discussed at length in many other posts. What this article will focus on are the reasons specifically an entrepreneur similar to you might be raising more more money. It’s really a function of five factors: stage, geography, investors, credibility, and strategy.
2020-06-14 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.3742, Raw Interest Score: 1.4238,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0949, Negative Sentiment 0.0475

COVID 19 Impact On Machine Learning Models

A lot of business processes are functioning with the help of data science implementations, i.e. machine learning models, time series models, AI solutions etc. These models take into consideration the historical data as well as past trends. In the Pre-COVID arena, all models were working well with the changing environment. All predictions were serving the purpose of the task as desired. With the advent of 2020, COVID 19 emerged on this Earth and caused a major disruption in our usual modelling behaviour.

COVID has affected every industry in a different way. For example, consumers have engaged in a lot of panic buying situations and supply hoarding due to the lockdown scenario in major parts of the world. Hence the consumer goods industry saw a heavy increase in supplies in the month of March and April. In western countries like the UK, US the ‘eating at home scenarios’ increased substantially. There was a major shift from eating outside to eating at home due to restricted movement for people.

The sales for most of the food products went up due to the situation. This sudden spike in sales has been very beneficial from the performance standpoint. The traditional models can no longer be used for sales predictions as they are unable to capture these unusual spikes in sales over the past two to three months. This is just one of the use cases. A similar kind of situation will be observed with respect to every industry.
2020-06-16 10:30:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.2859, Raw Interest Score: 1.1628,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2907, Negative Sentiment 0.1744


This news clip post is produced algorithmically based upon CloudQuant’s list of sites and focus items we find interesting. We used natural language processing (NLP) to determine an interest score, and to calculate the sentiment of the linked article using the Loughran and McDonald Sentiment Word Lists.

If you would like to add your blog or website to our search crawler, please email customer_success@cloudquant.com. We welcome all contributors.

This news clip and any CloudQuant comment is for information and illustrative purposes only. It is not, and should not be regarded as investment advice or as a recommendation regarding a course of action. This information is provided with the understanding that CloudQuant is not acting in a fiduciary or advisory capacity under any contract with you, or any applicable law or regulation. You are responsible to make your own independent decision with respect to any course of action based on the content of this post.

The post Alternative Data News. 17, June 2020 appeared first on CloudQuant.

Crux Summit on Data & Sustainability

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CloudQuant invites you to attend a Crux discussion on Data & Sustainability featuring 30 leaders from tech companies around the world, speaking about their practices and what your company can do to create a better future. CloudQuant has been active in Environmental, Social, and Governance Data research and backtesting in our try-before-buy ecosystem. You can sign up for free access to CloudQuant’s ESG data set and receive an updated forecast every day here. The Data & Sustainability webinar will take place June 23rd-24th. Registration is free at the link below, and we encourage you to join the CloudQuant team in learning about the future of sustainability in the technology world. #ESG

Register for the Data & Sustainability Summit

The post Crux Summit on Data & Sustainability appeared first on CloudQuant.


AI & Machine Learning News. 22, June 2020

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AI & Machine Learning News. 22, June 2020

The Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Newsletter by CloudQuant

The Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning News clippings for Quants are provided algorithmically with CloudQuant’s NLP engine which seeks out articles relevant to our community and ranks them by our proprietary interest score. After all, shouldn’t you expect to see the news generated using AI?


AI Tool Turns Blurry Human Photo Into Realistic Computer-Generated HD Faces

Duke University researchers have announced that they have developed an artificial intelligence-based tool that can turn blurry and unrecognisable images of people’s faces into perfect computer-generated portraits in high definition.

According to the reports, traditional methods can only scale up a human face image up to eight times than its original resolution; however, the researchers from the Duke University have developed this AI tool called PULSE, which can create a realistic-looking image which is 64 times the resolution of the input photo. This tool searches through artificial intelligence-generated high-resolution faces images as an example and analyses facial features like fine lines, eyelashes and stubble to match ones that look similar to the input image after actual size compression.

When asked, co-author Sachit Menon from the Duke University stated to the media, “While the researchers focused on faces as a proof of concept, the same technique could, in theory, take low-res shots of almost anything and create sharp, realistic-looking pictures, with applications ranging from medicine and microscopy to astronomy and satellite imagery.”

2020-06-15 07:39:58+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.0882, Raw Interest Score: 1.0886,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0294, Negative Sentiment 0.1177

CloudQuant Thoughts : Sometimes these demonstrations look a little data leaky (example, the input and output both wearing glasses when the downscale had no evidence of glasses at all). Data leakage can be easy to disprove  and fun for your reviewers if you provide a web front end and allow us to submit our own lo-res images!

For fun, here are the Wolfenstein and Doom Characters upscaled to real humans. And a final one to check for bias in the training data…

Image

Now AI Can Recreate How Artists Painted Their Masterpieces

Recently, the researchers from MIT introduced a new AI system known as Timecraft that has the capability to synthesise time-lapse videos depicting how a given painting might have been created. According to the researchers, there are various possibilities and unique combinations of brushes, strokes, colours, etc. in a painting and the goal behind this research is to learn to capture this rich range of possibilities.

Creating the exact same piece of a famous painting can take days even by skilled artists. However, with the advent of AI and ML, we have witnessed the emergence of a number of AI Artists for a few years now. One of the most popular artisanship of AI is the portrait of Edmond Belamy that was created by Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) and sold for an incredible $432,500.

In this research, the researchers presented a recurrent probabilistic model that can take an image of a finished painting and create a time-lapse video depicting how it was most likely to have been painted by the original artist. The system was trained on more than 200 existing time-lapse videos that people posted online of both digital and watercolour paintings.

2020-06-22 05:30:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.0490, Raw Interest Score: 1.6900,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1855, Negative Sentiment 0.3710

CloudQuant Thoughts : It is very low res at the moment but the potential is magnificent.

Computer makers unveil 50 AI servers with Nvidia’s A100 GPUs

Computer makers are unveiling a total of 50 servers with Nvidia’s A100 graphics processing units (GPUs) to power AI, data science, and scientific computing applications. The first GPU based on the Nvidia Ampere architecture, the A100 is the company’s largest leap in GPU performance to date, with features such as the ability for one GPU to be partitioned into seven separate GPUs as needed, Nvidia said. The company made the announcement ahead of the ISC High Performance online event, which is dedicated to high-performance computing.

Nvidia said it now has eight of the top 10 fastest supercomputers in the world, as measured by ISC.

Unveiled in May, the A100 GPU has 54 billion transistors (the on-off switches that are the building blocks of all things electronic) and a server with eight A100 GPUs like the Nvidia DGX A100 can execute 5 petaflops of performance, or about 20 times more than the previous-generation chip Volta. This means central processing unit (CPU) servers that cost $20 million and take up 22 racks can be replaced by new servers that cost $3 million and take up just four GPU-based server racks, said Nvidia product marketing director Paresh Kharya in a press briefing.
2020-06-22 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.5808, Raw Interest Score: 1.4544,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1929, Negative Sentiment 0.1484

CloudQuant Thoughts : I was just thinking how quiet Nvidia had been during the lockdown, then they come out with “eight of the top 10 fastest supercomputers in the world are powered by Nvidia”. VERY IMPRESSIVE!

Space and the profusion of data – the new development frontier?

Space is not just for astronauts. It’s the next frontier for tackling humanity’s most intractable problems such as food security, climate change and social inequality, as revealed at the first World Space Forum late last year.

Developing countries are crossing over the space frontier with a growing number of maiden satellite launches and inaugural space initiatives. Yet many lack capabilities to navigate through the vast profusion of data acquired by space technologies, namely through satellite Earth observation, and satellite positioning systems, as well as to effectively utilize satellite communications.

To avoid a leap into the dark and to reap long-term benefits from emerging space programs, developing countries need to address their capacity constraints in processing the tide of raw data that flows from satellites. The process of filtration, refinement and modelling for translating data into usable information in forecasting models requires huge computing capacities and appropriate skills in machine learning and artificial intelligence.

2020-06-10 Read the full story…

Solar Data Analytics Approaches Warp Speed

Data scientists at NASA are employing GPU-powered workstations and local storage to greatly accelerate analysis of images captured by the Solar Dynamic Observatory.

Launched in 2010 to probe our yellow dwarf star and its magnetic field, the solar observatory carries three instruments: an Atmospheric Imaging Assembly, Extreme Ultraviolet Variability Experiment and a Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager. As of the observatory’s 10th anniversary, NASA said SDO has so far captured more than 350 million images of the sun.

Parked in an inclined geosynchronous orbit, SDO is part of NASA’s “Living With a Star” program designed to study the sun as a “magnetic variable star” and how it influences life on Earth. Solar flares can, for example, disrupt critical infrastructure like electrical grids and literally fry electronics.

The challenge for solar data scientists is the sheer volume of imagery—about 20 petabytes and counting. The observatory collects data by recording images of the sun every 1.3 seconds—about as “dynamic” as a space sensor gets. Processing those images requires algorithms to remove errors such as “bad pixels.” Cleaned-up images are then archived.

2020-06-19 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.9470, Raw Interest Score: 1.2475,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1418, Negative Sentiment 0.3402

CloudQuant Thoughts : A couple of great articles about the huge volumes of data hitting our planet from outer space!!

The trouble with climate finance – Green investing has shortcomings – The financial system and climate change

The financial industry reflects society, but it can change society, too. One question is the role it might play in decarbonising the economy. Judged by today’s fundraising bonanza and the solemn pronouncements by institutional investors, bankers and regulators, you might think that the industry is about to save the planet. Some 500 environmental, social and governance (esg) funds were launched last year, and many asset managers say they will force companies to cut their emissions and finance new projects. Yet, as we report this week (see article), green finance suffers from woolly thinking, marketing guff and bad data. Finance does have a crucial role in fighting climate change but a far more rigorous approach is needed, and soon.

One of the shortcomings of green finance might be called “materiality”. Some fee-hungry fund managers make hyperbolic claims about their influence, even as big-business bashers pin most of the blame for pollution on companies. The reality is more prosaic. Fund managers have some influence over a big slice of the economy, but many emissions occur outside the firms they control. Estimates by The Economist suggest that publicly listed firms, excluding state-controlled ones, account for 14-32% of the world’s total emissions, depending on the measure you use. Global fund managers cannot directly influence the bosses of state-controlled Chinese coal-fired power plants or Middle Eastern oil and gas producers.

2020-06-20 21:01:53.030000+00:00 Read the full story…

CloudQuant Thoughts : One can argue that ESG based models are outperforming the market because they are an excellent predictor of the future direction of investment as younger people with different goals become a a key demographic. However, it would be just as easy to argue that the Oil, Gas and Coal industries have had a torrid time with the Corona Virus shut-down and by simply avoiding these industries one could have outperformed and ESG based strategy. Bust ESG is demonstrating Alpha and CloudQuant has an ESG dataset available on our Catalog page which includes a white paper, code and data to facilitate simple reproduction of the results.


CVPR 2020

Top Computer Vision Datasets Open-Sourced At CVPR 2020

A good dataset serves as the backbone of an Artificial Intelligence system. Data assists in various ways as it helps understand how the system is performing, understand meaning insights and others. At the premier annual Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference (CVPR 2020), several datasets have been open-sourced in order to help the community achieve higher accuracies and insights.

Below here we have listed the top 10 Computer Vision datasets that are open-sourced at the CVPR 2020 conference.

2020-06-19 12:30:28+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 5.9147, Raw Interest Score: 1.5534,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1098, Negative Sentiment 0.1098

Everything So Far At CVPR 2020 Conference

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) conference is one of the most popular events around the globe where computer vision experts and researchers gather to share their work and views on the trending techniques on various computer vision topics, including object detection, video understanding, visual recognition, among others. This year, the Computer Vision (CV) researchers and engineers have gathered virtually for the CVPR 2020 conference from 14 June, which will last till 19 June. In this article, we have listed down all the important topics and tutorials that have been discussed on the 1st and 2nd day of the conference.

2020-06-22 07:30:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.6493, Raw Interest Score: 1.6044,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2149, Negative Sentiment 0.1003

Everything So Far At CVPR 2020 Conference – Part 2

With about 7000 attendees, the 6 days virtual conference on computer vision concluded a plethora of paper presentations, workshops and tutorials. From the breakthroughs on computer vision to open-sourcing datasets and projects, this conference was loaded with interesting topics and areas including autonomous driving, video sensing, action recognition, and much more.

We have already covered the topics and tutorials from day 1 and 2, i.e. June 14t…
2020-06-22 07:30:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.6493, Raw Interest Score: 1.6044,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2149, Negative Sentiment 0.1003


Facebook just released a database of 100,000 deepfakes to teach AI how to spot them

The videos are designed to help improve AI’s performance—as even the best methods are still not accurate enough.

Deepfakes⁠ have struck a nerve with the public and researchers alike. There is something uniquely disturbing about these AI-generated images of people appearing to say or do something they didn’t. With tools for making deepfakes now widely available and relatively easy to use, many also worry that they will be used to spread dangerous misinformation. Politicians can have other people’s words put into their mouths or made to participate in situations they did not take part in, for example.

That’s the fear, at least. To a human eye, the truth is that deepfakes are still relatively easy to spot. And according to a report from cybersecurity firm DeepTrace Labs in October 2019, still the most comprehensive to date, they have not been used in any disinformation campaign. Yet the same report also found that the number of deepfakes posted online was growing quickly, with around 15,000 appearing in the previous seven months. That number will be far larger now. Social-media companies are concerned that deepfakes could soon flood their sites. But detecting them automatically is hard. To address the problem, Facebook wants to use AI to help fight back against AI-generated fakes. To train AIs to spot manipulated videos, it is releasing the largest ever data set of deepfakes⁠—more than 100,000 clips produced using 3,426 actors and a range of existing face-swapping techniques.

Facebook has also announced the winner of its Deepfake Detection Challenge, in which 2,114 participants submitted around 35,000 models trained on its data set via Kaggle. The best model, developed by Selim Seferbekov, a machine-learning engineer at mapping firm Mapbox, was able to detect whether a video was a deepfake with 65% accuracy when tested on a set of 10,000 previously unseen clips, including a mix of new videos generated by Facebook and existing ones taken from the internet.

Read the Full Story…

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) from scratch in Python

Principal Component Analysis is a mathematical technique used for dimensionality reduction. Its goal is to reduce the number of features whilst keeping most of the original information. Today we’ll implement it from scratch, using pure Numpy.

If you’re wondering why PCA is useful for your average machine learning task, here’s the list of top 3 benefits:

  1. Reduces training time — due to smaller dataset
  2. Removes noise — by keeping only what’s relevant
  3. Makes visualization possible — in cases where you have a maximum of 3 principal components

The last one is a biggie — and we’ll see it in action today.

But why is it a biggie? Good question. Imagine that you have a dataset of 10 features and want to visualize it. But how? 10 features = 10 physical dimensions. We as humans kind of suck when it comes to visualizing anything above 3 dimensions — hence the need for dimensionality reduction techniques.

I want to make one important note here — principal component analysis is not a feature selection algorithm. What I mean is that principal component analysis won’t give you the top N features like for example forward selection would do. Instead, it will give you N principal components, where N equals the number of original features.
2020-06-20 21:01:53.030000+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.5634, Raw Interest Score: 1.2551,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0000, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

3 Ways Traders Are Gaining Exposure to Rapid Changes in Technology

Innovative technologies are reshaping the way that we as humans live and work. Companies that specialize in the types of products that are changing the global economy are the focus of long-term investors and active traders alike. As you’ll see in the charts below, now could be an ideal time to increase exposure to this in-demand market segment.

SPDR Kensho New Economies Composite ETF (KOMP) – Investors who are most interested in adding exposure to innovative companies are often prudent to examine the top holdings of exchange-traded products such as the SPDR Kensho New Economies Composite ETF (KOMP). For those unaware, the fund’s managers seek to utilize artificial intelligence and quantitative weighting to track an index of companies that leverage exponential processing power, robotics, AI, and automation.
2020-06-16 17:33:06.824000+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.4941, Raw Interest Score: 1.9053,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3176, Negative Sentiment 0.1155

CloudQuant Thoughts : Investing in the Shares that make up the majority of a successful ETF is a good way to quickly identify key movers.

Top 8 Algorithms for Object Detection

Object detection has been witnessing a rapid revolutionary change in the field of computer vision. Its involvement in the combination of object classification as well as object localisation makes it one of the most challenging topics in the domain of computer vision. In simple words, the goal of this detection technique is to determine where objects are located in a given image called as object localisation and which category each object belongs to, that is called as object classification.

In this article, we list down the 8 best algorithms for object detection one must know..

  1. Fast R-CNN
  2. Faster R-CNN
  3. Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG)
  4. Region-based Convolutional Neural Networks (R-CNN)
  5. Region-based Fully Convolutional Network (R-FCN)
  6. Single Shot Detector (SSD)
  7. Spatial Pyramid Pooling (SPP-net)
  8. YOLO (You Only Look Once)

2020-06-14 Read the full story…

How to Build a Simple Machine Learning Web App in Python Part 2: An ML-Powered Web App in Less than 50 Lines of Code

In this article, I will show you how to build a simple machine learning powered data science web app in Python using the streamlit library in less than 50 lines of code.
The data science life cycle is essentially comprised of data collection, data cleaning, exploratory data analysis, model building and model deployment. For more information, please check out the excellent video by Ken Jee on Different Data Science Roles Explained (by a Data Scientist). A summary infographic of this life cycle is shown below:

As a Data Scientist or Machine Learning Engineer, it is extremely important to be able to deploy our data science project as this would help to complete the data science life cycle. Traditional deployment of machine learning models with established framework such as Django or Flask may be a daunting and/or time-consuming task. Video Link
2020-06-14 https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-build-a-simple-machine-learning-web-app-in-python-68a45a0e0291Read the full story…

Pagaya raises $102 million to manage assets with AI

Pagaya, an AI-driven institutional asset manager that focuses on fixed income and consumer credit markets, today announced it raised $102 million in equity financing. CEO Gal Krubiner said the infusion will enable Pagaya to grow its data science team, accelerate R&D, and continue its pursuit of new asset classes including real estate, auto loans, mortgages, and corporate credit.

Pagaya applies machine intelligence to securitization — the conversion of an asset (usually a loan) into marketable securities (e.g., mortgage-backed securities) that are sold to other investors — and loan collateralization. It eschews the traditional method of securitizing pools of previously assembled asset-backed securities (ABS) for a more bespoke approach, employing algorithms to compile discretionary funds for institutional investors such as pension funds, insurance companies, and banks. Pagaya selects and buys individual loans by analyzing emerging alternative asset classes, after which it assesses their risk and draws on “millions” of signals to predict their returns.

2020-06-17 Read the Full Story…

The Difference Between Various Data Science Job Titles

As the data science field has blown in popularity, it is important to note that there are other job titles with an overlap of functions. Job titles are so confusing nowadays that one company might label a designation something that is completely different somewhere, and so mainly focuses on what the responsibilities, technical skills and experiences will be when it comes to job titles related to data. In this article, we take a look at such similarities and differences in data job titles.

Data Scientist vs Data Engineer vs Data Analyst vs Statistician.

2020-06-22 08:30:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 5.5458, Raw Interest Score: 2.7735,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1761, Negative Sentiment 0.1101

Broadridge Unveils AI-Driven Corporate Bond Trading Platform

Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc. (NYSE: BR), a global fintech leader, today announced that its new AI-driven corporate bond trading platform, LTX®, has executed its first trades. Broadridge has partnered with Jim Toffey, founder of Tradeweb Markets, to create LTX, which combines powerful artificial intelligence (AI) with a new digital execution protocol that enables broker-dealers to significantly improve market liquidity, efficiency and execution for their buy-side customers.

Built on Broadridge’s US Fixed Income post-trade processing platform, which processes over $6 trillion in notional volume per day across 40+ dealer clients, LTX uses AI (LTX AISM) to help broker-dealers digitize their franchise to maximize liquidity for asset managers while delivering improved transparency, “BestEx” and minimizing information leakage.

2020-06-17 12:32:28+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 5.3747, Raw Interest Score: 2.7275,
Positive Sentiment: 0.6373, Negative Sentiment 0.1275

Artificial intelligence job growth crashed because of the coronavirus, but it’s starting to pick back up. Here’s what you need to know about the job market and how to pick up skills

As the coronavirus crisis has shrunk the job market in general, AI job growth has slowed too. Both LinkedIn and ZipRecruiter saw a decrease in AI job posting growth since mid-March, but there are signs that AI job growth could bounce back — maybe even stronger than before. Below find eight online resources for job-seekers looking to pick-up AI expertise or skills.

Artificial intelligence has been one of the hottest areas of tech and the economy in the last few years, and AI job growth has reflected that: AI roles ranked at the top of LinkedIn’s Job Of Tomorrow report in December, and the World Economic Forum estimated in January that 16% of new jobs would be in AI.

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic and corresponding economic downturn, which led to up to 40 million US jobs disappearing. How is the “job of tomorrow” faring now? New data from job boards shows that while the number of AI jobs is still growing, that growth has slowed dramatically during the coronavirus crisis.

2020-06-15 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 5.2723, Raw Interest Score: 2.1838,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1514, Negative Sentiment 0.3676

Deploying Machine Learning Has Never Been This Easy

According to PwC, AI’s potential global economic impact will reach USD 15.7 trillion by 2030. However, the enterprises who look to deploy AI are often hampered by the lack of time, trust and talent. Especially, with the highly regulated sectors such as healthcare and finance, convincing the customers to imbibe AI methodologies is an uphill task.

Of late, the AI community has seen a sporadic shift in AI adoption with the advent of AutoML tools and introduction of customised hardware to cater to the needs of the algorithms. One of the most widely used AutoML tools in the industry is H2O Driverless AI. And, when it comes to hardware Intel has been consistently updating its tool stack to meet the high computational demands of the AI workflows.

Now H2O.ai and Intel, two companies who have been spearheading the democratisation of the AI movement, join hands to develop solutions that leverage software and hardware capabilities respectively.

2020-06-19 07:20:42+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 5.1110, Raw Interest Score: 1.9648,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1551, Negative Sentiment 0.2068

Alation and Databricks Accelerate Data Discovery and Cloud Data Migration

Alation, provider of data catalog software, is partnering with Databricks, provider of a unified analytics platform for data and AI, to help accelerate data science-led innovations. According to the companies, a new integration provides data teams with a platform to identify and govern cloud data lakes, discover and leverage the best data for data science and analytics, and collaborate on data to deliver high quality predictive models and business insights.

By identifying the most widely used assets, Alation enables data teams to prioritize data for migration to the cloud. Once in the cloud, Alation provides data teams with visibility into the assets residing in the data lake and allows for context and understanding of the data, as well as collaboration among subject matter experts.

2020-06-17 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.9172, Raw Interest Score: 2.1222,
Positive Sentiment: 0.5694, Negative Sentiment 0.1035

Microsoft acquires ADRM Software, leader in large-scale, industry-specific data models

In advancing our mission to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more, Microsoft has been investing in the power of data and artificial intelligence (AI) to continuously innovate, influence and enhance customer experience and partner growth.

Data and AI are the foundation of modern technological innovation, yet businesses today struggle to unlock the full value data has to offer as fragmented data estates hinder digital transformation. Without a comprehensive and integrated view of their data, companies are at a competitive disadvantage, which hinders digital adoption and data-driven innovation.

Today, we are excited to announce the acquisition of ADRM Software, a leading provider of large-scale industry data models, which are used by large companies worldwide as information blueprints. ADRM’s robust industry data models have been built and refined over decades for business-critical analytics.

2020-06-18 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.2753, Raw Interest Score: 2.3952,
Positive Sentiment: 0.5988, Negative Sentiment 0.2139

COVID-19 Gives AI a Reality Check

While it seems unlikely that AI will enter another nuclear winter, the current COVID-19 situation is giving enterprises the opportunity to rethink their AI strategies, giving the better AI projects more room to run, while discarding the borderline AI projects that were unlikely to pay off.

The macro economic situation deteriorated rapidly thanks to COVID-19. In the span of a few weeks in late March, the United States went from record-low unemplo…
2020-06-18 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.2218, Raw Interest Score: 1.3963,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3103, Negative Sentiment 0.4893

Operationalizing of Machine Learning Data (Video Behind Registration Wall)

A challenge of ML is operationalizing the data volume, performance, and maintenance. In this session, Rashmi Gupta explains how to use tools for orchestration and version control to streamline datasets. She also discusses how to secure data to ensure that production control access is streamlined for testing.
2020-06-16 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.2071, Raw Interest Score: 1.6181,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0000, Negative Sentiment 0.3236

Hands-On Guide to Predict Fake News Using Logistic Regression, SVM and Naive Bayes Methods

There are more than millions of news contents published on the internet every day. If we include the tweets from twitter, then this figure will be increased in multiples. Nowadays, the internet is becoming the biggest source of spreading fake news. A mechanism is required to identify fake news published on the internet so that the readers can be warned accordingly. Some researchers have proposed the methods to identify fake news by analyzing the text data of the news based on the machine learning techniques. Here, we will also discuss the machine learning techniques that can identify fake news correctly.

In this article, we will train the machine learning classifiers to predict whether given news is real news or fake news. For this task, we will train three popular classification algorithms – Logistics Regression, Support Vector Classifier and the Naive-Bayes to predict the fake news. After evaluating the performance of all three algorithms, we will conclude which among these three is the best in the task.
2020-06-22 09:30:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.0722, Raw Interest Score: 1.6475,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0960, Negative Sentiment 0.0800

How to make your ML algorithms think like a human

The finance industry is a prime use case for machine learning, thanks to the abundant data sets, access to capital and strong incentive for efficiency and predicting future outcomes. While rule-based workflows are well embedded within the industry, many businesses are now turning to machine learning to automate the algorithm building process, especially when it comes to fintech.

As digital services become more widespread, financial organisations need to move beyond rule-based mechanisms and manual data analysis to ensure compliance, security and customer service. Machine learning is more scalable, flexible and reliable when implemented properly, but requires the right data to deliver actionable insights.

This is especially the case when it comes to making predictions about human behaviour. At a recent developer meetup, I heard from Ben Houghton, Head of Data Science for Barclays Payments, about his data approach and how he makes his algorithms think like a human.

2020-06-18 16:24:58 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.0388, Raw Interest Score: 1.7202,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1811, Negative Sentiment 0.2037

Scaling data science to create new business value (Video behind Registration Wall)

With businesses facing economic uncertainty, the potential of AI at scale is no longer a goal. It is an essential business priority. This is why Avanade and Microsoft have teamed up to power advanced analytics with Azure Synapse. Learn the four questions you should ask yourself to uncover the value of your data at scale.
2020-06-17 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.0373, Raw Interest Score: 1.5528,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0000, Negative Sentiment 0.6211

Oil & Gas Industry Transforming Itself with the Help of AI

The oil and gas industry is turning to AI to help cut operating costs, predict equipment failure, and increase oil and gas output.

A faulty well pump at an unmanned platform in the North Sea disrupted production in early 2019 for Aker BP, a Norwegian oil company, according to an account in the Wall Street Journal. The company installed an AI program that monitors data from sensors on the pump, flagging glitches before they can cause a shutdown, stated Lars Atle Andersen, VP of operations for the firm. Now he flies in engineers to fix such problems ahead of time and prevent a shutdown, he stated.
2020-06-18 21:30:16+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.9699, Raw Interest Score: 1.6643,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1884, Negative Sentiment 0.2355

The Need For A Data-Centric Approach To Compliance: Report

SteelEye, the compliance technology and data analytics firm, today published “Data-Driven Financial Services Compliance – Understanding the Opportunity”, a white paper which explores the key challenges faced by compliance teams within financial markets as they navigate regulatory change.

Increased complexity, rising costs and significant financial, operational and reputational risk have accompanied the wave of new regulations implemented over the past decade. Add to that the pandemic which brought with it market volatility and an exponential increase in the number of market abuse alerts, and financial compliance has become even more complex.
2020-06-18 13:37:54+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.8676, Raw Interest Score: 1.8068,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3127, Negative Sentiment 0.1737

Staying On Top of ML Model and Data Drift

A lot of things can go wrong when developing machine learning models. You can use poor quality data, mistake correlation for causation, or overfit your model to the training data, just to name a few. But there are also a few gotchas that data scientists need to look out for after the models have been deployed into production, specifically around model and data drift.

Data scientists pay close attention to the data they use to train their machine learning models, as they should. Machine learning models, after all, are simply functions of data. But the work is not over once the models are put into production, as data scientists must monitor the models to be sure they’re not drifting.

2020-06-16 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.5581, Raw Interest Score: 2.0420,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1789, Negative Sentiment 0.2534

The revised pessimistic projection for Digital wealth AUM does not make sense

Efi Pylarinou is the founder of Efi Pylarinou Advisory and a Fintech/Blockchain influencer – No.3 influencer in the finance sector by Refinitiv Global Social Media 2019.

Consulting practices call for 5yr predictions on all sorts of topics. The so-called Robo Advisor subsector in investing has not escaped these studies.

Back in 2016, was when Vanguard was making its first leapfrogging attempts in a space that Betterment and Wealthfront had broug…
2020-06-16 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.4815, Raw Interest Score: 1.6380,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0642, Negative Sentiment 0.0482

How to Create a Linear Regression Model

You can perform predictive modeling in Excel in just a few steps. Here’s a step-by-step tutorial on how to build a linear regression model in Excel and how to interpret the results

Excel for predictive modeling? Really? That’s typically the first reaction I get when I bring up the subject. This is followed by an incredulous look when I demonstrate how we can leverage the flexible nature of Excel to build predictive models for our data science and analytics projects. Let me ask you a question – if the shops around you started collecting customer data, could they adopt a data-based strategy to sell their goods? Can they forecast their sales or estimate the number of products that might be sold?

Now you must be wondering how in the world will they build a complex statistical model that can predict these things? And learning analytics or hiring an analyst might be beyond their scope. Here’s the good news – they don’t need to. Microsoft Excel offers us the ability to conjure up predictive models without having to write complex code that flies over most people’s heads.

2020-06-21 19:28:53+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.4720, Raw Interest Score: 1.7928,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2255, Negative Sentiment 0.0677

Dream of Becoming a Big Data Engineer? Discover What Sets Us Apart From Software Engineers

Engineering is an essential element of all corporations. Without it, companies are unable to create, maintain, and upgrade their products. Technology enterprises rely on their engineering department to survive in a competitive world. Even so, not all engineers perform the same set of tasks. In heavy technology-based companies, software engineers are one of the most critical resources. They build programs, create software, and maintain the functionality of the systems. Many other career paths diverge from software engineering. They specialize in a particular subject. In the data landscape, corporations face a tremendous growth in data amount. We need someone to step up and claim the responsibilities of managing that data. That commences the dawn of big data engineers. A big data engineer can evolve from a database administrator, a data architect, or a data analyst.

2020-06-20 17:45:51.905000+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.4175, Raw Interest Score: 1.8887,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1437, Negative Sentiment 0.1437

5 Tips for Kickstarting Your Data Career

Four years ago, I was a recent college grad, starting out my career at a four-person IoT startup. One of my first assignments was to research and propose a solution for an AI-based digital assistant for military settings. Although I studied engineering in college and worked in a lab assisting machine learning research, undertaking a huge natural language processing project without an experienced data scientist/engineer in-house was a daunting task. Inevitably, I had to resort to online resources to fill in the gaps and find mentors outside the organization for direction as well as personal growth.

Fast forward to the present, I now work on the data infrastructure for our IoT platform and train fullstack engineers and product managers in the company about data science to analyze our massive IoT data. This post is a compilation of all the resources I used and the tips I learned over the years of growing my own career in data science/engineering. Whether you are an engineer looking to break into the data industry or a recent grad preparing for your new role, I hope you find my tips useful.

2020-06-22 02:45:43.971000+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.2220, Raw Interest Score: 1.3601,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2218, Negative Sentiment 0.1331

AI Adoption Spurs Efforts to Reskill the Workforce

As AI adoption brings out changes in the workplace, workers are challenged to obtain needed AI skills and business leaders are working to adapt.

And as the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a shift to online learning, companies such as Udacity—who have been in that business for years—are in a good position to help.

Business leaders may be caught between competing objectives of continuing to deliver strong financial performance while making investments in hiring, workforce training and new technologies that support growth, suggested the author of a recent piece in Harvard Business Review.

2020-06-18 21:30:13+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.2167, Raw Interest Score: 1.4864,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2713, Negative Sentiment 0.1416

Game-Changing Technologies in the Data Environment of 2020

AI and machine learning were cited by several industry leaders as the most important technologies shaping today’s data environments. “We’re starting to see more success in specific use cases of machine learning, such as anomaly detection with system events, natural language processing, entity extraction, and classification technologies,” said Ranga Rajagopalan, vice president of product management for Commvault.

AI is critical to competing in the emerging economy, as it “makes it possible to go beyond what the human eye can detect and focus on a range of bad behaviors,” said David Ngo, vice president of product and engineering at Metallic. “It helps predict, identify, address, and solve our data needs.”

AI and automation are making IT and data professionals’ roles easier as well—enabling automatic processing of billions of dependencies in real time, continuous monitoring of the full stack for system degradation and performance anomalies, and delivering precise answers prioritized by business impact, said Jakub Mierzewski, product manager at Dynatrace. “With the right AI and automation technologies and practices in place, teams can shift from reactive to proactive, from guessing to knowing, from sifting through logs or becoming tied up in war rooms to having deep insights and data that drive innovation, acceleration, and business value. It’s like having an entire new team working for you 24×7, allowing your people to focus on what really matters.”

2020-06-17 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.2142, Raw Interest Score: 1.7033,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2241, Negative Sentiment 0.2689

Nebula Graph Joins Database Race

As the open source Nebula Graph database moves closer to commercial availability, the technology’s developer has announced an early funding round led by several Chinese investors. VEsoft Inc. said this week it would use the $8 million round to bring Nebular Graph to the European and North American markets as well as the rest of Asia.

Nebula Graph was released as an open source project in May 2019. The first beta version was released last June. The startup is poised to move from its beta version to general availability, addressing a market estimated by Gartner as growing to as much as $10 billion over the next several years. Competing graph database startups have so far raised more than $130 million in venture funding. Among them is TigerGraph, which announced a $32 million Series B funding round last fall as it released a cloud-based graph analytics service. Nebula Graph will be offered as a cloud service, VEsoft said. Monday (June 15).

2020-06-15 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.1643, Raw Interest Score: 1.7217,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0465, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

Defensive or Offensive, Every Strategy Must Start With Trust

As digital transformation becomes mainstream, digitization is no longer a differentiating advantage. Enterprises must answer to a new set of expectations from customers, employees and business partners, and all while prioritizing compliance with tightening data regulations. To ensure they aren’t hindered by bad data – or the inability to leverage good data – companies must balance both offensive and defensive strategies.

This two-pronged approac…
2020-06-17 11:00:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.1242, Raw Interest Score: 1.6649,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2775, Negative Sentiment 0.4096

Privacera’s Latest Release Integrates with Databricks to Offer Robust Governance

Privacera, a cloud data governance and security leader founded by the creators of Apache Ranger, is releasing the latest version of the Privacera Platform, an enterprise data governance and security solution for machine learning and analytic workloads in the public cloud.

Leveraging the Apache Ranger architecture, the Privacera Platform integrates with Databricks to help ensure consistent governance, security, and compliance across all data science, machine learning, and analytics workloads.

Privacera provides secure data sharing across the enterprise and balances the competing mandates of data democratization while adhering to applicable privacy and industry regulations such as GDPR and CCPA.

2020-06-17 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.9148, Raw Interest Score: 1.6622,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3145, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

Expanding Your Data Science and Machine Learning Capabilities (Registration Wall)

Surviving and thriving with data science and machine learning means not only having the right platforms, tools and skills, but identifying use cases and implementing processes that can deliver repeatable, scalable business value. The challenges are numerous, from selecting data sets and data platforms, to architecting and optimizing data pipelines, and model training and deployment. In responses, new solutions have emerged to deliver key capabilities in areas including visualization, self-service and real-time analytics. Along with the rise of DataOps, greater collaboration and automation have been identified as key success factors.

2020-06-25 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.8463, Raw Interest Score: 1.8130,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2863, Negative Sentiment 0.0954

The firms floating now offer clues for canny investors

After a lockdown hiatus, the IPO market has returned with a bang. This week saw success for US listings in biotech and pharmaceuticals – and news is expected in the next few weeks on major flotations in cloud computing, big data and artificial intelligence. This forthcoming wave of IPOs, with boards prepared to pull the trigger on a stock market listing despite an ongoing pandemic, is highlighting areas that are likely to do well whatever happens with Covid-19.

Also in the pipeline is artificial intelligence (AI) and behavioural economics group Lemonade, which is a fintech group with big hopes of disrupting the insurance sector. The company uses data analysis and an AI chat bot called Maya to calculate insurance rates for homeowners and renters – cutting costs and saving money for insurance issuers and customers alike.

2020-06-19 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.8415, Raw Interest Score: 1.3122,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1093, Negative Sentiment 0.2734

Evolution of data science: How it will change over the next decade

Although data science, as an academic discipline, has been around for more than 50 years, it wasn’t until around 2010 that it entered the mainstream consciousness. It happened as a new wave of businesses recognized that data was the key to mastery of modern markets and started making it their strategic focus. In the years since, the field of data science has seen explosive growth as well as some fast-paced developments as higher demand has spurred innovation.

As far as the field of data science has come since 2010, there’s every reason to believe that the next decade will bring even more change. With simultaneous advances in related technology fields and new approaches by the best and brightest minds in the industry, data science in 2030 will bear little resemblance to the state of the art today. Here’s a look at how data science is set to evolve over the next decade.

2020-06-16 10:33:57+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.8079, Raw Interest Score: 1.4761,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2312, Negative Sentiment 0.1601

Lenovo Announces Solutions Purpose-Built For Analytics And AI Workloads

Lenovo Data Center Group (DCG) announced the launch of the ThinkSystem SR860 V2 and SR850 V2 servers, which now features 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors with enhanced support for SAP HANA based on Intel Optane persistent memory 200 series. These solutions will allow customers to simplify common data management challenges. In addition, Lenovo announced new remote deployment service offerings for the ThinkSystem DM7100 storage systems.

With these offerings, customers can more easily navigate complex data management needs to deliver actionable business intelligence through artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics while getting maximum results when combined with business applications like SAP HANA®.

2020-06-19 07:31:41+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.8055, Raw Interest Score: 1.6920,
Positive Sentiment: 0.4999, Negative Sentiment 0.2115

AI2 spinout Lexion unveils Slack chatbot that automatically finds legal contracts

Lexion, a Seattle startup that spun out of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), this week rolled out a new Slack chatbot that can instantly find legal contracts. The chatbot analyzes a request via Slack and locates relevant information based on viewing permissions that a legal team has set.

“This not only helps in-house legal teams save hours each week on fishing contracts for sales/support/biz dev/executives, but is especially valuable now as teams work remotely with Slack as their main means of communication,” said Lexion CEO Gaurav Oberoi. It’s another example of companies adding features as the economic crisis changes how their customers work. Fellow Seattle startup Uplevel last week rolled out new tools to help managers measure engineer productivity in remote work settings.

2020-06-18 21:00:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.6658, Raw Interest Score: 1.5058,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0684, Negative Sentiment 0.0684

Staid Insurance Industry Exploring AI With Some Caution

Insurance industry taking careful steps in exploring AI for usage-based insurance, deep personalization, faster claims settlements.

The insurance industry is dominated by massive national brands and legacy product lines that have remained largely unchanged for decades. It is a staid industry. This makes the industry ripe for disruption by new technologies and approaches, especially those enabled by AI.

Venture capitalists see an opportunity and are investing. New York-based Lemonade, started in 2015, has attracted $480 million in funding so far, according to Crunchbase. Lemonade, which started in homeowner and renter’s insurance, recently filed to go public. Released financial information shows the company has a way to go to become profitable.

Auto insurance, which makes up more than 40 percent of the overall business, is likely to shrink as self-driving cars come onto the roads and fulfill their promise of making driving safer, suggested a KPMG report in 2015. The consultants predicted the auto insurance market will shrink 60 percent over the next 25 years.

2020-06-19 19:34:51+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.4238, Raw Interest Score: 1.2302,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2139, Negative Sentiment 0.2496

Roll Call: Visual Graph Data Models Today

Five years ago, I wrote a book about a new approach to Data Modeling — one that “turns the inside out.” It discussed visual Graph Data Modeling. For well over 30 years, relational modeling and normalization were the name of the game. One could ask that if normalization was the answer, what was the problem? But there is something upside-down in that approach.

Data analysis (and modeling) is much like exploration — almost literally. The data modeler wanders around searching for structure and content. This requires perception and cognitive skills, supported by intuition (a psychological phenomenon), that, together, will determine how well the landscape of business semantics is mapped.

Mapping is what we do; we explore the unknowns, draw the maps, and post the “Here be dragons” warnings. Of course, there are technical skills involved, and, surprisingly, the most important ones come from psychology and visualization (i.e., perception and cognition) rather than pure mathematical ability. Think of concept maps versus UML. And think of graphs versus SQL.

2020-06-22 07:35:29+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.3390, Raw Interest Score: 1.4204,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2007, Negative Sentiment 0.0309

AUC-ROC Curve in Machine Learning Clearly Explained

AUC-ROC Curve – The Star Performer!
You’ve built your machine learning model – so what’s next? You need to evaluate it and validate how good (or bad) it is, so you can then decide on whether to implement it. That’s where the AUC-ROC curve comes in.

The name might be a mouthful, but it is just saying that we are calculating the “Area Under the Curve” (AUC) of “Receiver Characteristic Operator” (ROC). Confused? I feel you! I have been in your shoes. But don’t worry, we will see what these terms mean in detail and everything will be a piece of cake!

For now, just know that the AUC-ROC curve helps us visualize how well our machine learning classifier is performing. Although it works for only binary classification problems, we will see towards the end how we can extend it to evaluate multi-class classification problems too.

We’ll cover topics like sensitivity and specificity as well since these are key topics behind the AUC-ROC curve.

2020-06-15 19:59:46+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.2828, Raw Interest Score: 1.0438,
Positive Sentiment: 0.4234, Negative Sentiment 0.5515

Blurred Lines: SAS and Microsoft To Go Deep in Analytics Partnership

The lines separating SAS and Microsoft analytics and AI software will blur as part of a major strategic expansion between the two companies announced today that will see Azure become the preferred cloud for SAS and technical integration across their respective product lines in the years ahead.

As part of the partnership, SAS has picked Microsoft Azure as the preferred provider for SAS Cloud, its suite of managed analytic and AI offerings. The company will begin the process of migrating SAS Cloud customers and offerings to Azure soon.

This deal is not exclusive, says SAS Executive Vice President and CIO Jay Upchurch. The SAS software will continue to be cloud agnostic, and customers will have the choice to run it on any cloud they want. “However, over the years ahead, SAS will migrate our internal operation and our global SAS Cloud business to Microsoft Azure,” he says.

2020-06-15 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.2790, Raw Interest Score: 1.1395,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2779, Negative Sentiment 0.0556

A former Google X employee just raised $21 million for his AI startup Streamlit, which is already being used by companies like Uber and Stitch Fix

On Tuesday, the artificial intelligence startup Streamlit announced it raised $21 million in Series A funding.

While still at Alphabet’s research subsidiary Google X (now known as X), Streamlit CEO and co-founder Adrien Treuille worked on all sorts of projects, from self-driving cars to Google Glass. But during this time, he first started to see a problem: Engineers building artificial intelligence products like a self-driving car constantly faced ever-growing mountains of data, and they often had difficulty working with all that.

He started building software to address the bottleneck, making it easier for data scientists and developers to build AI apps and experiment with machine learning, a field of AI that enables computer programs to learn from data, identify patterns, and make decisions on their own, without being told what to do. Machine learning is used in self-driving cars, email spam filters, mapping, and more. What started as a personal project ended up getting used by Uber and Stitch Fix. The next thing Treuille knew, investors wanted to put money into it. And on Tuesday, Streamlit announced it raised $21 million in Series A funding led by Gradient Ventures and GGV Capital.

2020-06-16 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.2104, Raw Interest Score: 1.3626,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1065, Negative Sentiment 0.1916

FogHorn Introduces Workplace Safety Solution that Leverages AI and IoT Data

FogHorn, a developer of Edge AI software for industrial and commercial Internet of Things (IoT) solutions, is creating Lightning Health & Safety Solutions, aiming to improve the safety of workplaces and help mitigate the spread of contagious illnesses.

Lightning Solutions, a new product line from FogHorn, are out-of-the-box packages of FogHorn’s Lightning Edge AI platform, preconfigured with use-case specific machine learning models and visualization dashboards.

Out-of-the-box solutions allow organizations to rapidly deploy edge intelligence and AI and immediately derive insights to common problems.

The FogHorn Lightning Health & Safety Solution suite includes a range of out-of-the-box solutions that can be used individually or together to create a comprehensive system.

An enterprise edition of the solutions is also available that can include further customizations, data science and integrations with customer’s existing IT systems, video management software, and access control systems.

Solutions include:

  • Health Monitoring: elevated temperature detection, cough detection, hand washing monitoring, social distancing monitoring, and mask / facial covering detection
  • Safety Monitoring: personal protective equipment, including hard hats, footwear, eyewear, vests, and boots
  • Hazard Detection: custom solution engagements are also available including crane and falling debris warnings, leak detection and spill hazards

2020-06-16 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.0826, Raw Interest Score: 1.1858,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0719, Negative Sentiment 0.2515

Challenges Data Teams Face While Working Remotely

Data science is a domain where working from home needs specific conditions, including the type of projects, access to tools, kind of tasks, staff engagement, and connectivity, and collaboration with the rest of the team/company. But such factors alone can be the source of problems for a data science team to be productive and efficient.

While you may think that not much has to change, and data science professionals can work smoothly from their homes, it may not be the case at all. According to AIM Research, 34% of analytics have reported a negative impact on their productivity due to work from home scenarios. The fact of the matter is that a lot of teams which are new to being remote and may face a host of unforeseen challenges.

2020-06-22 12:24:52+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.0739, Raw Interest Score: 1.1919,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3337, Negative Sentiment 0.6675

Zeroth-Order Optimisation And Its Applications In Deep Learning

Deep learning applications usually involve complex optimisation problems that are often difficult to solve analytically. Often the objective function itself may not be in analytically closed-form, which means that the objective function only permits function evaluations without any gradient evaluations. This is where Zeroth-Order comes in.

Optimisation corresponding to the above types of problems falls into the category of Zeroth-Order (ZO) optimisation with respect to the black-box models, where explicit expressions of the gradients are hard to estimate or infeasible to obtain. Researchers from IBM Research and MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab discussed the topic of Zeroth-Order optimisation at the on-going Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2020 conference.

In this article, we will take a dive into what Zeroth-Order optimisation is and how this method can be applied in complex deep learning applications.

2020-06-21 04:30:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.0614, Raw Interest Score: 1.5796,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2228, Negative Sentiment 0.5265


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The post AI & Machine Learning News. 22, June 2020 appeared first on CloudQuant.

Alternative Data News. 24, June 2020

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Alternative Data News. 24, June 2020

The AltDataNewsletter by CloudQuant

Finding sources and uses for alternative data can be difficult. At CloudQuant we regularly read and search the internet for new sources of data that can be used in our mission to find alpha signals and build quantitative trading strategies. We recognize that we are technology and data junkies so we wrote our own crawler that specifically seeks out web pages, posts, and news articles that give us a snapshot of what is going on in the world of Alt Data. The following is a collection of articles that we think you will find interesting from the past week.


Blockbuster Video US store locations between 1986 and 2019

Tools: Excel, Python and Blender 2.8

Sources: The per-state store numbers came from archive copies of Blockbuster Inc’s annual 10-K filings with the SEC between 1999 and 2011. The numbers outside of these years were collected from various business news articles with linear extrapolation for the dates in between.  The store counts also include Alaska and Hawaii which aren’t shown on the map.

Between 1985 and 2010, Blockbuster Video opened thousands of stores across the US. This map shows the locations of US Blockbuster Video stores over time.

Blockbuster opened their first store in Dallas in October of 1985. They weren’t the first video rental company, but they did have the largest selection of movie titles, over 6,500, which was more than any of their competitors at the time. Their first store was a huge success and throughout 1986, they opened three more stores in Texas.

While Blockbuster’s store concept worked really well, it wasn’t unique enough to be patentable. They knew that other companies would likely start copying their business model. To overcome this, their strategy was to grab as much market share as quickly as possible to stay ahead of any potential competitors. Throughout 1989, they purchased another four established rental chains and by 1990, they had opened over 1000 stores.

2020-06-19 Read the full story (Read the full YouTube description)…

European Commission opens investigation into acquisition of Refinitiv by London Stock Exchange

The Commission is concerned that the proposed acquisition may reduce competition in trading and clearing of various financial instruments and in financial data products.

The European Commission today announced the launch of an in-depth investigation into the proposed acquisition of Refinitiv by the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG). The Commission is concerned that the proposed acquisition may reduce competition in trading and clearing of various financial instruments and in financial data products.

The proposed transaction combines major trading venues where electronic trading of bonds of the European Economic Area (EEA), UK, and Swiss governments takes place. These venues include LSEG’s MTS and Refinitiv’s Tradeweb. This would result in a very large combined market share in the electronic trading of European Government Bonds, the Commission says. The market investigation indicates that the parties own venues with a leading position in the market, and are close competitors in this space, in particular regarding trading between dealers and investors. The market investigation also suggests that it is difficult for a new trading venue to attract clients in sufficient numbers and become a real alternative to incumbent venues.

In August 2019, LSEG announced the acquisition of Refinitiv in an all-share transaction for an enterprise value of approximately $27 billion. The proposed acquisition, which was approved by LSEG’s shareholders in November 2019, significantly accelerates LSEG’s existing strategy to be a leading global financial markets infrastructure provider. Thanks to the deal, LSEG is set to markedly expand its data and analytics offering to create a global multi-asset class capital markets business.

2020-06-22 19:52:46+03:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.5366, Raw Interest Score: 2.0690,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1277, Negative Sentiment 0.5109

CloudQuant Thoughts : This acquisition was big news in the Alternative Data world ($27 billion big). And so is the announcement of an investigation of the deal by the European Commission.

Credit-card data is broken. Here’s how hedge funds and banks are being forced to rethink one of the earliest forms of alt-data.

Credit-card data is one of the original alternative-data streams used by hedge funds and other investors. But the pandemic has disrupted consumer spending habits, and data vendors have been forced to do more hand-holding with clients. Banks are using techniques like post-stratification weighting and “swarming” to help make sense of data. One of the earliest and most popular forms of alternative data is proving more difficult to handle these days.

Investors like hedge funds have long leaned on credit-card data to help suss out everything from new retail trends to the health of specific businesses. But the coronavirus pandemic has transformed shopping habits, and that’s prompted some tough discussions in the ecosystem of data buyers and sellers.

“Relying on set-it-and-forget-it type models may not be a good idea because your outcome may be completely wrong,” Inna Kuznetsova, CEO of 1010data, told Business Insider.

For one hedge fund, Coatue’s $350 million quant fund, that means returning all outside capital while the firm reworks its strategy. It had pulled back severely from the markets in early April thanks to the instability and uncertainty in its data feeds. One source had told Business Insider that Coatue uses an e-commerce data set that showed a spike in visits to retailers’ websites while physical locations were closed — which could have overstated how well certain retailers were doing overall.

2020-06-22 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.2533, Raw Interest Score: 1.5262,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0860, Negative Sentiment 0.2150

CloudQuant Thoughts : Covid-19 has destroyed the set-it-and-forget-it black-box alt-data-driven algo. In the last three months we have seen new data sets (TSA Travel numbers) and the re-purposing of old data sets (Tom Tom Go’s City by City traffic patterns in China) take over Alternative Data. Alt Data is possibly the most progressive aspect of technology at the moment and the creativity shown during the pandemic has demonstrated just how dynamic and exciting this industry can be.

What I learned from looking at 200 machine learning tools

To better understand the landscape of available tools for machine learning production, I decided to look up every AI/ML tool I could find. The resources I used include:

  • Full stack deep learning
  • LF AI Foundation landscape
  • AI Data Landscape
  • Various lists of top AI startups by the media
  • Responses to my tweet and LinkedIn post
  • People (friends, strangers, VCs) share with me their lists

After filtering out applications companies (e.g. companies that use ML to provide business analytics), tools that aren’t being actively developed, and tools that nobody uses, I got 202 tools. See the full list. Please let me know if there are tools you think I should include but aren’t on the list yet!

2020-06-22 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.9448, Raw Interest Score: 1.6032,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1706, Negative Sentiment 0.1501

CloudQuant Thoughts : A nice mini summary of where we are with modern ML and  how we got here.

Analytics Best Practices for Transforming Data into a Business Asset

Data has three main functions that provide value to the business: To help in business operations, to help the company stay in compliance and mitigate risk, and to make informed decisions using analytics.

“Data can have an impact on your top line as well as your bottom line,” said Dr. Prashanth Southekal, CEO of DBP-Institute in a recent interview with DATAVERSITY®.

“Just capturing, storing, and processing data will not transform your data into a business asset. Appropriate strategy and the positioning of the data is also required,” he said. Southekal shared best practices for analytics and ways to transform data into an asset for the business.

2020-06-23 07:35:28+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.7507, Raw Interest Score: 1.6859,
Positive Sentiment: 0.4141, Negative Sentiment 0.1923

CloudQuant Thoughts : If you have a dataset that you think may be of use to others, particularly Investment firms, get in touch. We can help you to get your data in front of the right people in the right format.

AI experts say research into algorithms that claim to predict criminality must end

A coalition of AI researchers, data scientists, and sociologists has called on the academic world to stop publishing studies that claim to predict an individual’s criminality using algorithms trained on data like facial scans and criminal statistics.

Such work is not only scientifically illiterate, says the Coalition for Critical Technology, but perpetuates a cycle of prejudice against Black people and people of color. Numerous studies show the justice system treats these groups more harshly than white people, so any software trained on this data simply amplifies and entrenches societal bias and racism.

“Let’s be clear: there is no way to develop a system that can predict or identify ‘criminality’ that is not racially biased — because the category of ‘criminality’ itself is racially biased,” write the group. “Research of this nature — and its accompanying claims to accuracy — rest on the assumption that data regarding criminal arrest and conviction can serve as reliable, neutral indicators of underlying criminal activity. Yet these records are far from neutral.”

2020-06-24 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.6997, Raw Interest Score: 1.5393,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0563, Negative Sentiment 0.4505

CloudQuant Thoughts : This pseudoscience of scientific racism borders on Phrenology.


ESG Section

The Case for ESG Funds During Volatile Times: Morningstar

Advisors wary of sustainable investing may want to consider the performance of environmental, social and governance focused funds during these volatile times.

According to a new report from Morningstar, many funds investing in companies with relatively high ratings for ESG factors “prove to be more buoyant” than comparable non-ESG funds during market declines.

ESG funds tended to capture less of the downside of their Morningstar benchmark and to experience less volatility than comparable non-ESG funds during…
2020-06-16 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 5.5791, Raw Interest Score: 2.0821,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2112, Negative Sentiment 0.2414

‘Finance is, like, done. Everybody’s bought everybody else with low-cost debt’ says ValueAct co-founder Jeff Ubben — ‘Elizabeth Warren was right’

Companies, as governed today, with investors asking for more current returns and more buybacks and so forth, aren’t working for society or nature,’ Ubben tells the FT

The 58-year-old co-founder of ValueAct Capital, Jeff Ubben, told the Financial Times that he’s calling it quits at the investment fund that he co-founded about two decades ago in San Francisco.

“Finance is, like, done. Everybody’s bought everybody else with low-cost debt. Everybody’s maximized their margin. They’ve bought all their shares back . . . There’s nothing there. Every industry has about three players. Elizabeth Warren is right.”

Ubben had already stepped down as chief investment officer at the fund in 2017 and as CEO at the beginning of 2020, amid a round of changes in January at the activist hedge fund, and is now leaving altogether to kick off a new environmental and social-impact investment company that he calls Inclusive Capital Partners.
2020-06-23 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.3925, Raw Interest Score: 1.6174,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1578, Negative Sentiment 0.1183

‘Next Generation’ Of Smart Sustainable ETFs Launch

Stephane Degroote, head of ETFs & derivatives EMEA at FTSE Russell, said sustainability is involved in all the discussions the index, data and analytics provider is having regarding exchange-traded funds. Degroote told Markets Media: “Demand has become more sophisticated as issuers use factors to achieve specific environmental, social and governance exposures.”

Lida Eslami, head of business development for exchange traded products and international order book at London Stock Exchange, told Markets Media there has been more demand for ESG ETFs. “We currently list 19 sustainable ETFs and they have made up a quarter of new listings,” she added. Last week HSBC Global Asset Management launched three ETFs on the London Stock Exchange which track the newly created FTSE Russell ESG Low Carbon Select Indices. FTSE Russell is owned by the London Stock Exchange Group.

2020-06-15 17:31:37+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.7995, Raw Interest Score: 1.8675,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0865, Negative Sentiment 0.0346

ESG Fund Managers Look To Data And Scenario Analysis

The Covid-19 pandemic may help asset managers frame models for climate risk as they look to more forward looking scenario analysis for environmental, social and governance strategies.

Sharon Fay, co-head of equities and chief responsibility officer at AllianceBernstein, said in a blog that the investment management industry needs climate change models that are more forward-looking.

The investment-management industry needs to make strides in modeling #climatechange, says Sharon Fay, our Chief Responsibility Officer and Co-Head of Equities. #ABIQ https://t.co/kZs4I…
2020-06-18 19:01:20+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.9038, Raw Interest Score: 1.7442,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2514, Negative Sentiment 0.1100

CloudQuant Thoughts : As well as distributing this new summary, we also work with vendors of alternative datasets, including an ESG data set. Head over to our data catalog to find out more.


Mastercard buys financial-data startup Finicity for $825 million

We talked to Mastercard’s incoming CEO about why the card giant is spending $825 million to buy financial-data startup Finicity

Mastercard announced plans to acquire financial data startup Finicity for $825 million on Tuesday. The deal will help Mastercard grow it’s open-banking platform, which launched in Europe last year. Finicity’s data-sharing platform enables banks, fintechs, and lenders to access financial data for credit decision-making and real-time payment authentications.
2020-06-24 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.2442, Raw Interest Score: 1.7650,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1513, Negative Sentiment 0.0336

Mastercard to purchase open-banking company Finicity for $825 million

Mastercard Inc. MA, +0.80% announced Tuesday that it plans to acquire open-banking company Finicity for $825 million. Finicity shareholders have the ability for an earn out of as much as $160 million in additional funds if certain performance targets are met. The deal is expected to close by the end of the year. Mastercard said in a release that Finicity’s technologies will strengthen its open-banking capabilities…
2020-06-23 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.4805, Raw Interest Score: 1.5280,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2547, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

Mastercard to buy Finicity for open banking push

Mastercard is accelerating its open banking strategy through the $825 million acquisition of real-time financial data aggregation service Finicity. Salt Lake City-based Finicity works with thousands of banks and fintechs, using APIs to help smooth the exchange of customer data. With open banking seen as a “growing global trend” by Mastercard president Michael Miebach, the payments giant is keen to cash in, adding Finicity’s technology and teams to its platform as it seeks to win over banks and fintechs.
2020-06-23 16:38:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.3938, Raw Interest Score: 1.9732,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3946, Negative Sentiment 0.0000


Charles Schwab finalizes asset acquisition of Motif’s technology and intellectual property

The Charles Schwab Corporation on Tuesday announced the completion of the asset acquisition of Motif’s technology and intellectual property.

Motif is a fintech pioneer that has combined breakthrough technology and data science to deliver customized thematic portfolios to investors. On top of thematic investing, Motif’s technology platform offers the flexibility to personalize investments, supports real-time fractional share trading and can help enable sophisticated tax optimization strategies within investment portfolios.

The asset acquisition includes all of Motif’s technology and intellectual property, including algorithms, patents and source code. Schwab has also hired a majority of Motif’s development and investment talent.
2020-06-24 07:29:15+03:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.6010, Raw Interest Score: 2.0231,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1445, Negative Sentiment 0.0723

AxeTrading and Mosaic Smart Data collaborate to unlock bond market insights

AxeTrading, the fixed income trading software provider, and Mosaic Smart Data, the real-time capital markets data analytics company, today announced the integration of the AxeTrader EMS for the sell-side, buy-side and agency brokers with the Mosaic Smart Data’s MSX platform.

Mosaic Smart Data provides real-time capital markets data aggregation, normalisation and powerful data analytics fuelled by machine learning. Mosaic Smart Data understands that the true value of data comes not only from the intrinsic individual data streams themselves, but also from the correlations and inferences that can be drawn from the aggregated data from each client. It’s data analytics platform, MSX, and advanced suite of machine-learning powered tools, MSX360, provide value to buy-side, sell-side, custodians, market infrastructure providers and trading venues alike.
2020-06-24 10:58:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.3711, Raw Interest Score: 2.0138,
Positive Sentiment: 0.5664, Negative Sentiment 0.0315

Microsoft acquires ADRM Software, leader in large-scale, industry-specific data models

In advancing our mission to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more, Microsoft has been investing in the power of data and artificial intelligence (AI) to continuously innovate, influence and enhance customer experience and partner growth.

Data and AI are the foundation of modern technological innovation, yet businesses today struggle to unlock the full value data has to offer as fragmented data estates hinder digital transformation. Without a comprehensive and integrated view of their data, companies are at a competitive disadvantage, which hinders digital adoption and data-driven innovation.

Today, we are excited to announce the acquisition of ADRM Software, a leading provider of large-scale industry data models, which are used by large companies worldwide as information blueprints. ADRM’s robust industry data models have been built and refined over decades for business-critical analytics.

2020-06-18 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.2753, Raw Interest Score: 2.3952,
Positive Sentiment: 0.5988, Negative Sentiment 0.2139

Data Science on the Buy Side

With Gary Collier, CTO of Man Group Alpha Technology, and Hinesh Kalian, Director of Data Science, Man Group

What are the main data challenges / pain points for the buy side?

A big challenge is obtaining and retaining data science talent. It is apparent that there is a growing demand, and therefore competition, for data science talent across all industries, not just in financial services. Another challenge relates to the ability to ingest and curate structured and unstructured data rapidly and in a variety of raw formats. The growth in new data providers has led to a wide variance in the quality of data offered by data providers; some providers are well-established and have appropriate data science and technology teams, whereas others can be as limited as two employees in a start-up.

For data to be useful it needs to be clean, consistent and sourced and processed appropriately. Often data is provided after some processing steps are done, which limits awareness of the raw data and can lead to the risk of false representation and predictability.
2020-06-24 11:54:29+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.7405, Raw Interest Score: 1.8998,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1981, Negative Sentiment 0.0932

Lynn Martin Marks 5 Years As President, ICE Data Services

When she was a young girl Lynn Martin did not think that a woman could make a career on Wall Street but she has defied her own expectations. In July 2015 she became president and chief operating officer of ICE Data Services. Her responsibilities cover managing global data operations including exchange data, pricing and analytics, reference data, desktops and connectivity services across all major asset classes.

Martin told Markets Media: “The biggest change in five years has been the type of data produced and how it is used in markets. For example, developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning and more recently, environmental, social and governance data to power alpha generation.”
2020-06-22 17:57:39+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.4613, Raw Interest Score: 1.6211,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2074, Negative Sentiment 0.0566

Baidu’s PaddlePaddle deep-learning platform fuels the rise of industrial AI

This content was produced by Baidu. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.

PaddlePaddle lets developers build applications that can help solve problems in a wide range of industries, from waste management to health care.

AI is driving industrial transformation across a variety of sectors, and we’re just beginning to scratch the surface of AI capabilities. Some industrial innovations are barely noticed, such as forest inspection for fire hazards and prevention, but the benefits of AI when coupled with deep learning have a wide-ranging impact. In Southeast Asia, AI-powered forest drones have helped 155 forestry bureaus expand the range of forest inspections from 40% to 100% and perform up to 200% more efficiently than manual inspections. Behind these smart drones are well-trained deep-learning models based on Baidu’s PaddlePaddle, the first open-source deep-learning platform in China. Like mainstream AI frameworks such as Google’s TensorFlow and Facebook’s PyTorch, PaddlePaddle, which was open sourced in 2016, provides software developers of all skill levels with the tools, services, and resources they need to rapidly adopt and implement deep learning at scale.

2020-06-22 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.3906, Raw Interest Score: 1.7411,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2635, Negative Sentiment 0.1489

HK fintech Qupital to provide financing for eBay sellers

Hong Kong-based financial technology platform Qupital is pleased to announce that it has entered into an agreement with leading global e-commerce platform eBay as one of its officially recommended Hong Kong financing service providers.

This collaboration will enable Qupital to provide quality, data-based offshore financing services to eBay sellers in Greater China via its flagship product “QiaoYiDai” and assist them in resolving…
2020-06-24 11:32:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.0937, Raw Interest Score: 1.8678,
Positive Sentiment: 0.5747, Negative Sentiment 0.1149

HSBC invests $7m in data privacy firm Privitar

HSBC has invested $7 million in Privitar, topping up a recent $80 million Series C funding round for the UK-based data privacy startup.

HSBC joins Warburg Pincus, ABN Amro Ventures, Accel, Partech, IQ Capital, and Salesforce Ventures in the round, which was initially announced in April.

Established in 2014, Privitar helps banks and others make the most of big data while ensuring customer information is kept private. It says that its centralis…
2020-06-23 13:26:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.0769, Raw Interest Score: 1.7949,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0855, Negative Sentiment 0.1709

Evolution of data science: How it will change over the next decade

Although data science, as an academic discipline, has been around for more than 50 years, it wasn’t until around 2010 that it entered the mainstream consciousness. It happened as a new wave of businesses recognized that data was the key to mastery of modern markets and started making it their strategic focus. In the years since, the field of data science has seen explosive growth as well as some fast-paced developments as higher demand has spurred innovation.

As far as the field of data science has come since 2010, there’s every reason to believe that the next decade will bring even more change. With simultaneous advances in related technology fields and new approaches by the best and brightest minds in the industry, data science in 2030 will bear little resemblance to the state of the art today. Here’s a look at how data science is set to evolve over the next decade.

2020-06-16 10:33:57+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.8079, Raw Interest Score: 1.4761,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2312, Negative Sentiment 0.1601

Lenovo Announces Solutions Purpose-Built For Analytics And AI Workloads

Lenovo Data Center Group (DCG) announced the launch of the ThinkSystem SR860 V2 and SR850 V2 servers, which now features 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors with enhanced support for SAP HANA based on Intel Optane persistent memory 200 series. These solutions will allow customers to simplify common data management challenges. In addition, Lenovo announced new remote deployment service offerings for the ThinkSystem DM7100 storage systems.

With these offerings, customers can more easily navigate complex data management needs to deliver actionable business intelligence through artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics while getting maximum results when combined with business applications like SAP HANA®.

2020-06-19 07:31:41+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.8055, Raw Interest Score: 1.6920,
Positive Sentiment: 0.4999, Negative Sentiment 0.2115

Cape Privacy launches security-conscious collaboration platform for data science

Cape Privacy (formerly Dropout Labs), which is developing a privacy-preserving platform for collaborative data science, today announced it has raised $5.06 million. The company says $2.95 million of that is new funding and $2.11 million is seed money from 2018. It plans to use the money to accelerate its go-to-market efforts.

AI promises to transform — and indeed has transformed — entire industries, from civic planning and health care to cybersecurity. But privacy remains an unsolved challenge, particularly where compliance and regulation are concerned. Banks, health providers, and even retailers can run into problems when collaborating on AI and machine learning research involving sensitive or proprietary data, like patient records, financial documents, and supply chain details.

2020-06-24 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.8043, Raw Interest Score: 1.5563,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2993, Negative Sentiment 0.1197


This news clip post is produced algorithmically based upon CloudQuant’s list of sites and focus items we find interesting. We used natural language processing (NLP) to determine an interest score, and to calculate the sentiment of the linked article using the Loughran and McDonald Sentiment Word Lists.

If you would like to add your blog or website to our search crawler, please email customer_success@cloudquant.com. We welcome all contributors.

This news clip and any CloudQuant comment is for information and illustrative purposes only. It is not, and should not be regarded as investment advice or as a recommendation regarding a course of action. This information is provided with the understanding that CloudQuant is not acting in a fiduciary or advisory capacity under any contract with you, or any applicable law or regulation. You are responsible to make your own independent decision with respect to any course of action based on the content of this post.

The post Alternative Data News. 24, June 2020 appeared first on CloudQuant.

AI & Machine Learning News. 29, June 2020

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AI & Machine Learning News. 29, June 2020

The Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Newsletter by CloudQuant

The Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning News clippings for Quants are provided algorithmically with CloudQuant’s NLP engine which seeks out articles relevant to our community and ranks them by our proprietary interest score. After all, shouldn’t you expect to see the news generated using AI?


Nvidia Synthesizing High Resolution Images with StyleGAN2

This new project called StyleGAN2, developed by NVIDIA Research, and presented at CVPR 2020, uses transfer learning to produce seemingly infinite numbers of portraits in an infinite variety of painting styles. The work builds on the team’s previously published StyleGAN project. GANs have captured the world’s imagination. Their ability to dream up realistic images of landscapes, cars, cats, people, and even video games, represents a significant step in artificial intelligence. Over the years, NVIDIA researchers have contributed several breakthroughs to GANs. 2020-07-14 Read the full story… CloudQuant Thoughts : My daughter is an artist, this AI amazed us both. The possibilities are endless. We all knew AI was capable of something like this but the execution by Nvidia is flawless.  

AI Weekly: A deep learning pioneer’s teachable moment on AI bias

I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve heard someone say Timnit Gebru is saving the world recently. Her co-lead of AI ethics at Google, Margaret Mitchell, said it a few days ago when Gebru led events around race at Google. Gebru’s work with Joy Buolamwini demonstrating race and gender bias in facial recognition is one of the reasons lawmakers in Congress want to prohibit federal government use of the technology. That landmark work also played a major role in Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft agreeing to halt or end facial recognition sales to police. Earlier this week, organizers of the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) conference, one of the biggest AI research events in the world, took the unusual step of calling Gebru’s CVPR tutorial illustrating how bias in AI goes far beyond data “required viewing for us all.” 2020-06-26 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.6915, Raw Interest Score: 1.0650,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0592, Negative Sentiment 0.4142
CloudQuant Thoughts : This is a great summary of AI news over the last week in the form of an article, I really enjoy it when people put in this kind of effort. However, I was a little surprised that, whilst they led off with Timnit Gebru’s must watch presentation, they led the article with an image of “a couple of white dudes”.  

AI Being Applied to Improve Health, Better Predict Life of Batteries

AI techniques are being applied by researchers aiming to extend the life and monitor the health of batteries, with the aim of powering the next generation of electric vehicles and consumer electronics. Researchers at Cambridge and Newcastle Universities have designed a machine learning method that can predict battery health with ten times the accuracy of the current industry standard, according to an account in ScienceDaily. The promise is to develop safer and more reliable batteries. In a new way to monitor batteries, the researchers sent electrical pulses into them and monitored the response. The measurements were then processed by a machine learning algorithm to enable a prediction of the battery’s health and useful life. The method is non-invasive and can be added on to any battery system.

2020-06-25 21:30:28+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.6520, Raw Interest Score: 1.2970,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1513, Negative Sentiment 0.2162

CloudQuant Thoughts : This is incredibly useful Research as we move away from finite energy resources and towards storing the power of the sun in more and more batteries.  

This AI translates code from a programming language to another | Facebook TransCoder Explained

CloudQuant Thoughts : Does we really need ML to do this? Probably not for small scale translation, but being able to algo-rhythmically translate entire code bases will be very useful! Note that Facebook has not release any code, at the moment there is just a white paper on a preprint website.  

ESG Section

This is our section on ESG data in the news. Don’t forget that CloudQuant also supply alternative datasets including an ESG data set. For more information head over to our Data Catalog.

RepRisk partners With Battlefin to offer ESG datasets for alternative data community

RepRisk, a specialist in ESG data science combining machine learning and human intelligence, has formed a strategic partnership with alternative data platform and marketplace BattleFin that will significantly expand alternative data buyer access to ESG risk data.

RepRisk’s daily-updated dataset on nearly 150,000 companies linked to ESG and business conduct risks will be available through BattleFin’s global alternative data marketplace, …
2020-06-25 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 9.6320, Raw Interest Score: 3.0835,
Positive Sentiment: 0.4253, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

 

BNY Mellon Launches New ESG Data Analytics

The Bank of New York Mellon Corporation announced the launch of three new Data and Analytics Solutions offerings designed to help investment managers better manage their data, improve the success of U.S.-listed fund launches and support the customization of investment portfolios to preferred Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) factors.

Additionally, as part of its digital strategy to collaborate with external partners, BNY Mellon has expanded its relationship with Microsoft to create data, technology and content solutions for investment managers.”Our clients want and need more flexibility in their cloud-based data solutions so they can remain agile to evolving market, client and regulatory changes,” said Roman Regelman, Senior Executive Vice President and Head of Asset Servicing and Digital, BNY Mellon. “Data Vault, Distribution Analytics and ESG Data Analytics were developed to help investment managers better manage and unlock value from their data. Further, our expanded relationship with Microsoft underscores our open culture of partnering with leading technology providers to collaborate on data solutions that address client investment needs.”
2020-06-26 10:38:45+00:00 Read the full story (marketsmedia)… 2020-06-29 07:30:25+00:00 Read the full story (fintechfutures)…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.2777, Raw Interest Score: 2.3515,
Positive Sentiment: 0.7116, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

 

How Data Intelligence is Shaping the Future of the U.S. Renewables Sector

Data Intelligence — Still a Buried Treasure for an Efficient Green Recovery Regardless of whether the attraction of private capital to the renewable sector is met via a “green” stimulus, relevant stakeholders would do well to make better use of the resources already at their disposal, namely the wealth of data generated by installed IoT assets in the renewables sector. This driving imperative to innovate is behind the recent surge in investment from venture capital, utilities, and private equity players into digital technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to reap fewer risks and get better returns on renewable energy.

2020-06-26 07:35:19+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.1108, Raw Interest Score: 1.8082,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3113, Negative Sentiment 0.3473

 
 

Apple Parts Ways With Intel, Yann LeCun’s Tweetstorm, And More In This Week’s Top AI News

This week the AI community has witnessed a couple of ground shifting controversies, a couple of software releases and more. This week also marked the launch of Apple’s 31st edition of its flagship WWDC event. Here is all the top AI news that you wouldn’t want to miss.
  • Amazon Makes A Billion Dollar Entry Into Self-Driving Market
  • Deep Learning Paper Taken Down
  • Apple Concludes Its Biggest WWDC Event Ever
  • A Tweet Stirs Up ML Bias Controversy
  • Self-Driving Tech Company Waymo Joins Hands With Volvo
  • Deloitte Sets Up AI Institute
  • AWS Releases Honeycode To Develop Apps Without Writing Code

2020-06-27 12:30:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.7043, Raw Interest Score: 1.3016,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1795, Negative Sentiment 0.1795

 

Nvidia Destroys TPCx-BB Benchmark with GPUs

Traditionally, vendors have used CPU-based systems for the TPCx-BB benchmark, which simulates a Hadoop-style workload that mixes SQL and machine learning jobs on structured and unstructured data. So when Nvidia ran the benchmark on its new Ampere class of GPUs system, the results were predictably grim – for CPU systems, that is. Nvidia today reported unofficial results for two TPCx-BB tests, including the SF1K and the SF10K. For the SF1K test, which simulated a series of queries against a 1TB dataset, the company rolled out a dual DGX A100 systems, comprising a total of 16 A100 GPUs and a Mellanox interconnect. For the SF10K test, which used a 10TB data set, it used a Mellanox interconnect to hook together 16 DGX A100 systems running a total of 128 A100 GPUs.

2020-06-22 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.4146, Raw Interest Score: 1.4601,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1825, Negative Sentiment 0.0456

 

QuantHouse to provide TSL machine learning capabilities as part of the QuantFactory cloud backtesting suite

tHouse, a provider of end-to-end systematic trading solutions including market data services, algo trading platform and infrastructure products and part of Iress, has added Trading System Lab’s (TSL) machine learning capabilities to its QuantFactory cloud backtesting suite.

The suite provides a fully configurable environment in which clients can develop, backtest, optimise and implement quantitative trading strategies that can later be executed in a standalone, live-trading environment. Machine learning outputs from TSL are integrated into the QuantDeveloper module of QuantFactory.

Machine learning delivers…
2020-06-29 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 6.7901, Raw Interest Score: 2.3957,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3549, Negative Sentiment 0.0444

 

SQream Raises Funds to Expand its Analytics Push

SQream Technologies, the GPU database vendor, has attracted new investors while adding several financial backers to its board of directors. The Tel Aviv-based database vendor said Wednesday (June 24) it raised $39.4 million in a Series B+ funding round led by Mangrove Capitol Partners and Shusterman Family Investments. Existing investors include Alibaba Group, Blumberg Capital, Hanaco Venture Capital, Silvertech Ventures, Sistema.vc and World Trade Center Ventures. The company also said Charlie Federman of Silvertech Ventures and Roy Saar of Mangrove Capital Partners will join its board. The new investments will be used for recruitment as SQream attempts to accelerate development of its GPU-accelerated cloud analytics platform. Investors have been steadily pouring funds into the data analytics sector as customers seek to get their arms around ever-expanding data stores fueled by a flood of unstructured data. For example, Dremio, the cloud data lake engine vendor, announced a $70 million funding round in March.

2020-06-24 00:00:00 Read the full story (Datanami)… 2020-06-24 00:00:00 Read the full story (dbta)…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.6210, Raw Interest Score: 2.4403,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0000, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

 

Search for COVID-19 Treatment Accelerating Use of AI in Healthcare

AI was already having an impact in healthcare before COVID-19 came along. Now the impact of AI in healthcare is accelerating. A harbinger of the impact of AI on the spread of COVID-19 came on New Year’s Eve for 2020, when the AI platform Blue Dot registered a clutter of unusual cases in Wuhan, China. The Toronto-based company uses natural language processing and machine learning to track, locate and report on infectious disease spread. It sends alerts to its clients, which include entities in health care, government, business and public health. It had spotted what turned out to be COVID-19, nine days before the World Health Organization released an alert on the emergence of a novel coronavirus, noted a recent account in Wired. Since then AI has been used for prediction, screening, contact alerts, faster diagnosis, automated deliveries, and laboratory drug discovery in the fight against the coronavirus. One example is an AI-powered diagnostic system that purports to detect new coronavirus cases with an accuracy of 96% compared to computerized tomography scans, according to an account in Nikkei Asian Review.

2020-06-25 21:30:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.5090, Raw Interest Score: 1.6455,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1208, Negative Sentiment 0.1208

 

Quant Insight launches quant analytics platform on OpenFin

Quant Insight (Qi), a macro data analytics firm that applies quantitative techniques to financial markets, has launched its desktop application on the OpenFin operating system. Qi provides quantitative macro analytics across multiple asset classes to a wide array of investors from discretionary to systematic, from equity long/short to absolute return. Qi brings a single, comprehensive and robust solution to its clients with actionable signals. The collaboration enables the seamless deployment of Qi’s quantitative macro analytics on OpenFin’s OS, giving end-users a simple, comprehensive macro solution to aid their strategy, via an integrated API and an enhanced user experience dashboard. This will allow users to identify investment opportunities and manage risk, whether they are bottom-up or top-down in approach.

2020-06-25 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.0373, Raw Interest Score: 1.8634,
Positive Sentiment: 0.5324, Negative Sentiment 0.0444

 

Data Science on the Buy Side

With Gary Collier, CTO of Man Group Alpha Technology, and Hinesh Kalian, Director of Data Science, Man Group

What are the main data challenges / pain points for the buy side?

A big challenge is obtaining and retaining data science talent. It is apparent that there is a growing demand, and therefore competition, for data science talent across all industries, not just in financial services. Another challenge relates to the ability to ingest and curate structured and unstructured data rapidly and in a variety of raw formats. The growth in new data providers has led to a wide variance in the quality of data offered by data providers; some providers are well-established and have appropriate data science and technology teams, whereas others can be as limited as two employees in a start-up. For data to be useful it needs to be clean, consistent and sourced and processed appropriately. Often data is provided after some processing steps are done, which limits awareness of the raw data and can lead to the risk of false representation and predictability. 2020-06-24 11:54:29+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.7405, Raw Interest Score: 1.8998,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1981, Negative Sentiment 0.0932
 

Liquidity risk COVID-19: big vs small data

Using the right technologies to track, trace, and manage liquidity data and reporting will help financial institutions smoothly navigate the balance sheet and financial liquidity issues arising from the pandemic. During World War II, leaders of the free world called on industries to get creative and focus on critical warcraft needs. A technology boom ensued. The Turing Machine – with which the allies cracked the Enigma code – was one of many tech miracles of the era that turned the course of the war. Effectively the first risk engine, the machine enabled users to analyse (decrypt) critical data, understand (enemy) positions, and thus mitigate risks. In today’s war against coronavirus (COVID-19), industries are also answering the call to invent, retool, and ramp up to deliver vital medicines, specialised equipment, and supplies. To mitigate and beat the coronavirus, there has already been an explosion of new capabilities that capture, map, and enable users to understand COVID-19 infection data. Just as before, we can expect this global crisis to continue to precipitate technology changes into the next decade.

2020-06-23 11:30:35+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.6950, Raw Interest Score: 1.6509,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2830, Negative Sentiment 0.3145

 

MLflow Joins the Linux Foundation, Broadening Adoption of the Platform

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced that MLflow, an open source machine learning (ML) platform created by Databricks, is joining the Linux Foundation. The Linux Foundation provides a vendor neutral home with an open governance model to broaden adoption and contributions to the MLflow project even further. “The steady increase in community engagement shows the commitment data teams have to building the machine learning platform of the future. The rate of adoption demonstrates the need for an open source approach to standardizing the machine learning lifecycle,” said Michael Dolan, VP of strategic programs at the Linux Foundation. “Our experience in working with the largest open source projects in the world shows that an open governance model allows for faster innovation and adoption through broad industry contribution and consensus building.”

2020-06-26 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.5960, Raw Interest Score: 2.1220,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2653, Negative Sentiment 0.1592

 

Databricks’ ML Platform – MLflow Joins The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced that MLflow, an open source machine learning (ML) platform created by Databricks, will join the Linux Foundation.

Since its introduction at Spark + AI Summit two years ago, MLflow has experienced impressive community engagement from over 200 contributors and is downloaded more than 2 million times per month, with a 4x annual growth rate in downloads. The Linux Foundation provides a vendor-neutral home with an open governance model to broaden adoption and contributions to the MLflow project even further.
2020-06-26 07:17:11+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.3417, Raw Interest Score: 2.0253,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2848, Negative Sentiment 0.0949

 

A closer look at SageMaker Studio, AWS’ machine learning IDE

Back in December, when AWS launched its new machine learning IDE, SageMaker Studio, we wrote up a “hot-off-the-presses” review. At the time, we felt the platform fell short, but we promised to publish an update after working with AWS to get more familiar with the new capabilities. This is that update.

When Amazon launched SageMaker Studio, they made clear the pain points they were aiming to solve: “The machine learning development workflow is still very iterative, and is challenging for developers to manage due to the relative immaturity of ML tooling.” The machine learning workflow — from data ingestion, feature engineering, and model selection to debugging, deployment, monitoring, and maintenance, along with all the steps in between — can be like trying to tame a wild animal.

2020-06-27 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.2954, Raw Interest Score: 2.0045,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1706, Negative Sentiment 0.1493

 

Databricks Cranks Delta Lake Performance, Nabs Redash for SQL Viz

Today at its Spark + AI Summit, Databricks unveiled Delta Engine, a new layer in its Delta Lake cloud offering that uses several techniques to significantly accelerate the performance of SQL queries. The company also announced the acquisition of Redash, which develops a visualization tool that will be integrated with Databricks’ Lakehouse. Delta Engine is a new layer that sits atop Delta Lake, the structured transactional data storage layer that Databricks launched three years ago to address a variety of data ingestion and quality issues that customers were facing with the emergence of data lakes running atop cloud object stores, such as Amazon S3.

2020-06-24 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.1955, Raw Interest Score: 1.5774,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2214, Negative Sentiment 0.1245

 

Why our decision-making during COVID has been so bad

No one was prepared for COVID-19. No one but a handful of epidemiologists and visionaries — including, most famously, Bill Gates in his now-viral TED talk — had an inkling that the next global pandemic was a matter of when and not if. In retrospect, our unpreparedness is embarrassing and almost inexcusable. All the more so considering everything we know about HIV, SARS, MERS, and, most recently, the Ebola and Zika epidemics. We’ve all been talking about AI’s superpower for the last decade. But AI hasn’t been able to save us so far. It cannot replace human decision-making — yet. However, the technology can provide us with tools that complement our own cognitive processes. That could make us better prepared to respond to future epidemics, crises, and black swan events.

2020-06-28 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.1946, Raw Interest Score: 1.2905,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1844, Negative Sentiment 0.4916

 

Sino-US tech race triggers fears of expanding bubble

“Ten years ago, you could fit all of China’s semiconductor investors around two tables,” said Alan Peng, founder of chip start-up NextVPU. “Nowadays there are hundreds of people crowding around those same two tables.”

Until recently, China’s semiconductor sector was heavily reliant on the government. The National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, popularly known as “the big fund”, put up 139 billion yuan for chip projects in 2014. It …
2020-06-25 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.1652, Raw Interest Score: 1.6899,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0536, Negative Sentiment 0.1341

 

Machine Learning in Data Science Interviews

Machine learning questions are often the toughest parts of data science interviews, and for good reason. This post will highlight several example problems, general comments on machine learning, and what topics to study on the theory and application side. The problems discussed are featured from https://datascienceprep.com/ which covers interview questions from top tech companies. Machine learning is not applicable to every data science role since data science is a broad field, but for relevant roles, it is an important area of study that has both depth and breadth. However, regardless of role, I think it is useful for any data scientist or aspiring data scientist to study machine learning for three main reasons: There are two main areas of focus relevant to machine learning: theory and application. Theory entails all of the mathematical underpinnings behind models and why and how they work the way they do, whereas application entails all of the real-world use cases whereby technology at scale can leverage such models. Both are equally important to study and become well-versed in.

2020-06-29 04:41:21.547000+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.0948, Raw Interest Score: 1.8292,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1829, Negative Sentiment 0.3292

 

ING taps Expert System to boost back office automation

ING has extended a back-office automation agreement with artificial intelligence (AI) firm, Expert System.

The Dutch bank is deploying Expert System’s natural language understanding (NLU) services. This will improve its application of robotic process automation (RPA).

According to Expert System, RPA can sometimes fall short in automating tasks that require accurate comprehension, categorisation, and correlation of data. 2020-06-29 08:00:18+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.0656, Raw Interest Score: 2.0594,
Positive Sentiment: 0.4240, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

 

Synergy Between AI, 5G and IoT Yields Intelligent Connectivity

The major US mobile operators are all deploying their 5G networks in 2020, and each one claims that AI and machine learning will help them proactively manage the costs of deploying and maintaining new 5G networks. AT&T recently outlined the company’s blueprint for leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) to maximize the return on its 5G network investment. AT&T’s Mazin Gilbert sees a “perfect marriage” of AI, ML and software defined networking (SDN) to help enable the speeds and low latency of 5G. AT&T is using AI and ML to map its existing cell towers, fiber lines, and other transmitters that today, to build its 5G infrastructure and to pinpoint the best location for 5G build outs in the future. AT&T has more than 75,000 macro cells in its network and is using AI to guide plans for deploying hundreds of thousands of additional small cells and picocells. If AI detects a cell site isn’t functioning properly, it will signal another tower to pick up the slack.

2020-06-25 21:30:29+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.0001, Raw Interest Score: 1.4664,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3026, Negative Sentiment 0.2095

 

Eric and Wendy Schmidt back Cambridge University effort to equip researchers with A.I. skills

 
  • The program is designed to equip young researchers with machine learning and artificial intelligence skills that have the potential to accelerate their research.
  • PhD physicists, biologists, chemists and other scientists will all receive training.
  • Artificial intelligence and machine learning have the potential to speed up the pace of discovery across a range of disciplines.
Schmidt Futures, the philanthropic foundation set up by billionaires Eric (former Google CEO) and Wendy Schmidt, is funding a new program at the University of Cambridge that’s designed to equip young researchers with machine learning and artificial intelligence skills that have the potential to accelerate their research.

The initiative — known as the Accelerate Program for Scientific Discovery — will initially be aimed at researchers in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine. However, it will eventually be available for those studying arts, humanities and social science.

Some 32 PhD students will receive machine-learning training through the program in the first year, the university said, adding that the number will rise to 160 over five years. The aim is to build a network of machine-learning experts across the university.
2020-06-29 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.9545, Raw Interest Score: 1.7328,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0912, Negative Sentiment 0.0456

 

22 Widely Used Data Science and Machine Learning Tools

 
  • There are a plethora of data science tools out there – which one should you pick up?
  • Here’s a list of over 20 data science tools catering to different stages of the data science lifecycle
What are the best tools for performing data science tasks? And which tool should you pick up as a newcomer in data science? I’m sure you’ve asked (or searched for) these questions at some point in your own data science journey. These are valid questions! There is no shortage of data science tools in the industry. Picking one for your journey and career can be a tricky decision. Let’s face it – data science is a vast spectrum and each of its domains requires handling of data in a unique way that leads many analysts/data scientists into confusion. And if you’re a business leader, you would come across crucial questions regarding the tools you and your company choose as it might have a long term impact. So again, the question is which data science tool should you choose? In this article, I will be attempting to clear this confusion by listing down widely used tools used in the data science space broken down by their usage and strong points. So let us get started!

2020-06-22 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.8669, Raw Interest Score: 1.7328,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2542, Negative Sentiment 0.1338

 

Spark 3.0 Brings Big SQL Speed-Up, Better Python Hooks

Apache Spark 3.0 is now here, and it’s bringing a host of enhancements across its diverse range of capabilities. The headliner is an big bump in performance for the SQL engine and better coverage of ANSI specs, while enhancements to the Python API will bring joy to data scientists everywhere.

In 10 short years, Spark has become the dominant data processing framework for parallel big data analytics. It started out as a replacement for MapReduce, but it’s still going strong even as excitement for Hadoop has faded. Today, it’s the Swiss Army knife of processing, providing capabilities spanning ETL and data engineering, machine learning, stream processing, and advanced SQL analytics.
2020-06-25 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.7924, Raw Interest Score: 1.7595,
Positive Sentiment: 0.4353, Negative Sentiment 0.1088

 

Would You Rather be a Data Analyst or Data Scientist?

How does it feel to be in one of these roles? Find out here.

After working as both a professional data analyst and data scientist, I thought it would be insightful to highlight the experience of each position along with some key differences in how they feel day-to-day. Ultimately, I hope my article can help you decide which role fits best for you. If you are already in one of these positions, perhaps you would like to switch to the other one. Some people start as data analysts then move on to becoming a data scientist, whereas, as a less popular route but still somewhat prominent, is going from a non-senior level data scientist position to a senior data analyst. For each position, there are several concepts and overall experiences that are important to know as you make your next big career move. Below, I will highlight how it feels to be a data analyst as well as a data scientist. I will raise common questions about each role and answer them accordingly from what I have experienced — in addition to some close peers in each field. 2020-06-29 05:05:25.125000+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.7890, Raw Interest Score: 1.5320,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1129, Negative Sentiment 0.0484
 

Analytics Best Practices for Transforming Data into a Business Asset

Data has three main functions that provide value to the business: To help in business operations, to help the company stay in compliance and mitigate risk, and to make informed decisions using analytics.

“Data can have an impact on your top line as well as your bottom line,” said Dr. Prashanth Southekal, CEO of DBP-Institute in a recent interview with DATAVERSITY®.

“Just capturing, storing, and processing data will not transform your data into a business asset. Appropriate strategy and the positioning of the data is also required,” he said. Southekal shared best practices for analytics and ways to transform data into an asset for the business.

2020-06-23 07:35:28+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.7507, Raw Interest Score: 1.6859,
Positive Sentiment: 0.4141, Negative Sentiment 0.1923

 

Eventus Systems partners with VoxSmart

Global trade surveillance and risk management software platform provider Eventus Systems has partnered with VoxSmart, a specialist in communications surveillance technology.

The firms are collaborating to build custom solutions for global market participants looking to enhance their ability to surveil and manage risk across the entire order and trade lifecycle, from pre-trade communications to execution and post-trade monitoring.

Both VoxSmart and Eventus use artificial intelligence (AI) to help clients reduce time spent on false-positive alerts and flag suspicious activity to mitigate risk in their organisations.
2020-06-26 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.6439, Raw Interest Score: 1.6070,
Positive Sentiment: 0.4017, Negative Sentiment 0.0670

 

Banking on the cloud in the face of COVID-19 and beyond

As coronavirus (COVID-19) continues to significantly affect the world around us, financial services organisations are playing a key role in supporting societies around the globe. In light of the pandemic, however, many financial services businesses must adapt to shifting customer and market landscapes. This new environment is putting pressure on existing systems and, as a result, the need for resilient, flexible and secure systems and applications to ensure operational resilience has become vital. Even before the pandemic, discussions between technology providers and financial firms have increasingly become focused on what business issues the cloud can solve. How is it already aiding savvy banks and their fintech counterparts? This conversation is now more important than ever, as firms adjust to new realities, including more remote workforces and more digital interactions with customers. So, how can the cloud help financial businesses in the face of COVID-19 and beyond? And how is it already aiding savvy banks and their fintech counterparts?

2020-06-22 00:00:51+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.6316, Raw Interest Score: 1.3085,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1845, Negative Sentiment 0.1845

 

Expressive power of graph neural networks and the Weisfeiler-Lehman test

How powerful are graph neural networks?

 Do you have a feeling that deep learning on graphs is a bunch of heuristics that work sometimes and nobody has a clue why? In this post, I discuss the graph isomorphism problem, the Weisfeiler-Lehman heuristic for graph isomorphism testing, and how it can be used to analyse the expressive power of graph neural networks. This is the first in the series of three posts on the expressivity of graph neural networks. In Part 2, I will discuss how to depart from the Weisfeiler-Lehman hierarchy and in Part 3, I will suggest why it may be a good idea to revisit the whole graph isomorphism framework.

2020-06-29 10:39:26.489000+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.6310, Raw Interest Score: 1.2477,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1248, Negative Sentiment 0.2382

   

SoftBank-backed Lemonade wants IPO investors to think of it as a technology company. Here’s why it really isn’t.

chnologies” more times than did Casper or WeWork, two startups that also tried to boost their offerings by pretending to be tech companies.

The company also touts its use of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other buzzy technologies.

But it has little reason to be considered a tech firm — Nearly all of the company’s revenue comes from selling insurance; technology development is only a small portion of its expenses; and it holds no patents.

Online insurance company Lemonade is pitching itself as a tech company and hoping public investors wil…
2020-06-27 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.4936, Raw Interest Score: 1.4190,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1075, Negative Sentiment 0.0645

 

Adverse media screening: a key pillar of financial crimes compliance

The scale, complexity and sophistication of financial crimes has been rapidly rising over the last decade. Technology advancements have improved banks’ and financial institutions’ (FI) capabilities of prevention, detection and reporting of such crimes. But the same advanced technology is being exploited by criminals to benefit them by proliferating more innovative financial crimes, leading to expanding typologies in fraud and money laundering among others. Can we leverage AI to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of adverse media screening? Adverse media screening is a critical component of financial anti-crime measures adopted by banks and FIs, as regulators across the globe, from Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (USA) to European Commission (EU), Financial Conduct Authority (UK) and several others, are enforcing strict requirements on the same. It is mandatory during onboarding know your client (KYC) checks, scheduled reviews and ongoing monitoring as part of customer due diligence (CDD). It is essential to gather all details about a customer, or prospect to be onboarded as a customer, including any negative information about them so that the bank can take a risk-based approach on the relationship with such customer. Technology has enabled us to access staggering volumes, variety and velocity of news and information from around the world. Is it then humanly possible to screen millions of customers of any bank by searching the web for adverse news, analyse every negative news item and then consider them for risk profiling of the accused customer? Can we leverage artificial intelligence (AI) instead, to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of adverse media screening?

2020-06-29 00:00:20+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.4667, Raw Interest Score: 1.2978,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2329, Negative Sentiment 0.6323

 

AI startup 7bridges just raised $3 million in a seed round backed by LocalGlobe and Crane Venture Partners

AI logistics startup 7bridges has raised $3.4 million in a seed funding round backed by LocalGlobe and Crane Venture Partners.

The AI logistics market is expected to be worth more than $6 billion globally by 2023, according to analysts at Infoholic Research.

Scott Sage, partner at Crane Venture Partners, said COVID-19 had created “an incredibly important opportunity for disruption”.

2020-06-25 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.4442, Raw Interest Score: 1.2226,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3373, Negative Sentiment 0.1686

 

$6.2 billion AI startup Databricks, which is rolling out a new strategy this week, has a stockpile of more than $500 million to ride through the recession to an IPO thanks to CEO’s ‘sky is falling’ pa

Ali Ghodsi, the CEO of artificial intelligence firm Databricks, was so paranoid about an economic downturn that the company raised two rounds of funding in under six months from the likes of Andreessen Horowitz.

Now the company has “well over half a billion dollars on its balance sheet” left to ride out the recession to an IPO, likely next year.

This week the company is unveiling a new concept called “the data lakehouse” that will allow com…
2020-06-23 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.3788, Raw Interest Score: 1.2583,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1601, Negative Sentiment 0.2288

 

Data Science Certifications: Are They Worth It?

With data science becoming key to many companies’ overall strategies, it’s well worth asking if data science certifications are necessary if you want to land a job as a data scientist. In simplest terms, data scientists mine company datasets for key insights, which executives and team leaders then use to tailor strategies. Data scientists often utilize statistical and machine learning techniques to create predictive analytics and models; they also interface with data and application engineers to integrate these models into the product. It’s a job that not only requires technical skills, but also “soft skills” that allow successful interactions with people from multiple departments, including business development, sales, product management, project management, UX/UI designs, and software engineering teams. In other words, it’s a job that demands a lot of skills (and, depending on the company and position, a lot of experience). But do companies want you to have certifications that validate some of those skills? Dice Insights spoke with Dustin Weaver, analytics lead at data analytics consulting firm Atrium, about certifications and what hiring managers want. What are some certifications for data science professionals? 2020-06-24 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.3734, Raw Interest Score: 1.3392,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1933, Negative Sentiment 0.0690
 

Fixed Income EMS AxeTrader Integrates MSX Platform for Data Analytics

AxeTrader’s fixed-income EMS for the sell-side, buy-side, and agency brokers has integrated the Mosaic Smart Data’s MSX platform, according to an official statement. The fixed-income trading market continues to rapidly evolve as a wave of change is driving the adoption of automation, algorithmic driven trading and expansion of trading models. AxeTrader seamlessly generates, collects and standardizes all the relevant data from multiple sources including OTC transactions, voice trade confirmations, and trades across 22 execution venues, 12 leading market data sources, and internal platforms. AxeTrader provides fixed income traders with market aggregation and trading workflows in a single desktop enabling more efficient and transparent trading. The firm partnered with Mosaic Smart Data for its analytics tool, which will deliver AxeTrader users a range of new capabilities including real-time counterparty insights, TCA, hit ratios, and profitability analytics, fuelled by machine learning. Its data analytics platform, MSX, and advanced suite of machine-learning powered tools, MSX360, provide value to buy-side, sell-side, custodians, market infrastructure providers and trading venues alike.

2020-06-26 19:34:49+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 5.0566, Raw Interest Score: 2.2636,
Positive Sentiment: 0.5992, Negative Sentiment 0.0333

 

This news clip post is produced algorithmically based upon CloudQuant’s list of sites and focus items we find interesting. We used natural language processing (NLP) to determine an interest score, and to calculate the sentiment of the linked article using the Loughran and McDonald Sentiment Word Lists.

If you would like to add your blog or website to our search crawler, please email customer_success@cloudquant.com. We welcome all contributors.

This news clip and any CloudQuant comment is for information and illustrative purposes only. It is not, and should not be regarded as investment advice or as a recommendation regarding a course of action. This information is provided with the understanding that CloudQuant is not acting in a fiduciary or advisory capacity under any contract with you, or any applicable law or regulation. You are responsible to make your own independent decision with respect to any course of action based on the content of this post.

The post AI & Machine Learning News. 29, June 2020 appeared first on CloudQuant.

Alternative Data News. 01, July 2020

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Alternative Data News. 01, July 2020

The AltDataNewsletter by CloudQuant

Finding sources and uses for alternative data can be difficult. At CloudQuant we regularly read and search the internet for new sources of data that can be used in our mission to find alpha signals and build quantitative trading strategies. We recognize that we are technology and data junkies so we wrote our own crawler that specifically seeks out web pages, posts, and news articles that give us a snapshot of what is going on in the world of Alt Data. The following is a collection of articles that we think you will find interesting from the past week.


The Major US Airlines’ Number of Flights Per Day

Source: Flightradar24.com

Tools used: matplotlib

This visualization was created for city-data.com

Their API is accessible using pyflightdata. You can list planes (tail numbers) by airline as well as get flight history for each tail number.

Q : How did you do it then? Did you search for all the flight numbers operated by a particular airline, then search for that flight information?

A : Yes, that’s a few lines of python code. The only issue is you have to throttle requests – so querying all the planes takes several hours.

2020-06-26 Read the Full Story…

CloudQuant Thoughts : Another great post from Data Is Beautiful over at Reddit.

Almost 17,000 Protesters Had No Idea A Tech Company Was Tracing Their Location

Data company Mobilewalla used cellphone information to estimate the demographics of protesters. Sen. Elizabeth Warren says it’s “shady” and concerning.

On the weekend of May 29, thousands of people marched, sang, grieved, and chanted, demanding an end to police brutality and the defunding of police departments in the aftermath of the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. They marched en masse in cities like Minneapolis, New York, Los Angeles, and Atlanta, empowered by their number and the assumed anonymity of the crowd. And they did so completely unaware that a tech company was using location data harvested from their cellphones to predict their race, age, and gender and where they lived.

Just over two weeks later, that company, Mobilewalla, released a report titled “George Floyd Protester Demographics: Insights Across 4 Major US Cities.” In 60 pie charts, the document details what percentage of protesters the company believes were male or female, young adult (18–34); middle-aged 35º54, or older (55+); and “African-American,” “Caucasian/Others,” “Hispanic,” or “Asian-American.”

“These companies can even sell this data to the government, which can use it for law and immigration enforcement.”
“African American males made up the majority of protesters in the four observed cities vs. females,” Mobilewalla claimed. “Men vs. women in Atlanta (61% vs. 39%), in Los Angeles (65% vs. 35%), in Minneapolis (54% vs. 46%) and in New York (59% vs. 41%).” The company analyzed data from 16,902 devices at protests — including exactly 8,152 devices in New York, 4,527 in Los Angeles, 2,357 in Minneapolis, and 1,866 in Atlanta.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren told BuzzFeed News that Mobilewalla’s report was alarming, and an example of the consequences of the lack of regulation on data brokers in the US.

2020-06-25 Read the full story…

CloudQuant Thoughts : We often forget how little most people know about the data collected by firms like Mobilewalla. When the extent of their data collection shocks even data scientists then you know someone has overstepped the mark.

Quants Sound Warning as Everyone Chases Same Alternative Data

Quant and discretionary practitioners warn pandemic markets are shining a light on two big pitfalls: Investing signals are hard to find in the noise and, when money mangers do strike gold, excess returns can vanish quickly.

“I’ve looked at probably 700 or 800 data sets over the last 10 years and about 90 to 95% of data sets tend to have basic evident biases to them,” said Qaisar Hasan, a fund manager at Lombard Odier Investment Managers in New York. “They don’t really deliver the claims the vendor has made.”

Like many of his peers, Hasan is using Apple and Google’s mobility statistics to help map the economic recovery as virus restrictions ease. But he warns those venturing deeper into the data world to tread carefully. A set of credit-card data might be skewed toward one demographic that isn’t receiving stimulus checks, or to a specific region of the U.S. which is unrepresentative of broader trends, for instance.

2020-06-25 04:35:54-04:00 Read the full story…
2020-06-25 12:01:05+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 5.0552, Raw Interest Score: 1.9180,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2166, Negative Sentiment 0.1701

CloudQuant Thoughts : Finding useful datasets that are a) not garbage! b) do not have bias c) still contain useful alpha and d) are easy to test and ingest still remains this industry’s number one challenge. At CloudQuant we are constantly working to make locating and testing alternative data as easy as test driving a car.

BlackRock Adopts New Investing Framework Due to Pandemic

BlackRock has developed a “completely new macro framework” for investing as a result of the coronavirus shock to the global economy and global financial markets.

“We used to frame things as to where we were in the business cycle,” said Jean Boivin, head of the BlackRock Investment Institute, who discussed the firm’s midyear investment outlook in a webinar. “That is not the story anymore. The shock [of the pandemic] has fundamentally changed the investment environment and landscape … [and] that requires a deeper rethink of how we build portfolios.”
Continuing that theme, Elga Bartsch, who heads up economic and markets research at the BlackRock Institute, said the current global economic downturn “is not a recession” and its reversal will not be a recovery but “a restart” of the economy, which has strategic (longer term) and tactical (short term) implications for investors.

2020-06-30 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.7607, Raw Interest Score: 1.4817,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0228, Negative Sentiment 0.2507

CloudQuant Thoughts : The tragic number of deaths is obviously the major impact caused by the Corona Virus, but a very close second and some would claim larger impact is the massive financial intervention in the market by the FED. Without the FED pumping trillions of dollars into Bonds and ETFs the market would have collapsed. They did not execute this rescue alone, BlackRock assisted. And whilst the press claims that BlackRock made relatively modest fees from this assistance. We in data know that being on the inside and knowing what was happening when, with presumably access to the exact trades, puts BlackRock at a tremendous advantage when it comes to “Predicting” the future direction of the economy and the market.

Analytics Best Practices for Transforming Data into a Business Asset

Data has three main functions that provide value to the business: To help in business operations, to help the company stay in compliance and mitigate risk, and to make informed decisions using analytics.

“Data can have an impact on your top line as well as your bottom line,” said Dr. Prashanth Southekal, CEO of DBP-Institute in a recent interview with DATAVERSITY®.

“Just capturing, storing, and processing data will not transform your data into a business asset. Appropriate strategy and the positioning of the data is also required,” he said. Southekal shared best practices for analytics and ways to transform data into an asset for the business.

2020-06-23 07:35:28+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.7507, Raw Interest Score: 1.6859,
Positive Sentiment: 0.4141, Negative Sentiment 0.1923

CloudQuant Thoughts : If you have data the you think may be of interest to market professionals, let CloudQuant help you get the data in front of the right people in the right format. Get in touch!

Research Reveals Shortcomings in Data Literacy Projects: Don’t Let This Happen to You

The studies cited in this report indicate that: “Only 32 percent of business executives surveyed said that they’re able to create measurable value from data, while just 27 percent said their data and analytics projects produce actionable insights. Organizations need to recognize that the exponential growth in data usage has accelerated far beyond the skills and confidence of the employees required to use it. Only 25 percent of employees felt fully prepared to use data effectively when entering their current role.”

It then went on to say later in the study that: “Despite nearly all employees recognizing data in the workplace as an asset, few are using it to inform decision-making. Only 37 percent of employees trust their decisions more when those decisions are based on data, and almost half (48 percent) frequently defer to making decisions based on gut feeling over data-driven insight.”

2020-07-01 07:35:30+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.5993, Raw Interest Score: 1.5194,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3575, Negative Sentiment 0.1639

CloudQuant Thoughts : Remember when listening to business managers quoting statistics that Jack Ma led one of the largest tech firms in the world, invested in AI and is estimated to be worth more than $43b.


ESG Section

CloudQuant also provides Alternative Data sets together with analysis in the form a a white paper, code and data to reproduce the results in the white paper. Head over to our Data Catalog to find out more.

How to build an investment portfolio that supports racial justice

Measuring the social impact of your stocks and bonds is not always easy, but there are still many tools to help you promote racial equity with your investments

In the wake of widespread outrage and protests about racial injustice, many people are looking at their stock portfolio and wondering: what can I do to support racial justice with my dollars? If you are an investor of any type — whether you have a 401(k), IRA, or trading account — there are a few things you could do to promote racial equity.

ESG investing: the basics : You may have heard of ESG investing, which stands for “environmental, social and governance.” It is also often called sustainable, socially responsible or simply “values” investing. It’s an investment strategy that selects stocks and bonds based not only on traditional financial criteria, but also based on the impact of different companies on society and the environment.

2020-06-29 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.6584, Raw Interest Score: 1.4456,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1268, Negative Sentiment 0.1268

Activist Hedge Funds Can Smell Greenwashing, Study Finds

Hedge funds are going after firms that announce environmental, social, or governance plans — but not the ones that take them seriously.

Companies implementing social responsibility plans are twice as likely to enter activist hedge funds crosshairs as firms that are not addressing these issues. But management teams that are truly serious, not just greenwashing, about environmental, governance and other impact goals, may be able to avoid luring activists, according to new academic research.

Investors are increasingly deploying money via ESG and impact frameworks. Even Jeff Ubben, founder of $16 billion ValueAct Capital, is quitting to start an impact fund. Skeptics have long believed that a financial crisis would reduce the amount of attention paid to what are often considered soft issues like board diversity or the environmental impact of manufacturing plants. But investors have actually doubled down on ESG strategies since the pandemic shut down economies in March.

For companies wanting to get in on those capital flows (or do the right thing), the new study sheds light on how activists may react to ESG initiatives.

2020-06-25 Read the full story…

Carbon Transition Is ‘Extraordinary’ Opportunity

David Blood, co-founder and senior partner of Generation Investment Management, said the transition to a low-carbon economy presents ‘extraordinary’ economic opportunities which he has not seen before in his 35 years in finance.

He spoke this morning on a webinar, Investors as catalysts of the climate transition, hosted by the London Stock Exchange Group and the United Nations-backed Principles of Responsible Investment.

“People are recognising the link between sustainability, inequality and resilience,” Blood said. “Investors are insisting that climate change and social justice should be addressed when we build back better after Covid-19. The economic opportunities are extraordinary, which I have not seen in my 35 years of finance,”

2020-06-30 17:23:13+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.7551, Raw Interest Score: 1.6150,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1900, Negative Sentiment 0.0760

Why Jeff Bezos is pouring billions into tackling climate change

Amazon is making much of its efforts to tackle climate change. But what does it stand to gain?

Jeff Bezos wants you to know that Amazon is serious about tackling climate change. In the space of four days last week, his company launched a $2bn (£1.6bn) venture capital fund to invest in technologies that tackle carbon emissions, bought an electric self-driving car firm and revealed that it would rename a Seattle hockey stadium to the “Climate Pledge Arena”….

According to a 2018 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body, the cost of a 1.5°C increase in temperatures by 2030 could lead to damage costs of $54tn.

Amazon’s ambitions to address its carbon footprint appear significant. It hopes to power all of its operations with 100pc renewable energy by 2025. By 2030, the aim is to make all Amazon shipments net zero on carbon. Ten years after that, the goal is to be …

2020-06-30 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.6188, Raw Interest Score: 1.4035,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2159, Negative Sentiment 0.1889

The 100 Most Sustainable Companies, Reranked by Social Factors

For years, the three pillars of ESG investing—“E” for environmental factors, “S” for social factors, and “G” for corporate governance—were uneasy bedfellows.

Few investors would argue with the importance of good corporate governance, and most have slowly come to realize that it’s critical for companies to understand any investment risk, or opportunity, that stems from global warming. The S has been easily dismissed as consisting of squishy criteria such as how companies treat their employees, data security, and product safety….

2020-06-28 Read the Full Story…


How Satellite Imagery is Helping Hedge Funds Outperform

At the beginning of the last decade, Swiss investment firm UBS Investment Research began partnering with satellite companies such as Remote Sensing Metrics LLC in order to gauge changes in the occupancy rates of parking lots belonging to Walmart. By taking images of the number of cars entering and leaving the parking lots over certain fixed time periods, it was able to determine the number of customers who were visiting the US mega-retailer; and from this data, an approximation of Walmart’s quarterly sales could be extrapolated. In so doing, UBS became one of the first financial institutions to leverage satellite imagery to gain useful investment insights. “UBS proprietary satellite parking lot fill rate analysis points to an interesting cadence intra-quarter and potential upside to our view,” the subsequent report read.

Satellite imagery falls under the umbrella of alternative data, which represents non-traditional forms of data that are greatly coveted by fund managers eager to gain a competitive informational edge over their peers. Whether it’s counting cars in a retailer’s parking lot as a measure of sales activity, tracking ships across the seas, monitoring crops or scanning the activity at oil rigs, refineries and ports, satellite imagery is proving incredibly useful as a way to measure levels of industrial activity that may not necessarily be possible to determine at ground level.

“It’s not magic. It’s just another input,” noted Matthew Granade, chief market intelligence officer at Point72 Asset Management. “This stuff works best as one input into a much bigger process. On the other hand, it’s getting harder and harder not to have these critical inputs.” Indeed, in the 10 years since UBS’s forays into the nascent field, demand for satellite imagery has skyrocketed such that it is now used extensively across the investment industry. Today, financial institutions—particularly hedge funds—are paying increasingly exorbitant amounts to gain access to information that can reveal crucial insights tied to a potential investment.

2020-06-26 Read the full story…

COVID Notebooks Aims to Speed Predictive Models

IBM’s new open source toolkit with AI extensions to the Jupyter notebooks data science development platform is being extended to a COVID notebooks platform designed to help analyze real-time data about the pandemic. The company’s Center for Open-Source Data and AI Technologies developed the COVID notebooks toolkit that among other things addresses data quality issues related to coronavirus analytics. Along with compiling “authoritative” data on the pandemic, the IBM unit said it “clean[ed] up the most serious data-quality problems.”

“Policy makers are asking questions including: What stories can we tell in the aggregate? Are there patterns we see across the country? What regions or demographics are getting affected the most by the pandemic?” the company said in a blog post. Given that underlying data about the pandemic changes daily, COVID notebooks allows data scientists to concentrate on building models rather than data cleaning. The tool allows frequent updates of results on analysts’ notebooks.

2020-06-25 Read the full story…

Handling Missing Data For Advanced Machine Learning

Throughout this article, you will become good at spotting, understanding, and imputing missing data. We demonstrate various imputation techniques on a real-world logistic regression task using Python. Properly handling missing data has an improving effect on inferences and predictions. This is not to be ignored. The first part of this article presents the framework for understanding missing data. Later we demonstrate the most popular strategies in dealing with missingness on a classification task to predict the onset of diabetes.

MISSING DATA IS HARD TO AVOID : A considerable part of data science or machine learning job is data cleaning. Often when data is collected, there are some missing values appearing in the dataset. To understand the reason why data goes missing, let’s simulate a dataset with two predictors x1, x2, and a response variable y.

2020-06-25 15:02:46+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.6143, Raw Interest Score: 1.3163,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0658, Negative Sentiment 0.0965

Data privacy rules stop banks from auditing algorithms for bias

Companies say they need access to sensitive data to make sure their systems are being fair

Banks are struggling to audit algorithms for racial bias because of European privacy laws, experts warn.

A privacy clampdown has made collecting the information needed to work out if an automated system has made an unfair decision difficult under General Data Protection Regulation in the UK and Europe, businesses have said. Scientists have long warned that automated systems which make decisions about who to lend money to may be as prejudiced as humans because the data used to train the algorithm may not be diverse enough to be fair.  To mitigate this, institutions need data including race or gender to ensure that the system is not discriminating against these groups.
2020-06-29 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.3513, Raw Interest Score: 1.0381,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2076, Negative Sentiment 0.2076

Refinitiv to Power FxPro’s Data for Real-Time Prices, Corporate Actions, News, ESG

FxPro has adopted Refinitiv’s data and execution management solutions to support its online trading platforms, according to an official announcement. Refinitiv’s global data across multiple asset classes will power FxPro’s capabilities with real-time prices, corporate actions, market-moving Reuters top news, and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) data.

Refinitiv is one of the world’s largest providers of financial markets data and infrastructure, serving over 40,000 institutions in over 190 countries. FxPro is a global Contracts for Difference (CFDs) broker that offers clients trading capabilities on foreign exchange, futures, shares, indices, energies and metals. The partnership will provide FxPro with powerful tools that support their online trading applications with data, analytics, and transactional connectivity.

2020-07-01 09:56:15+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.8528, Raw Interest Score: 2.5130,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3191, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

Data Science on the Buy Side

What are the main data challenges / pain points for the buy side?

A big challenge is obtaining and retaining data science talent. It is apparent that there is a growing demand, and therefore competition, for data science talent across all industries, not just in financial services. Another challenge relates to the ability to ingest and curate structured and unstructured data rapidly and in a variety of raw formats. The growth in new data providers has led to a wide variance in the quality of data offered by data providers; some providers are well-established and have appropriate data science and technology teams, whereas others can be as limited as two employees in a start-up.

For data to be useful it needs to be clean, consistent and sourced and processed appropriately. Often data is provided after some processing steps are done, which limits awareness of the raw data and can lead to the risk of false representation and predictability.

2020-06-24 11:54:29+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.7405, Raw Interest Score: 1.8998,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1981, Negative Sentiment 0.0932

Model Evaluation Metrics for Machine Learning

Whenever you build a statistical or Machine Learning model, all the audiences including business stakeholders have only one question, what is model performance? What are model evaluation metrics? What is the accuracy of a model?

Evaluating your developed model helps you refine the model. You keep developing and evaluating your model until you reach an optimum model performance level. (Optimum model performance doesn’t mean 100 percent accuracy; 100 percent accuracy is a myth).

I have seen many analysts and aspiring data scientists who do not give importance to the model performance or model evaluation metrics. You can develop n number of models on one data set, but which model should be picked is the main question. And model evaluation metrics are the answers.

2020-06-27 07:38:06+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.1709, Raw Interest Score: 1.7172,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1703, Negative Sentiment 0.4186

Google’s G Suite finalizes Connected Sheets and introduces AI-driven data cleanup tools

Last April during its Cloud Next conference, Google unveiled Connected Sheets, a type of Google Sheets spreadsheet that works with the full data set from BigQuery, up to 10 billion rows. After just over a year in preview and beta, Connected Sheets is generally available as of today. And in the coming months, it will be joined by new capabilities — Smart Fill and Smart Cleanup — that leverage AI to learn patterns between columns to autocomplete data and surface suggestions in Sheets’ side panel.

Connected Sheets, along with Smart Fill and Smart Cleanup, are intended to make it easier for G Suite customers to take informed actions and produce better results. According to Gartner, 87% of organizations have low business intelligence and analytics maturity, meaning they’re largely relying on spreadsheet-based management systems while lacking data guidance and support.

“At Google Cloud, we believe everyone — not just those who specialize in writing complex queries — should be able to harness the power of data,” G Suite product manager Ryan Weber wrote in a blog post. “We continue to build Google AI natively into Sheets, so it’s easy for everyone — not just specialized analysts — to quickly make data-backed decisions.”


2020-06-30 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.1066, Raw Interest Score: 1.6561,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1361, Negative Sentiment 0.2042

QuantHouse Adds Machine Learning From Trading System Lab

QuantHouse, the global provider of end-to-end systematic trading solutions including innovative market data services, algo trading platform and infrastructure products and part of Iress, today announced that Trading System Lab® (TSL) has added their machine learning capabilities as part of the QuantFactory cloud backtesting suite.

The QuantFactory cloud backtesting suite provides a fully configurable environment in which clients can develop, backtest, optimise and implement quantitative trading strategies that can later be executed in a standalone, live-trading environment. Machine learning outputs from TSL are integrated into the QuantDeveloper module of QuantFactory.

2020-06-30 10:32:51+00:00 Read the full story…
2020-06-30 13:00:45+00:00 Read the full story…
2020-06-30 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 7.0464, Raw Interest Score: 2.4194,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3820, Negative Sentiment 0.0424


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AI & Machine Learning News. 06, July 2020

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AI & Machine Learning News. 06, July 2020

The Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Newsletter by CloudQuant

The Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning News clippings for Quants are provided algorithmically with CloudQuant’s NLP engine which seeks out articles relevant to our community and ranks them by our proprietary interest score. After all, shouldn’t you expect to see the news generated using AI?


How AI can empower communities and strengthen democracy

Each Fourth of July for the past five years I’ve written about AI with the potential to positively impact democratic societies. I return to this question in hopes of shining a light on technology that can strengthen communities, protect privacy and freedoms, and otherwise support the public good.

This series is grounded in the principle that artificial intelligence is capable of not just value extraction, but individual and societal empowerment. While AI solutions often propagate bias, they can also be used to detect that bias. As Dr. Safiya Noble has pointed out, artificial intelligence is one of the critical human rights issues of our lifetimes. AI literacy is also, as Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott asserted, a critical part of being an informed citizen in the 21st century.

This year, I posed the question on Twitter to gather a broader range of insights. Thank you to everyone who contributed.
2020-07-04 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.9823, Raw Interest Score: 1.2540,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1704, Negative Sentiment 0.3774

CloudQuant Thoughts : It is nice to read an article that is outside the ordinary. For such a cutting edge industry, AI/ML is FULL of repetitive articles and thoughts. This article contains a number of alternative ideas. I particularly like PO.LIS which started in Seattle and was covered quite well on an episode of BBC Click last year.

AI For All: The US Introduces New Bill For Affordable Research

Yesterday, AIM published an article on how difficult it is for the small labs and individual researchers to persevere in the high compute, high-cost industry of deep learning. Today, the policymakers of the US have introduced a new bill that will ensure deep learning is affordable for all.

The National AI Research Resource Task Force Act was introduced in the House by Representatives Anna G. Eshoo (D-CA) and her colleagues. This bill was met with unanimous support from the top universities and companies, which are engaged in artificial intelligence (AI) research. Some of the well-known supporters include Stanford University, Princeton University, UCLA, Carnegie Mellon University, Johns Hopkins University, OpenAI, Mozilla, Google, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, IBM and NVIDIA amongst others.

The objective of this Act is to establish a task force that develops a roadmap for a national AI research cloud.

2020-07-02 Read the full story…

CloudQuant Thoughts : Top Companies, Top Universities, US Government, all pulling in the same direction, great to see!

Top 15 AI Articles You Should Read This Month – June 2020

Usually, every month we write an article about the best and most promising AI research papers from that month. In addition to that, we list fifteen AI articles we have found amazing that month. This collection of articles should give you an overview of what happened that month in the AI industry both from technical, business and from an ethical perspective…

  • NASA needs your help teaching its Curiosity rover how to drive on Mars
  • Deepfake Detection Challenge Results: An open initiative to advance AI
  • AI researchers say scientific publishers help perpetuate racist algorithms
  • Slightly Unnerving AI Produces Human Faces Out of Totally Pixelated Photos
  • NeoML Released as TensorFlow Alternative
  • Google Meet takes on Zoom with AI-powered noise cancellation
  • Machine learning helped demystify a California earthquake swarm
  • Google’s MixIT AI isolates speakers in audio recordings
  • IBM says it is no longer working on face recognition because it’s used for racial profiling
  • Recent Advances in Google Translate
  • TensorTrade: Trade Efficiently with Reinforcement Learning
  • How Artificial Intelligence Could Help Video Gamers Create the Exact Games They Want to Play
  • Russian Voice Assistant Alice Can Paint Landscapes and Abstract Concepts on Command
  • Microsoft researchers say NLP bias studies must consider role of social hierarchies like racism
  • Grading on a Curve? Why AI Systems Test Brilliantly but Stumble in Real Life

2020-06-30 Read the full story…

CloudQuant Thoughts : This is a great collection of papers and articles. We have alrady reported on a few through the month. I particularly enjoyed the California Earthquake Storm, TensorTrade and Google’s MixIt – jump to the bottom of the article and play all three samples (though I have seen more impressive audio separation including track by track extraction for music).

Debate Over Health Data on Fitness Devices Escalates as Google-Fitbit Merger Faces Scrutiny

Countries with data protection laws generally put health data in a special category of sensitive personal information that is subject to stricter regulation. These regulations also usually apply only to the medical industry, however; things like fitness apps and wearables capture some sensitive data of this nature, but are not subject to the same level of regulation. This issue has been taken up by privacy advocates, and it is now receiving some mainstream attention in the form of a petition to block the proposed merger between Google and Fitbit. The effort is led by Privacy International, and accuses Google of having a dangerous monopoly on personal data.

Health data in the hands of Google? Google and Fitbit announced a $2.1 billion acquisition in November 2019. Fitbit is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of “smart” fitness devices such as watches, wearable trackers and scales. The company has about 28 million customers. Health data that these devices track include heart rate, number of steps taken, respiratory patterns, menstrual cycles and information about sleep quality. Google formally notified the European Commission of the proposed acquisition in mid-June of this year, a necessary step in finalizing the merger. The data protection regulator must review the proposed merger for potential harm it might cause to European Union (EU) consumers.
2020-07-03 22:00:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.1255, Raw Interest Score: 1.3327,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0337, Negative Sentiment 0.4892

CloudQuant Thoughts : Remember, this is not about Google having access to the data, it is about who Google will sell it to. The rest of the world currently has public health care systems but private health care companies and insurance companies are desperate to get a piece or even all of that pie. Health data on your customers and non-customers is incredibly invasive.

Automakers Making Deals to Speed Incorporation of AI

Automakers are making deals with technology companies to produce the next generation of cars that incorporate AI technology in new ways.

Nvidia last week reached an agreement with Mercedes-Benz to design a software-defined computing network for the car manufacturer’s entire fleet, with over-the-air updates and recurring revenue for applications, according to an account in Barron’s.

“This is the iPhone moment of the car industry,” stated Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who founded the company in 1993 to make a new chip to power three-dimensional video games. Gaming now represents $6.1 billion in revenue for Nvidia, which is now positioning for its next phase of growth, which will involve AI to a great extent. “People thought we were a videogame company,” stated Huang. “But we’re an accelerated computing company where videogames were our first killer app.”

2020-07-01 21:30:55+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 1.8194, Raw Interest Score: 1.2085,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1528, Negative Sentiment 0.0278

CloudQuant Thoughts : Regular readers will know how much we appreciate all that Nvidia does for AI and ML. It is definitely a leader in the industry. If it can leverage this leadership to get it’s product into a huge number of new cars it will be a just reward!

How Stitch Fix used AI to personalize its online shopping experience

Online retailers have long lured customers with the ability to browse vast selections of merchandise from home, quickly compare prices and offers, and have goods conveniently delivered to their doorstep. But much of the in-person shopping experience has been lost, not the least of which is trying on clothes to see how they fit, how the colors work with your complexion, and so on.

Companies like Stitch Fix, Wantable, and Trunk Club have attempted to address this problem by hiring professionals to choose clothes based on your custom parameters and ship them out to you. You can try things on, keep what you like, and send back what you don’t. Stitch Fix’s version of this service is called Fixes. Customers get a personalized Style Card with an outfit inspiration. It’s algorithmically driven and helps human style experts match a garment with a particular shopper. Each Fix includes a Style Card that shows clothing options to complete outfits based on the various items in a customer’s Fix. Due to popular demand, last year the company began testing a way for shoppers to buy those related items directly from Stitch Fix through a program called Shop Your Looks.

AI is a natural fit for such services, and Stitch Fix has embraced the technology to accelerate and improve Shop Your Looks. On the tech front, this puts the company in direct competition with behemoths Facebook, Amazon, and Google, all of which are aggressively building out AI-powered clothes shopping experiences.

Stitch Fix told VentureBeat that during the Shop Your Looks beta period, “more than one-third of clients who purchased through Shop Your Looks engaged with the feature multiple times, and approximately 60% of clients who purchased through the offering bought two items or more.” It’s been successful enough that the company recently expanded to include an entire shoppable collection using the same underlying technology to personalize outfit and item recommendations as you shop.

2020-07-05 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.0257, Raw Interest Score: 0.7703,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2853, Negative Sentiment 0.1522

CloudQuant Thoughts : Always nice to see a successful execution in a difficult space that is extremely customer facing!


ML/AI Bias

We need a new field of AI to combat racial bias – TechCrunch

Since widespread protests over racial inequality began, IBM announced it would cancel its facial recognition programs to advance racial equity in law enforcement. Amazon suspended police use of its Rekognition software for one year to “put in place stronger regulations to govern the ethical use of facial recognition technology.”

But we need more than regulatory change; the entire field of artificial intelligence (AI) must mature out of the computer science lab and accept the embrace of the entire community.

We can develop amazing AI that works in the world in largely unbiased ways. But to accomplish this, AI can’t be just a subfield of computer science (CS) and computer engineering (CE), like it is right now. We must create an academic discipline of AI that takes the complexity of human behavior into account. We need to move from computer science-owned AI to computer science-enabled AI. The problems with AI don’t occur in the lab; they occur when scientists move the tech into the real world of people. Training data in the CS lab often lacks the context and complexity of the world you and I inhabit. This flaw perpetuates biases.

2020-07-03 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.7659, Raw Interest Score: 1.8028,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2121, Negative Sentiment 0.3393

MIT takes down 80 Million Tiny Images data set due to racist and offensive content

Creators of the 80 Million Tiny Images data set from MIT and NYU took the collection offline this week, apologized, and asked other researchers to refrain from using the data set and delete any existing copies. The news was shared Monday in a letter by MIT professors Bill Freeman and Antonio Torralba and NYU professor Rob Fergus published on the MIT CSAIL website.

Introduced in 2006 and containing photos scraped from internet search engines, 80 Million Tiny Images was recently found to contain a range of racist, sexist, and otherwise offensive labels, such as nearly 2,000 images labeled with the N-word, and labels like “rape suspect” and “child molester.” The data set also contained pornographic content like non-consensual photos taken up women’s skirts. Creators of the 79.3 million-image data set said it was too large and its 32 x 32 images too small, making visual inspection of the data set’s complete contents difficult. According to Google Scholar, 80 Million Tiny Images has been cited more 1,700 times.
2020-07-01 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.1841, Raw Interest Score: 1.2881,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0585, Negative Sentiment 0.3318


How to Understand Global Poverty from Outer Space

Economic livelihood is difficult to estimate. Even in today’s world, there is a lack of clear data to identify impoverished areas, which leads to insufficient resource distribution — money, food, medicine, and access to education. We produce an ample amount of resources to feed, clothe, and house up to 10 billion people, yet hundreds of millions still suffer in poverty.

One approach to help alleviate this problem is to create a model utilizing computer vision to map and predict poverty in the African country of Rwanda, one small enough to provide an abundant and diverse but not overwhelming dataset.

How do we complete this task? There are several key steps…
2020-07-06 00:03:28.300000+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.2350, Raw Interest Score: 1.9390,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1170, Negative Sentiment 0.1003

7 Open Source Data Science Projects

Open source data science projects add a lot of value to your resume and help you stand out in an interview.

I’m going to give you a tip I wish someone had given me when I started my data science career. When I was navigating the obstacle-filled journey through the backwaters of data science, I had quite a struggle before I landed my first role. I had all the qualifications (or so I thought) but something seemed to be off. That gap between what I brought to the table and what the interviewer expected was data science project experience.

Data science projects add a lot of value to your resume, especially if you’re a beginner. Most newcomers will have certifications but adding open source data science projects will give you a significant advantage over the competition. And trust me, there are an astonishing number of open source data science projects for you. Here, I’ve put together a list of the top 7 open-source data science projects that were created or released in June. This is part of my monthly project series where I bring out the best data science projects open-sourced on GitHub.

2020-07-07 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.4149, Raw Interest Score: 1.3981,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2078, Negative Sentiment 0.0850

JPMorgan Python Training Guide: Solid Intro to Snaky Language

If you’re interviewing for an investment banking analyst or junior trading job at JPMorgan, and you don’t know how to code in Python, you should probably fix that as soon as possible. As with most banks, JPMorgan wants to hire bankers and traders who can code, and, when necessary, it will train those who can’t.

But even if you’re not interested in financial services as a career path, you can still rely on JPMorgan’s generosity to learn Python, which is one of the most ubiquitous and fastest-growing programming languages in business. That’s because the Python training modules JPMorgan uses for its existing analysts and traders are freely accessible on Github, where they were placed by Tim Paine, a developer in the company’s New York office who’s been working on products such as an artificial intelligence engine for the fashion industry in his spare time.

2020-07-01 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.1013, Raw Interest Score: 1.3094,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2757, Negative Sentiment 0.0689

GoodData Introduces Support for Geolocation Capabilities

GoodData, a global analytics company, is introducing new geo-mapping capabilities to better meet the needs of companies seeking location data analytics to inform strategic decision making.

This new set of analytical visualizations, analytics, and modeling techniques provides support for geolocation in the analytics industry for market trends evaluation, site selection, asset tracking and monitoring, and other core business needs.

The examples of location-based business insights include COVID-19 infections, economic shifts by geography, election results, unemployment trends, and even contact tracing as efforts ramp up to battle COVID-19.

“We are quickly moving into a world where essentially all data is geo-tagged for location intelligence,” says Roman Stanek, GoodData founder, and CEO. “The rise of IoT, smartphones, Bluetooth, and other wireless technologies gives businesses completely new perspectives into their operations and risks and our new capabilities lead this trend.”
2020-06-30 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.6786, Raw Interest Score: 1.5089,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1372, Negative Sentiment 0.0686

AI Being Applied in Agriculture to Help Grow Food, Support New Methods

AI continues to have an impact in agriculture, with efforts underway to help grow food, combat disease and pests, employ drones and other robots with computer vision, and use machine learning to monitor soil nutrient levels.

In Leones, Argentina, a drone with a special camera flies low over 150 acres of wheat checking each stock, one-by-one, looking for the beginnings of a fungal infection that could threaten this year’s crop.

The flying robot is powered by a computer vision system incorporating AI supplied by Taranis, a company founded in 2015 in Tel Aviv, Israel by a team of agronomists and AI experts. The company is focused on bringing precision and control to the agriculture industry through a system it refers to as an “agriculture intelligence platform.”
2020-07-01 21:30:49+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.2352, Raw Interest Score: 1.0959,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0751, Negative Sentiment 0.1351

Mozilla Common Voice updates will help train the ‘Hey Firefox’ wakeword for voice-based web browsing

Mozilla today released the latest version of Common Voice, its open source collection of transcribed voice data for startups, researchers, and hobbyists to build voice-enabled apps, services, and devices. Common Voice now contains over 7,226 total hours of contributed voice data in 54 different languages, up from 1,400 hours across 18 languages in February 2019.

Common Voice consists not only of voice snippets, but of voluntarily contributed metadata useful for training speech engines, like speakers’ ages, sex, and accents. It’s designed to be integrated with DeepSpeech, a suite of open source speech-to-text, text-to-speech engines, and trained models maintained by Mozilla’s Machine Learning Group.

Collecting the over 5.5 million clips in Common Voice required a lot of legwork, namely because the prompts on the Common Voice website had to be translated into each language. Still, 5,591 of the 7,226 hours have been confirmed valid by the project’s contributors so far. And according to Mozilla, five languages in Common Voice — English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish — now have over 5,000 unique speakers, while seven languages — English, German, French, Kabyle, Catalan, Spanish, and Kinyarwandan — have over 500 recorded hours.
2020-07-01 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 1.7568, Raw Interest Score: 0.9134,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1015, Negative Sentiment 0.0338

Pair Finance lands €2 million in new funding

Berlin-based digital debt collection outfit Pair Finance has raised €2 million from existing investors after crossing the profitability threshold in 2019.

Currently, more than 250 companies work with Pair Finance, which offers digital debt collection services based on artificial intelligence, enabling companies to collect outstanding receivables more efficiently compared to traditional methods. Customers include Klarna, Zalando, Sixt, Grover or the Jochen Schweizer mydays Group.
2020-07-06 09:11:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 5.3846, Raw Interest Score: 2.3932,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3419, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

Indonesia’s Amar Bank taps Google Cloud for launch of smart phone bank

Indonesia’s Amar Bank has launched an app-only banking offshoot housed entirely in Google Cloud.

Using technology from the bank’s fintech subsidiary Tunaiku, with support from FIS Cloud and Infofabrica, the My Smile app currently offers a savings account backed up by personal financial management and account aggregation tools.

Amar bank already uses Google Cloud for Big Data architecture, AI and analytics and intends to gradually bulk up the …
2020-07-03 09:46:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 5.1745, Raw Interest Score: 2.7677,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1203, Negative Sentiment 0.1203

dotData and Teradata Collaborate to Enable Organizations to Derive More Value from AI

dotData, a provider of full-cycle data science automation and operationalization for the enterprise, is partnering with Teradata, a cloud data and analytics company, allowing dotData to leverage Teradata’s Vantage platform with dotData’s autoML 2.0 platform.

The collaboration will streamline and simplify the movement of data between Teradata and dotData to help the companies’ joint customers derive more value from their AI and machine learning initiatives.
2020-06-30 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.3656, Raw Interest Score: 2.2885,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2452, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

Has AI arrived for financial services?

When will artificial intelligence really have ‘arrived’? For a long time, this was a question for philosophers and computer scientists, pondering over whether passing the Turing test truly indicates intelligence, or debating about how broad our definition of artificial intelligence should be. Over the last several years, however, this question has changed considerably: with the advent of consumer AI tools such as virtual assistants and the increasing availability of off-the-shelf solutions offering to bring the power of AI to business operations, the issue has become less philosophical, and much more pragmatic. Now, for business leaders, it is often a matter not of whether to respond to the arrival of AI, but of how to respond to the arrival of AI.

The promise is, of course, huge. It’s hard to think of an area of the economy which won’t be changed, and it’s hard to think of a short summary which properly encapsulates what those changes will be. It’s probable that for every business, there is at least one thing which will be done faster, or made available to far more people, or be significantly more accurate, or will simply be possible for the first time, through the use of AI. Its importance has been compared, convincingly, to electricity itself.

Nowhere is this more true than in financial services.

2020-07-02 10:16:06 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.7532, Raw Interest Score: 1.6609,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1444, Negative Sentiment 0.2347

Batch Normalization in practice: an example with Keras and TensorFlow 2.0

In this article, we will focus on adding and customizing batch normalization in our machine learning model and look at an example of how we do this in practice with Keras and TensorFlow 2.0.

“In the rise of deep learning, one of the most important ideas has been an algorithm called batch normalization (also known as batch norm).
Batch normalization is a technique for training very deep neural networks that standardizes the inputs to a layer for each mini-batch. This has the effect of stabilizing the learning process and dramatically reducing the number of training epochs required to train deep networks.” – Jason Brownlee

Batch normalization can be implemented during training by calculating the mean and standard deviation of each input variable to a layer per mini-batch and using these statistics to perform the standardization.

2020-07-05 21:59:57.445000+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.7512, Raw Interest Score: 1.5239,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0743, Negative Sentiment 0.0743

Guided Labeling Episode 1: An Introduction to Active Learning

One of the key challenges of utilizing supervised machine learning for real-world use cases is that most algorithms and models require lots of data with quite a few specific requirements.

First of all, you need to have a sample of data that is large enough to represent the actual reality your model needs to learn. Nowadays, there are lots of thoughts regarding the harm generated by biased models. Such models are often trained with biased data. Usually, a rough rule of thumb is that the more data you have, the less biased your data might be. The size of the sample not only impacts the righteousness of your model but, of course, its performance too. This is especially significant if you are dealing with deep learning, which requires more data than other machine learning algorithms.

Assuming you have access to all of these pieces of data, you now need to make sure they are labeled. These labels, also called the ground truth class, will be used as the target variable in the training of your predictive model.
2020-07-02 07:30:52+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.5709, Raw Interest Score: 1.7043,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2093, Negative Sentiment 0.0448

Executive Interview: Steven Babitch, Head of AI Portfolio, GSA’s TTS

Primary Mission is to Accelerate AI Investment, Help Agencies Achieve Goals

Steven Babitch is Head of the Artificial Intelligence Portfolio for the GSA’s Technology Transformation Services (TTS), where he is charged to help the US federal government use AI to achieve its mission. He describes four areas of focus for that effort. He brings public policy and private industry perspectives to the task, as a former White House Presidential Innovation Fellow, and as the head of Babitch Design Group. He recently took some time to talk to AI Trends Editor John P. Desmond about his work.
2020-07-01 21:30:20+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.7896, Raw Interest Score: 1.2404,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2464, Negative Sentiment 0.0935

Data Scientist vs Data Analyst Interview. Here’s the Difference.

An interviewing guide – Introduction Data Scientist Interview – Data Analyst Interview – Similarities and Differences

Many of the readers here on Medium are looking to be a data scientist or data analyst, and are therefore interested in the interview process for each position. In my experience, I have interviewed with several companies for both roles. Below, I will detail the process for both roles and highlight where the…
2020-07-06 03:03:25.205000+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.7731, Raw Interest Score: 1.4717,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1214, Negative Sentiment 0.1062

AI Strategy: Using the 715 Framework to Build High Value Big Data

What is the Solution? 7:15 Framework®
We’ve come across organizations that want their data cleaned, and they want a culture that is able to drive growth and revenue. Yet, there is no set guide or framework currently available in the market that provides a roadmap for how to implement this within their organization. They need a plan that has the ability to identify all of the elements that need to be taken into account for a data-driven project to provide high value.

My company has been doing research on a framework, and, during our research, we have discovered that there are seven primary objects and 15 secondary elements which create the framework. A total of 22 elements have been built into this framework to assist organizations in identifying and helping to assess if they are structurally ready to get high value from data. Here is a list of the top seven primary elements in the framework:

  • The High Value
  • Organizational Maturity
  • Internal Competence
  • Clear Objectives
  • Data Governance
  • Engagement
  • Business Transformation

2020-07-06 07:35:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.6207, Raw Interest Score: 1.3621,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2484, Negative Sentiment 0.1159

VAPAR raises $700K in seed funding to accelerate growth

VAPAR an Australian startup in the Internet of Things arena which utilises artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to automate condition assessments for stormwater and sewerage pipelines, has raised $AU700,000 in seed funding.

The funding round closed with a diverse range of angel investors in addition to Startmate and Australia’s premier VC, Blackbird Ventures, who are also investors in Canva, SafetyCulture, and Culture Amp.
2020-07-06 10:47:04+10:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.6141, Raw Interest Score: 1.5492,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2951, Negative Sentiment 0.1475

How Autodesk Used Data Wrangling to Accelerate Analytics by 66% (Webinar)

Due to the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, every company needs to do more with less. This has sparked a massive effort within organizations large and small to modernize processes, incorporate automation wherever they can and utilize data to increase the efficiency of their operations. However, not all operations are intuitive to automate and when it comes to cleaning, blending and structuring diverse customer data, many data teams get stuck.

In Trifacta’s upcoming webinar with Snowflake, AWS and Autodesk, Autodesk’s John Gardner will walk through the challenges his team experienced wrangling diverse sources of customer data to build a 360-degree view of their customers to identify cross-sell/upsell opportunities. John will share how his team at Autodesk established a cloud data platform combining Snowflake, AWS and Trifacta to automate traditionally siloed data preparation activities and reach new levels of efficiency with their analytics initiatives.

Join this webinar to learn how Autodesk…

2020-07-06 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.5935, Raw Interest Score: 1.5976,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3495, Negative Sentiment 0.0999

Creating a Vanilla Neural Network with Tensorflow

A beginner’s friendly guide detailed on creating a neural network using Tensorflow.

Nowadays, Tensorflow is a highly demanded skill in the market, ensuring ease of production, standardizing some crucial stages of Machine Learning.
Today you’ll learn how to make your first neural network with Tensorflow; We’re going to build a Multilayer Perceptron model, also called the “Vanilla” Neural Network. Are you ready? So let’s start!

  • Table of Contents
  • What is Tensorflow?
  • What is a Neural Network?
  • The Google Colab
  • Structure of Today’s Project
  • Keras? What is that?
  • Building our Model
  • Fit with training sets
  • Evaluation with validation sets
  • Prediction with test sets
  • Final Considerations
  • Bibliography

2020-07-06 02:32:58.973000+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.5000, Raw Interest Score: 1.9399,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1252, Negative Sentiment 0.1877

DBS Bank followed four design principles when building their enterprise data platform

I recently had the pleasure to talk with Siew Choo So, Group Head Consumer Banking Technology and Big Data/AI at DBS, on how the bank has set up their enterprise data platform to enable a data driven organization. That session was part of Forrester’s APAC Financial Services Webcast Week 2020, and you can find the full session for replay (as well as all other session replays) at https://forr.com/apacfsweek (free registration required).

In the session, Siew Choo and I talked about the situation at the starting point of the bank’s journey and how the team set the objectives and design principles for a single end-to-end platform. That platform, named “ADA — Advancing DBS with AI,” was conceptualized to provide data ingestion, data security, data storage, data governance, data visualization, and analytics model management capabilities.
2020-07-06 01:31:20-04:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.4988, Raw Interest Score: 1.4230,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2453, Negative Sentiment 0.0736

Adverse media screening: a key pillar of financial crimes compliance

It is essential to gather all details about a customer, or prospect to be onboarded as a customer, including any negative information about them so that the bank can take a risk-based approach on the relationship with such customer.

Technology has enabled us to access staggering volumes, variety and velocity of news and information from around the world. Is it then humanly possible to screen millions of customers of any bank by searching the web for adverse news, analyse every negative news item and then consider them for risk profiling of the accused customer? Can we leverage artificial intelligence (AI) instead, to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of adverse media screening?

2020-06-29 00:00:20+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.4667, Raw Interest Score: 1.2978,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2329, Negative Sentiment 0.6323

AI is Making BI Obsolete, and Machine Learning is Leading the Way (Registration Wall)

BI has become a must-get for any company, and while it does offer some great value, what are you really getting from it? Although BI is great at visualizing your data and giving you digestible reports, it’s hard to make predictions and automate your insights to really optimize your operations. Building predictive models that can cut down your decision time and offer better insights is a must, but achieving them sounds impossible. So, why are we still hung up on BI? It’s time to embrace a paradigm that empowers us to make smarter, better predictions using real data. With machine learning leading the way, data science is quickly making BI obsolete.
2020-06-29 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.4169, Raw Interest Score: 1.6667,
Positive Sentiment: 1.0606, Negative Sentiment 0.4545

The Sunny Side of Privacy Laws and Compliance Mandates

Enterprises are faced with a growing onslaught of data and increasing data privacy regulations. Those regulations include the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which regulators began enforcing in May 2018. These businesses often see protecting data from misuse and abuse as a procedural chore and financial burden. Some organizations even look at data privacy regulation as a legal nightmare.

Such organizations often respond by throwing resources at the problem. That may involve appointing a chief data officer (CDO) and other professionals to enact and enforce restrictive policies, while bracing for costly non-compliance fines at the same time. But rather than seeing data privacy initiatives as a necessary evil, organizations should look at them as an opportunity for positive change. Data privacy efforts can be valuable in enabling businesses to build trusted relationships with their customers.

In a world in which customer experience is paramount but distrust and misinformation are rampant, there’s no better time for organizations to have a 360-degree view of their data.

2020-06-29 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.4041, Raw Interest Score: 1.2747,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3346, Negative Sentiment 0.2390

Learn how to accelerate your business using automation and AI technology: Transform 2020

If companies were already investing in automation and AI technologies before March 2020, they have only accelerated those investments since. No one expected the jolt the COVID-19 pandemic would bring to business. With leaders looking for ways to avoid human contact, machines, software, and new processes that avoid those humans are even more imperative.

That’s why we’ve committed a whole day of our Transform 2020 digital conference to the Technology and Automation Summit, presented by collaborative data science software maker Dataiku, on July 15. Hear from industry leaders at Dataiku, Intuit, Chase, Walmart, Goldman Sachs, and more about their journeys and learnings in implementing these technologies, how they unlocked value/ROI from them, and their thoughts about what the future holds.
2020-07-01 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.3932, Raw Interest Score: 1.4552,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2782, Negative Sentiment 0.0214

Data privacy rules stop banks from auditing algorithms for bias

“Being oblivious to race gets in the way of being fair…. Unfortunately, both company policies and government policies like GDPR prevent the collection and use of those sensitive attributes.”

Roger Taylor, chair of the Centre of Data Ethics and Innovation, said: “In the UK, GDPR and the Data Protection Act should not prevent organisations from effectively auditing their algorithms for bias, but it is clear that uncertainty on this point could pr…
2020-06-29 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.3513, Raw Interest Score: 1.0381,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2076, Negative Sentiment 0.2076

Democratizing Data: Do Your People Have the Access They Need?

Organizations have invested heavily in engineering resources to centralize data across the enterprise, often creating sophisticated environments with robust data pipelines. But even as they have successfully gathered and corralled data this way, many still struggle with effectively sharing and orchestrating the data across the enterprise.

That’s a pressing concern because, to successfully experiment, explore and activate data for the entire organization, IT, analytics and marketing teams must all have the data access they need to succeed. This notion isn’t new, but for many businesses, despite their commitment to democratizing data, that access—leveraging each group’s strengths—is insufficient or absent.
2020-07-01 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.1806, Raw Interest Score: 1.1229,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3417, Negative Sentiment 0.2116

Unilever and Alibaba announce technology partnership to enhance shopping experiences

Unilever, one of the biggest multinational consumer goods companies, is partnering with Alibaba Cloud, as part of a strategic initiative that will enable the global consumer goods business to action on next-generation digital marketing campaigns, according to the companies.

Fang Jun, VP Data and Digital, Unilever China: “Customer buying patterns are ever-changing; when and where they buy has caused marketing to become even more agile and precise in order to stay relevant and reduce marketing waste. The use of Alibaba Cloud’s cutting-edge technology will ensure that our customers enjoy even more value from their relationship with the Unilever brand, through relevant campaigns and activities based on true insights into their buying preference.”

The Unilever and Alibaba Cloud collaboration were announced at the Alibaba Cloud Global Summit, in which “China Gateway 2.0” was also launched. The programme, that Unilever is part of, hopes to help Alibaba Cloud’s partners and customers to accelerate their growth in China by capitalizing Alibaba Cloud’s local business expertise, technologies, and matured ecosystem. In the partnership, Unilever will apply Alibaba Cloud’s artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud-based technologies to its omnichannel, online and offline demand generation activities.
2020-07-03 11:23:40+10:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 1.9428, Raw Interest Score: 1.3611,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2500, Negative Sentiment 0.0278

Yellowbrick Data Launches Cloud Disaster Recovery Service

Yellowbrick Data, the Hybrid cloud data warehouse company, is releasing its Cloud Disaster Recovery service, as well as introducing new database replication and enhanced backup/restore features to its platform.

“We’re complementing the existing business continuity functionality inside a single Yellowbrick Data Warehouse–including support for high availability, erasure coding, and fault tolerance–with new features that provide continuity across databases and locations in a low-cost, low-effort way using the power and flexibility of hybrid cloud architecture,” said Nick Cox, Yellowbrick head of products. “That is essential for business-critical applications.”
2020-07-01 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 1.8671, Raw Interest Score: 1.0983,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1647, Negative Sentiment 0.3295

CCPA Enforcement Begins: Are You Ready?

The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) became law six months ago, but enforcement has been delayed until today. If you haven’t yet started your CCPA remediation effort, you’ve got a lot of catching up to do.

California residents gained new data rights under CCPA, and companies are now subject to new requirements regarding that data. Residents of the state can demand to know what personal data companies are collecting about them, whether they’re selling that data, and to whom. Residents can demand access to that data, and even request that companies delete their personal data.

2020-07-01 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 1.8617, Raw Interest Score: 1.0517,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1813, Negative Sentiment 0.3506

These 5 Chicago Tech Companies Made $146M in June

This month, the five biggest funding rounds in Chicago’s tech scene pulled in a combined total of $146 million. This marks the city’s strongest month of tech funding since March. Topping the list was renewable energy startup LanzaTech. Continue reading below for the details on all of June’s top funding rounds in Chicago tech.

  • Ocient – Data Analytics
  • Tovala – Meal Delivery
  • Kalderos – Drug Claim Analysis
  • M1 Finance – Financial Management Tool
  • LanzaTech Inc. – Bio Aviation Fuel

2020-07-01 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.8345, Raw Interest Score: 1.7763,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0658, Negative Sentiment 0.0658


This news clip post is produced algorithmically based upon CloudQuant’s list of sites and focus items we find interesting. We used natural language processing (NLP) to determine an interest score, and to calculate the sentiment of the linked article using the Loughran and McDonald Sentiment Word Lists.

If you would like to add your blog or website to our search crawler, please email customer_success@cloudquant.com. We welcome all contributors.

This news clip and any CloudQuant comment is for information and illustrative purposes only. It is not, and should not be regarded as investment advice or as a recommendation regarding a course of action. This information is provided with the understanding that CloudQuant is not acting in a fiduciary or advisory capacity under any contract with you, or any applicable law or regulation. You are responsible to make your own independent decision with respect to any course of action based on the content of this post.

The post AI & Machine Learning News. 06, July 2020 appeared first on CloudQuant.

Alternative Data News. 08, July 2020

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Alternative Data News. 08, July 2020

The AltDataNewsletter by CloudQuant

Finding sources and uses for alternative data can be difficult. At CloudQuant we regularly read and search the internet for new sources of data that can be used in our mission to find alpha signals and build quantitative trading strategies. We recognize that we are technology and data junkies so we wrote our own crawler that specifically seeks out web pages, posts, and news articles that give us a snapshot of what is going on in the world of Alt Data. The following is a collection of articles that we think you will find interesting from the past week.


Watch COVID-19 spread across the continental United States

This animation visualizes the changing geography and changing epicenters of COVID-19 growth from March through June. I tried to label some points of interest along the way, but I’m curious if anyone has any ideas about other things that should be labeled. If you’re looking for a tool to get you a precise number for a particular place, this isn’t the right thing.

Data : NYT COVID-19 cases, County shapefile (modified to match NYT data) from Census Bureau, Population data by county from Census Bureau, SEDAC population density raster
Tools : QGIS, Blender, R, FFmpeg

I do have code for all this, but I want to do some cleanup before publishing the whole thing. If you’re curious about the process or particular pieces of code, I’m happy to answer those questions.

See more from David Waldron on Vimeo.

2020-07-04 Read the Full Story…

CloudQuant Thoughts : Another beautiful posting from DataIsBeautiful. David has really worked on the ‘beautiful’ on this one.

MIT takes down 80 Million Tiny Images data set due to racist and offensive content

Creators of the 80 Million Tiny Images data set from MIT and NYU took the collection offline this week, apologized, and asked other researchers to refrain from using the data set and delete any existing copies. The news was shared Monday in a letter by MIT professors Bill Freeman and Antonio Torralba and NYU professor Rob Fergus published on the MIT CSAIL website.

Introduced in 2006 and containing photos scraped from internet search engines, 80 Million Tiny Images was recently found to contain a range of racist, sexist, and otherwise offensive labels, such as nearly 2,000 images labeled with the N-word, and labels like “rape suspect” and “child molester.” The data set also contained pornographic content like non-consensual photos taken up women’s skirts. Creators of the 79.3 million-image data set said it was too large and its 32 x 32 images too small, making visual inspection of the data set’s complete contents difficult. According to Google Scholar, 80 Million Tiny Images has been cited more 1,700 times.
2020-07-01 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.1841, Raw Interest Score: 1.2881,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0585, Negative Sentiment 0.3318

CloudQuant Thoughts : Check all your data sources for bias. This should be one of the first questions you ask from here onwards.

New iPhone Feature Reveals Concerning Way Apps Like Tik Tok Are accessing Your Phone’s Clipboard Data

A new feature in Apple’s upcoming iPhone operating system has revealed privacy concerns with numerous popular applications. iOS 14, which is currently only available in beta, alerts the user when an application has access to the clipboard. The clipboard is where text is held between copying and pasting messages. It was discovered that many mainstream apps including TikTok, Reddit, and LinkedIn were accessing users’ clipboards. At least 53 applications were found to be scraping the data users copy and paste.

2020-07-06 Read the full story…

CloudQuant Thoughts : With the suggestion that it is copying your clipboard every 10 seconds regardless of what app you are currently using, and the soft promotion of the CPP it seems likely that the US Government will ban this extremely popular app.

Facebook discovers it shared user data with at least 5,000 app developers after a cutoff date

Facebook says it accidentally allowed around 5,000 developers to access data from their app’s inactive users, even though that access should have been cut off. The company explained on Wednesday it recently discovered an issue that had allowed app developers to continue receiving this information beyond the 90 days of inactivity that is meant to cut off data access until the user returns to the app and again re-authenticates.

In 2018, Facebook announced a change to the way app developers would be able to access Facebook user data in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which saw the personal data of 87 million Facebook users compromised. Among many new restrictions to Facebook’s API platform, it introduced a stricter review process for the use of Facebook Login for apps and said it would block apps’ access to users’ personal data after three months of non-use.

This latter change is the one that was not adhered to, in the case of this latest data sharing incident.

2020-07-02 Read the full story…

CloudQuant Thoughts : Nothing should surprise anyone regarding Facebook’s respect for private data.

What Price Would You Put on Your Personal Data?

Many Americans are happy to flog even their most sensitive data, and for a cheap price, too.

For all the talk of digital rights — and the Big Brotherly tentacles of Big Tech — a surprising number of Americans would sell even their most sensitive data, sometimes for a song. In fact, according to research commissioned by Okta, which develops cloud software for authenticating users, only 24% of Americans would refuse to sell any of their online information, at any price.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, users were less willing to trade biometric data, offline conversations and identifying personal information than they were data on their purchasing, browsing and location. But 15% would still sell their passwords for $100 or less. It’s hard to know exactly why users would part with even profoundly private information for such relatively small sums, though one might hazard a few guesses: They are strapped for cash; they are less fearful of corporate surveillance than people suppose; they assume that their personal data is already being secretly stolen as a matter of routine.

2020-07-06 00:00:00 Read the full story…

CloudQuant Thoughts : Then again, it appears we put little value on our personal data!

In the Right Hands, NASA Satellite Data and Analysis Make Earth Better

The number of illegal gold mines in the Amazon is increasing so fast that activists have turned to satellite imagery to identify them. Still, with thousands of new mines a year, the work was overwhelming scientists at Earthrise Alliance – they needed more hands on deck. That’s how ninth graders in Weston, Massachusetts, began locating illegal mining activity in Brazil’s protected Yanomami territory.

Earthrise is one of numerous organizations getting Earth-observation images, data, and analysis – much of which NASA makes available for free – into the hands of people working on sustainability projects. These efforts by many different aid groups are tracking illegal mining, deforestation, and groundwater resources and informing the decisions of small farmers and governments trying to support them in regions that are feeling the worst effects of climate change.

2020-07-02 Read the full story…

CloudQuant Thoughts : Help the planet without even leaving your Python IDE!


ESG Section

CloudQuant also makes available alternative datasets, these include a white paper describing the observed performance of the dataset and python code with access to the data used in the white paper via our CloudQuant Mariner backtester. For more information, head over to our data catalog page.

ESG Assets Have Grown 15% Annually

Assets under management at funds that integrate environmental, social and governance criteria have grown at 15.3% each year since 2016 and this is likely to continue.

The overall value of assets using ESG data has increased from $22.9 (€20.5) trillion in 2016 to more than $40 trillion this year according to a report, ESG Data Integration By Asset Managers: Targeting Alpha, Fiduciary Duty & Portfolio Risk Analysis, from consultancy Opimas.

Axel Pierron, co-founder and managing d…
2020-07-02 17:36:26+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.2804, Raw Interest Score: 1.6545,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1742, Negative Sentiment 0.0522

Global ESG-data driven assets hit $40.5 trillion

The value of global assets applying environmental, social and governance data to drive investment decisions has almost doubled over four years, and more than tripled over eight years, to $40.5 trillion in 2020.

Analysis of active and passive strategies by research firm Opimas showed that not all products that integrate ESG criteria into their investment strategies are labeled as “ESG” or “sustainable,” with non-ESG products also using sustainability data as a source of insight on portfolio companies.

A report of the research said active strategies represent the majority of ESG-related assets under management, at 75% in the U.S. and 82% in Europe.

However, passive ESG strategies captured about 60% of new asset inflows in the U.S. in 2019.

2020-07-02 Read the full story…

Refinitiv Launches Lipper Fund ESG Scores

Building on its commitment to connect and advance the global financial community through data and analytics, Refinitiv announced Lipper Fund ESG Scores to serve as a pivotal data-metric in the transition to sustainable investing – providing comparisons at the fund level for fund managers, advisors and investors.

Refinitiv Lipper Fund ESG Scores brings together the Lipper fund universe of 330,000 fund share classes and its deep holdings content, …
2020-07-08 09:56:23+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.1730, Raw Interest Score: 2.1987,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1670, Negative Sentiment 0.0835

GRI response: ESG and US-DoL investment duties regulation

Amsterdam, 29 June 2020 – Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) has responded to the US Department of Labor’s proposed changes to investment duties regulation, which indicate that environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors should not be considered by retirement plan fiduciaries.

Get Our Activist Investing Case Study! Get the entire 10-part series on our in-depth study on activist investing in PDF. Save it to your desktop, read it on your tablet, or print it out to read anywhere! Sign up below!
2020-06-29 19:40:17+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.2098, Raw Interest Score: 1.9065,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1816, Negative Sentiment 0.0908

Guide To Socially Responsible Funds: 23 Best Buys

Nowadays it doesn’t cost much to be an ESG investor

Protest in Seattle, 2017 (Photo by Jason Redmond) AFP via Getty Images

If the Trump Administration is skeptical about social and environmental goals in investing, individual savers are not. People are piling into funds with ethical themes. This survey of socially conscious investing identifies the best buys: 10 open-end and 13 exchange-traded funds with low expense ratios.

It’s a bit incongru…
2020-07-06 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.7833, Raw Interest Score: 1.4626,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1746, Negative Sentiment 0.1528

When Might You See ESG Issues Align With Stock Performance?

Are you interested in making a statement with your retirement assets? Are you holding back because, in using your retirement savings to make a statement, you fear there’s a cost you might not be willing to pay?

This is a reasonable fear. In the 1980s, when activists demanded “socially responsible investing” via demands institutions divest themselves of companies participating in economies of targeted countries, academic studies at that ti…
2020-07-06 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.2282, Raw Interest Score: 1.2120,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2204, Negative Sentiment 0.5264


AI For All: The US Introduces New Bill For Affordable Research

Yesterday, AIM published an article on how difficult it is for the small labs and individual researchers to persevere in the high compute, high-cost industry of deep learning. Today, the policymakers of the US have introduced a new bill that will ensure deep learning is affordable for all.

The National AI Research Resource Task Force Act was introduced in the House by Representatives Anna G. Eshoo (D-CA) and her colleagues. This bill was met with unanimous support from the top universities and companies, which are engaged in artificial intelligence (AI) research. Some of the well-known supporters include Stanford University, Princeton University, UCLA, Carnegie Mellon University, Johns Hopkins University, OpenAI, Mozilla, Google, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, IBM and NVIDIA amongst others.

The objective of this Act is to establish a task force that develops a roadmap for a national AI research cloud.

2020-07-02 Read the full story…

Can AI Answer “What’s the Meaning Of Life”?

With artificial intelligence maturing in the current era, it is gaining immense potential in becoming a key technology for practical applications. Although the technology has displayed expertise in coming up with answers to business queries with accuracy, it often struggles to answer questions that are abstract in nature. In fact, even these conversation AI bots like Alexa and Siri are advanced in managing our schedule but if asked obscure existential questions like “meaning of life,” it will only provide you with either a hilarious response or a sarcastic joke.

However, as artificial intelligence is evolving with advancements in natural language processing, speech recognition and automated reasoning, the technology can now answer some of the tough life questions asked by humans. To test the theory, researchers from the University of New South Wales asked some moral and existential questions to Salesforce’s Conditional Transformer Language model to check if the AI is capable of answering some fundamental questions of life.
2020-07-08 06:31:39+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.3669, Raw Interest Score: 1.3095,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1797, Negative Sentiment 0.3852

Python: Online Bayesian A/B Testing!

A crash course on the Beta distribution, binomial likelihood, and conjugate priors for A/B testing

If you’re anything like me, long before you were interested in data science, machine learning, etc, you gained your initial exposure to statistics through the social sciences. In domains such as psychology, sociology, etc, a study is often conducted over a period of time (that might be days, months, or even years.) In the case of novel experiments, the results are collected, maximum likelihood estimates are produced for the mean and variance, and confidence intervals are…
2020-07-08 00:41:12.625000+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.3215, Raw Interest Score: 1.4503,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2024, Negative Sentiment 0.1939

Morgan Stanley Among Adopters of New 4U Platform: Tech Roundup

Morgan Stanley, Morningstar and T. Rowe Price are among the first major firms to announce their adoption of the new 4U online, multimedia, management and measurement platform.

The platform was created to “enhance the partnership between” investment companies and wealth management firms, according to 4U Platform, which was founded in 2015 by financial co-CEOs Denise Wypiszenski, a former Morgan Stanley Smith Barney executive, and Arin Epstein, a fintech strategist and engineer.
4U “collaborated with 50-60 companies on the investment company side, 100% of the top wealth management firms and some of the industry’s largest platform providers to receive their feedback and insight,” the firm noted. The platform was designed to meet the “everyday needs of firms of all sizes and resolves collective industry challenges by transforming multiple partner workstreams,” it added.
2020-06-30 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.8881, Raw Interest Score: 1.7439,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2097, Negative Sentiment 0.0331

IIT Madras’ Data Science Degree

The Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) announced the launch of India’s first online B.Sc. degree in Programming and Data Science. The programme is open to anyone who has passed Class XII, with English and Maths at the Class X level and enrolled in any on-campus UG course.

2020-07-04 12:30:20+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.8719, Raw Interest Score: 1.4040,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1504, Negative Sentiment 0.1839

Aligning Data Architecture and Data Strategy

Peter Aiken disagrees with the popular idea that it’s impossible to put a dollar value on Data Architecture.

“It won’t be the right number, but it will be at least a dollar value on it, and if there’s money involved, people should be paying attention to it.”Aiken is an author, an associate professor of Information Systems, a researcher, and the Founding Director of Data Blueprint. He spoke about Data Architecture and Data Strategy with attendees at the DATAVERSITY® Data Architecture Online Conferen…
2020-07-07 07:35:30+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.8538, Raw Interest Score: 1.3627,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3061, Negative Sentiment 0.2567

How Data Science Is Revolutionising Our Social Visibility

Artificial Intelligence has the potential to revolutionize the social visibility of brands, paving the way for more incisive approaches towards marketing.

The huge potential of AI in social media has led to Markets and Markets forecasting that the industry of deep learning, machine learning and NLP within sales marketing, customer experience management and predictive risk assessment within social platforms will grow to more than $2.1 billion in …
2020-07-06 23:24:57+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.8377, Raw Interest Score: 1.3043,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2531, Negative Sentiment 0.0487

Google Teams With NVIDIA On New Cloud Computing Offerings

NVIDIA announced on Tuesday that just weeks after its release, the A100 Tensor Core graphics processing unit (GPU) has been adopted by Google Cloud, a division of Alphabet.

The Accelerator-Optimized VM (A2) family, available on Google Compute Engine, is designed specifically to handle some of the most demanding applications out there, including artificial intelligence (AI) workloads and high performance computing (HPC). This makes Google the fir…
2020-07-08 06:20:05-04:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.7630, Raw Interest Score: 1.4354,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0532, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

What is a Database Administrator (DBA)?

A database administrator (DBA) is a person who manages, maintains, and secures data in one or more data systems so that a user can perform analysis for business operations. DBAs take care of data storage, organization, presentation, utilization, and analysis from a technical perspective.

The DBA job is transitioning from being database-centric to data-centric, as Data Management becomes more autonomous. Augmented Data Management, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence(AI) make accomplishing general database upkeep easier, reducing the amount of manual labor. This, in turn, frees up the DBA to do more strategic tasks such as ensuring compliance with regulations and improving data flow performance. Many see the DBA’s responsibilities shifting from managing a few database instances and systems to managing more of them. As the number of data sources increases, DBAs will be focused on enterprise data rather than specializing in a few database technologies.
2020-07-08 07:30:13+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.4907, Raw Interest Score: 1.4646,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1246, Negative Sentiment 0.0623

5 simple tips for aspiring data scientists

My advice to help you to successfully become a data scientist

I frequently have aspiring data scientists contact me to ask for advice on how to get into data science. In this story I will go through 5 simple tips that I often give in response to these requests. Hopefully you will be able to implement them into your data science career exploration.

2020-07-06 13:50:25.213000+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.1592, Raw Interest Score: 1.2101,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2375, Negative Sentiment 0.2488


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AI & Machine Learning News. 13, July 2020

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AI & Machine Learning News. 13, July 2020

The Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Newsletter by CloudQuant

The Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning News clippings for Quants are provided algorithmically with CloudQuant’s NLP engine which seeks out articles relevant to our community and ranks them by our proprietary interest score. After all, shouldn’t you expect to see the news generated using AI?


AutoML-Zero: Evolving Code that Learns

Machine learning (ML) has seen tremendous successes recently, which were made possible by ML algorithms like deep neural networks that were discovered through years of expert research. The difficulty involved in this research fueled AutoML, a field that aims to automate the design of ML algorithms. So far, AutoML has focused on constructing solutions by combining sophisticated hand-designed components. A typical example is that of neural architecture search, a subfield in which one builds neural networks automatically out of complex layers (e.g., convolutions, batch-norm, and dropout), and the topic of much research.

An alternative approach to using these hand-designed components in AutoML is to search for entire algorithms from scratch. This is challenging because it requires the exploration of vast and sparse search spaces, yet it has great potential benefits — it is not biased toward what we already know and potentially allows for the discovery of new and better ML architectures. By analogy, if one were building a house from scratch, there is more potential for flexibility or improvement than if one was constructing a house using only prefabricated rooms. However, the discovery of such housing designs may be more difficult because there are many more possible ways to combine the bricks and mortar than there are of combining pre-made designs of entire rooms. As such, early research into algorithm learning from scratch focused on one aspect of the algorithm, to reduce the search space and compute required, such as the learning rule, and has not been revisited much since the early 90s. Until now.

2020-07-09 Read the full story…

CloudQuant Thoughts : I particularly like the idea that they start from scratch thus dramatically reducing the chance of bias!

10 Interesting and Impressive AI projects for absolute Beginners (with Python Source Code)

Artificial Intelligence has become certainly part of our lifes now. We knowingly or unknowingly use it in our day-to-day life as in recommended films, image recognition, speech recognition, sites-recommended products etc.

That’s why you also need to start learning about it. You could start by checking out the 5 Best Artificial Intelligence Books in 2020. Yet it’s not enough to understand just the Theory. That’s why students are expected to try to complete some artificial intelligence projects. That is why, if you’re a newbie, the best thing you can do is to spend some time on some real Artificial Intelligence projects. From trying to follow the trends of artificial intelligence to doing some of your own projects. A link to the Python Source Code will be included for each!

I will show you some fun ideas for Artificial Intelligence projects that beginners can work on to test their knowledge of Python.

These projects will help you develop your skill set while also checking your existing knowledge. Artificial intelligence can be used in a number of fields. The more you look at various Artificial Intelligence projects, the more you will learn.

1. Predict Housing Price
2. Stock Price Prediction
3. Chatbot
4. Spam E-Mails Identifier
5. Handwritten Digits Recognition
6. Chrome T-rex Dino Bot
7. Next Word Predictor
8. Twitter Sentiment Analyzer
9. Cancer Detection using medical data
10. Facial Emotion Recognition and Detection

2020-07-06 Read the full story…

CloudQuant Thoughts : Neat idea to bring 10 common starter ML challenges into one article.

Elon Musk Brags That Tesla Is “Very Close” to Full, Level 5 Self Driving

“I’m extremely confident that level 5 or essentially complete autonomy will happen and I think will happen very quickly.” For years, we’ve been promised a near future in which cars drive themselves as well as a human motorist — while their occupants scroll through Twitter or browse Netflix in a cozy cabin with comfy seats.

That dream, formally known as Level 5 autonomy, is probably still many years out — but Tesla CEO Elon Musk believes it could be right around the corner. In a video message recorded for the opening of Shanghai’s annual World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC), Musk said he’s confident Tesla will be able to deliver basic Level 5 autonomy in its vehicles as soon as this year.

2020-07-09  Read the full story…

CloudQuant Thoughts : So many potentially dangerous tails though!

Data Prep Still Dominates Data Scientists’ Time, Survey Finds

Data scientists spend about 45% of their time on data preparation tasks, including loading and cleaning data, according to a survey of data scientists conducted by Anaconda. The company also analyzed the gap between what data scientists learn as students, and what the enterprises demand.

Data cleansing – fixing or discarding anomalous or wrong numbers and otherwise ensuring the data is an accurate representation of the phenomenon it is meant to measure — accounts for more than a quarter of average day for data scientists, followed by 19% for data loading (the “L” in ETL), according to Anaconda’s annual survey.

Data visualization tasks occupied for about 21% of their time, while model selection, model training and scoring, and model deployment each consume 11% to 12% of the day, the survey found.

2020-07-06 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.4173, Raw Interest Score: 2.0492,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1734, Negative Sentiment 0.2049

CloudQuant Thoughts : No matter which way you cut it, data scientists still spend too much time fiddling with data before they can use it. For financial services CloudQuant provides Symbol translation, data quality checking and organisation so that the data you need is ready to go. Head over to our Data Catalog for more info.

How Data Science Is Revolutionising Our Social Visibility

The rise of artificial intelligence has been well documented, but how exactly can it enhance your social media marketing strategies?

Artificial Intelligence has the potential to revolutionize the social visibility of brands, paving the way for more incisive approaches towards marketing.

The huge potential of AI in social media has led to Markets and Markets forecasting that the industry of deep learning, machine learning and NLP within sales marketing, customer experience management and predictive risk assessment within social platforms will grow to more than $2.1 billion in value by 2023.

The rise of AI has been well documented, but how exactly can it enhance your social media marketing strategies? Let’s take a deeper look into the role that AI is set to play in boosting our exposure on social platforms:

2020-07-06 23:24:57+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.8377, Raw Interest Score: 1.3043,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2531, Negative Sentiment 0.0487

CloudQuant Thoughts : A very detailed article on how the big players are using AI in social media marketing.

Nvidia overtakes Intel as most valuable U.S. chipmaker

Nvidia has for the first time overtaken Intel as the most valuable U.S. chipmaker.

In a semiconductor industry milestone, Nvidia’s shares rose 2.3% in afternoon trading on Wednesday to a record $404, putting the graphic component maker’s market capitalization at $248 billion, just above the $246 billion value of Intel, once the world’s leading chipmaker.

2020-07-10 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.7865, Raw Interest Score: 1.5288,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3597, Negative Sentiment 0.1799

CloudQuant Thoughts : With the amount of work Nvidia have put into AI we are big supporters. Congratulations on overtaking Intel!

Aspiring Toward Provably Beneficial AI Including The Case Of Autonomous Cars

As AI systems continue to be developed and fielded, one nagging and serious concern is whether the AI will achieve beneficial results. Perhaps among the plethora of AI systems are some that will be or might become eventually untoward, working in non-beneficial ways, carrying out detrimental acts that in some manner cause irreparable harm, injury, and possibly even death to humans. There is a distinct possibility that there are toxic AI systems among the ones that are aiming to help mankind.

We do not know whether it might be just a scant few that are reprehensible or whether it might be the preponderance that goes that malevolent route. One crucial twist that accompanies an AI system is that they are often devised to learn while in use, thus, there is a real chance that the original intent will be waylaid and overtaken into foul territory, doing so over time, and ultimately exceed any preset guardrails and veer into evil-doing.

2020-07-09 21:30:24+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.7725, Raw Interest Score: 1.0067,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3079, Negative Sentiment 0.3323

RAM Active Investments launches AI-driven sustainable fund

RAM Active Investments SA (RAM AI), a systematic asset manager based in Geneva, is launching a fund with the objective of tackling climate change and providing investors an active strategy with strong ESG standards. RAM AI’s ESG approach is the result of extensive research exploring alternative data thanks to the successful development of the RAM AI Machine Learning (ML) infrastructure.

As the climate change emergency continues to grow RAM AI believes its role as an asset manager is to provide investors with a differentiated solution to low-carbon investing. Emmanuel Hauptmann, who heads the Systematic Equity research, says: “The RAM ML team has made tremendous advances in building the strategy with the objective to provide a selection of best-in-class, low-carbon companies without compromising performance.”

2020-07-10 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 6.1887, Raw Interest Score: 2.2447,
Positive Sentiment: 0.4115, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

dotData Launches New Platform to Meet Demand for Real-Time Prediction Capabilities

dotData, a provider of full-cycle data science automation and operationalization for the enterprise, is releasing dotData Stream, a new containerized AI/ML model that enables real-time predictive capabilities for dotData users.

“We are seeing an increasing demand for real-time prediction capability, which has become an essential necessity for many enterprise companies. dotData Stream allows our customers to leverage AI/ML capability in a real-time environment,” said Ryohei Fujimaki, Ph.D., founder and CEO of dotData.

dotData Stream was developed to meet the growing market demand for real-time prediction capabilities for use cases such as fraud detection, automated underwriting, dynamic pricing, industrial IoT, and more.
2020-07-07 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 5.3214, Raw Interest Score: 2.7317,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1383, Negative Sentiment 0.0346

Emerging Job Roles for Successful AI Teams

Many job descriptions across organizations will require at least some use of AI in the coming years, creating opportunities for the savvy to learn about AI and advance their careers regardless of discipline.

New job titles have and will emerge to help the organization execute on AI strategy. Machine learning engineers have cemented a leading role on the AI team, for example, taking first place on best jobs listed on Indeed last year, according to a recent rapport in CIO. And AI specialists were the top job in LinkedIn’s 2020 Emerging Jobs report, with 74% annual growth in the last four years. This was followed by robot engineer and data scientist.

The number of AI-related jobs could increase globally by up to 16%, stated Ritu Jyoti, Program VP, AI Research with IDC IT consultants. With AI generating productivity returns during the pandemic, interest is growing. “IDC believes that AI spending and employment will increase among healthcare providers, education, insurance, pharmaceutical companies and federal governments,” she stated.

2020-07-09 21:30:28+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 5.2458, Raw Interest Score: 1.8605,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2608, Negative Sentiment 0.1565

Taking an Active Approach to Data Governance – A Look at How Riot Games “League of Legends” Implemented Non-Invasive Data Governance (Video)

Riot Games created and runs “League of Legends,” the world’s most-played PC game and most viewed eSport — and is now transforming to become a multi-title publisher. To keep pace with this transformation and support a growing player base of millions, Riot Games is taking a page from Bob Seiner’s book, “Non-Invasive Data Governance: The Path of Least Resistance and Greatest Success” and leveraging the Alation Data Catalog to help guide accurate, well-governed analysis.

Bob Seiner will join Riot Games’ Chris Kudelka, Technical Product Manager, and Michael Leslie, Senior Data Governance Architect, and Alation’s John Wills, VP of Professional Service, for an inside look at Data Governance at one of the world’s leading gaming companies.

  • How Riot Games is implementing Non-Invasive Data Governance
  • How this new approach to Data Governance helps to drive the business
  • How the Alation Data Catalog helps Riot Games create the foundation for guiding accurate, well-governed data use

2020-07-09 21:00:59+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.7760, Raw Interest Score: 1.8414,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1561, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

DeepMind researchers propose rebuilding the AI industry on a base of anticolonialism

Researchers from Google’s DeepMind and the University of Oxford recommend that AI practitioners draw on decolonial theory to reform the industry, put ethical principles into practice, and avoid further algorithmic exploitation or oppression.

The researchers detailed how to build AI systems while critically examining colonialism and colonial forms of AI already in use in a preprint paper released Thursday. The paper was coauthored by DeepMind research scientists William Isaac and Shakir Mohammed and Marie-Therese Png, an Oxford doctoral student and DeepMind Ethics and Society intern who previously provided tech advice to the United Nations Secretary General’s High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation.

2020-07-11 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 5.0584, Raw Interest Score: 1.7916,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1558, Negative Sentiment 0.3311

Why Traditional Data Preparation Approaches Fail

At Data Summit Connect 2020, Thomas Cook, director of sales, Cambridge Semantics, described the laborious process of manually discovering, sorting, cleaning, and conforming silo’d data that consumes the lion’s share of data scientists’ time, and how new approaches are improving the process. The dirty secret of data science is that 70 to 80% of the time is spent on data preparation and feature engineering, Cook explained. While confirming this with data scientists, they typically chuckle and say, “It’s more like 90 to 95%,” Cook said.

“The aspect of discovering the data, finding the data that’s suitable, cleaning, conforming, and creating features is also the least enjoyable part of their job,” Cook said. So how can organizations make this easier and make the job more enjoyable, reducing the cost of developing the models and applications, and reducing burnout?

2020-07-10 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.7511, Raw Interest Score: 1.6674,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1667, Negative Sentiment 0.1667

Is Zero Closer to Eight or to One?

Is zero closer to eight or to one? Is this a three or a five? This was the type of question we were pondering a few weeks ago when we examined the results of an image classification application.

Yes, indeed, a zero is closer to an eight than to a one and a two is closer to a five than to a three — of course, from an image recognition point of view rather than in a strictly mathematical sense. In the last data science example that we were preparing, we trained a machine learning model to recognize images of hand-written digits. In the end, while checking the results, we realized how sloppy people’s handwriting is and how hard it is sometimes to distinguish an eight from a zero, a two from a five, a one from a seven, a zero from a three, and other, sometimes unexpected, similar digits.

2020-07-08 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.9291, Raw Interest Score: 1.1319,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0888, Negative Sentiment 0.0666

FLASH FRIDAY: It’s All in the Data

Data data data.

If a trader does not have it, he’s lost. If he has it – and more of it, presumably he can make a better decision, execute his order flow more efficiently and generate more alpha. While it is most definitely true for equities and fixed income, it’s also becoming moreso for exchange-traded funds, which have seen an uptick in trading activity lately too.

Dan Royal, Head of Global Equity Trading at Janus Henderson Investors, recent explained the need for good solid data to Traders Magazine that the informational content of the data, coming from the SIPs, needs to be improved and the geographical latency concerns need to be addressed for the consolidated feeds to be competitive and for all to trade better.

“Reducing some of the information asymmetries between participants is a step towards a more level playing field of data consumption,” Royal said.

2020-07-10 09:18:44+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.9465, Raw Interest Score: 2.0594,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1720, Negative Sentiment 0.2015

Diversity continues to grow at Transform 2020

As our writers here at VentureBeat have emphasized, diversity is a long game. We recognize there’s no instant fix to the long-standing barriers people of color as well as women face, which include important challenges to those working in tech. At the same time, change will only happen with a committed focus on these issues, which is why at VentureBeat we continue to ensure they’re a prominent pillar of our events.

At Transform 2020, we’re building on the gains we made last year, and are thrilled again to offer several opportunities to dive into these issues, give ample opportunity for provocative discussion, as well as celebrate some outstanding successes.

Here’s a snapshot of our diversity program:

2020-07-09 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.7982, Raw Interest Score: 1.4540,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3923, Negative Sentiment 0.1616

White House advisory council’s AI guidance conflicts with Trump’s talent pool sabotage

Earlier this week, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) released a report outlining what it believes must happen for the U.S. to advance “industries of the future.” Several of the committee’s suggestions touched on how the field of AI relates to federal, state, and private-sector partnerships, as well as departmental budgetary considerations. In particular, the report recommends that the U.S. grow nondefense federal investments in AI by 10 times over the next 10 years and for the federal government to create national AI “testbeds,” expanding the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) AI Institutes with at least one AI Institute in each state and creating “National AI Consortia” to share capabilities, data, and resources.

Loosely, PCAST — which lives in the Office of Science and Technology — provides advice to the president on science and technology policy. (Its 12 members from academia and private industry met for the third time this week under the Trump Administration.) In the report, the committee argues the U.S. will need to boost AI R&D investments from $1 billion a year in 2020 to $10 billion a year by 2030 in order to remain competitive. PCAST asserts this would enable the NSF — which requested $487 million for AI in 2020 — to make at least 1,000 awards to individual investigators “without any loss of quality.”

2020-07-10 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.6580, Raw Interest Score: 1.6579,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1719, Negative Sentiment 0.1596

Announcing the second annual VentureBeat AI Innovation Awards at Transform 2020

The past year has seen remarkable change. As innovation in the field of AI and real-world applications of its constituent technologies such as machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision continue to grow, so has an understanding of their social impacts.

At our AI-focused Transform 2020 event, taking place July 15-17 entirely online, VentureBeat will recognize and award emergent, compelling, and influential work in AI through our second annual VB AI Innovation Awards.

Drawn both from our daily editorial coverage and the expertise, knowledge, and experience of our nominating committee members, these awards give us a chance to shine a light on the people and companies making an impact in AI.

2020-07-11 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.2488, Raw Interest Score: 2.0122,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3744, Negative Sentiment 0.0234

Visit the cutting edge in AI: Transform 2020 Expo (July 15-17)

To say that the speed of technological change in AI is fast-firing is an understatement. As engineers and data scientists unlock more of the potential of AI and machine learning, ever-more innovative solutions continue to advance the goals of business leaders.

At Transform 2020 next week, you’ll have a chance to see those solutions for yourself. Transform 2020 Expo (July 15-17) will showcase some of the most cutting edge AI companies, from large tech giants like Intel and Dell to some of the most innovative growth companies and startups like Dataiku, Cloudera, and Modzy.

This means you’ll be able to get an up-close look at some of the most advanced solutions spanning AI security, automation, conversational AI, explainable AI, training data, as well as solutions for specialized areas, such as customer experience, and specific industries, such as wealth management.

2020-07-10 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.1876, Raw Interest Score: 1.5092,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3354, Negative Sentiment 0.1677

Red Swan Risk and Asset Control team up to provide integrated security master and model risk service

Red Swan Risk is enhancing its multi-asset class portfolio risk management solution, RiskON, through Asset Control’s managed service offering, PaSSPort, to provide a ‘seamless data experience’ to its clients.

The collaboration between the two companies will provide asset managers with a managed service which delivers a high-quality, data mastering, data analytics and model risk solution.

Hedge funds, pension funds, funds of funds, asset managers and banks need to manage model risk with increasingly more control and transparency. This has to be done across data inputs, model configuration, statistics, stress scenarios, reporting and analysis. Front office risk management, as well as back office oversight, require these capabilities.

Red Swan’s RiskON platform provides seamless aggregation of portfolio holdings data with security level risk and reference data using a unified data model. This gives users the transparency and control over risk modelling decisions needed to monitor, analyse and manage model and portfolio risk through a web-based UI and API hosted on AWS.

2020-07-08 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.0784, Raw Interest Score: 2.6557,
Positive Sentiment: 0.4426, Negative Sentiment 0.1897

Google Cloud’s Dataproc Gets a GPU-Powered Spark Boost

Google Cloud’s Dataproc – its big data platform that allows users to run Apache Hadoop and Spark jobs – is getting a boost. Apache Spark 3 and Hadoop 3 have launched general availability, enhancing users’ data analytics capabilities with a series of new features – and naturally, those features are now available on Google Cloud’s Dataproc image version 2.0.

In a blog post, Christopher Crosbie (product manager for Google Cloud) and Igor Dvorzhak (a software engineer at Google) highlighted the new features offered in the Apache Spark 3 implementation.

  • Adaptive queries: Spark can now optimize a query plan while execution is occuring. This will be a big gain for data lake queries that often lack proper statistics in advance of the query processing.
  • Dynamic partition pruning: Avoiding unnecessary data scans are critical in queries that resemble data warehouse queries, which use a single fact table and many dimension tables. Spark 3 brings this data pruning technique to Spark.
  • GPU acceleration: NVIDIA has been collaborating with the open source community to bring GPUs into Spark’s native processing. This allows Spark to hand off processing to GPUs where appropriate.

2020-07-07 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.9969, Raw Interest Score: 2.8328,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3104, Negative Sentiment 0.1164

Said to Be Faster, More Accurate

Anomaly detection is work to identify rare events or observations that differ in a big way from the majority of surrounding data, thus raising questions as to why it is the case.

Anomaly detection, synonymous with outlier detection, is used in many fields including statistics, finance, manufacturing, networking and data mining. It can be useful for intrusion detection, fraud detection, system health monitoring and event detection in sensor networks. It is used in preprocessing to remove irregular data from the dataset, which can substantially increase accuracy.

Today anomaly detection is also used in cyber security for spam filters, credit card fraud detection, network security and social media content moderation.

2020-07-09 21:30:25+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.8127, Raw Interest Score: 1.6941,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1583, Negative Sentiment 0.8233

CaixaBank: Innovation Drives Digital Transformation (Podcast 35m)

At no time has the importance of innovation and the deployment of advanced technologies in banking been more evident than today. With more consumers embracing digital banking, banks are being challenged to replicate the level of engagement of bigtech and new tech organizations such as Amazon, Google, Netflix, Zoom and Alibaba.

One of the perennial global leaders in technological innovation for banking is CaixaBank, Spain’s leading digital financial services provider. As a pioneer in digital transformation, the application of artificial intelligence, innovative product design, and hybrid cloud utilization, CaixaBank continues to be at the forefront of what banking can become.

2020-07-07 06:00:17+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.6601, Raw Interest Score: 2.1456,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3366, Negative Sentiment 0.1262

On-Ramp to AI: The Path to Democratize AI Starts with One Class (Course Advert)

On-Ramp to AI: The Path to Democratize AI Starts with One Class

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is like a superhighway, it’s moving fast, evolving, and growing quickly. Like most things in life, data scientists are not born with AI and Machine Learning (ML) knowledge. They learn it. Learning is a journey.

At H2O.ai, we are on a mission to democratize AI. To help every company become an AI company. Companies are also on an AI transformation journey. AI is being used to improve decision making by leveraging data to better find patterns, predict behavior, mitigate risk, understand customers, and optimize supply chains. Every day there is a growing number of AI use cases across all industries around the world. But how do you get started and join this AI transformation? You need an on-ramp, an on-ramp to the AI superhighway.

2020-07-13 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 6.6347, Raw Interest Score: 2.2073,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1679, Negative Sentiment 0.0240

8 Key Considerations for AI in the Enterprise – H2o.ai

If you’re developing or thinking of developing an AI strategy to transform your business, there’s a lot to consider, let us help. We’re the creator of the leading open source machine learning and artificial intelligence platform and our vision is to democratize AI for all and empower every company to be an AI company. This is a fundamental concept for the future of every business and organization. AI empowers companies to augment their human intelligence and to gain more value, and most importantly achieve a competitive edge in their markets.

2020-07-06 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 6.1415, Raw Interest Score: 2.4129,
Positive Sentiment: 0.6702, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

MLOps Vendor dotData Boosts Automation with Containers

As data science platforms expand across enterprise applications like predictive analytics, automated machine learning vendors are steadily integrating AI models with emerging infrastructure to ease deployment and orchestration.

For example, data science automation specialist dotData this week released a container-based machine learning model aimed at real-time prediction. Applications include automated loan processing, dynamic pricing, fraud detection and industrial Internet of Things deployments such as a smart manufacturing partnership also announced this week.

The Stream platform is designed to deliver real-time prediction using dotData’s AI and machine learning models. Those models are downloaded from the company’s flagship platform via a one-click process akin to launching a Docker application container.

2020-07-07 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.5827, Raw Interest Score: 2.2152,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0396, Negative Sentiment 0.1187

Why Tesla Invented A New Neural Network

Recently, Tesla filed a patent called ‘Systems and methods for adapting a neural network on a hardware platform.’ In the patent, they described the systems and methods to select a neural network model configuration that satisfies all constraints.

According to the patent, the constraints mainly include an embodiment that computes a list of valid configurations and a constraint satisfaction solver to classify valid configurations for the particular platform, where the neural network model will run efficiently.

The Reason Behind the Patent – Neural network models are increasingly relied upon for different problems due to the ease at which they can label or classify the input data. Different neural networks are trained with different hyperparameters, and then they are used to analyse the same validation training set. A particular neural network is selected for future-use based on the desired performance as well as the accuracy goals of specific applications.
2020-07-13 06:30:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.4520, Raw Interest Score: 2.4368,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1819, Negative Sentiment 0.0909

BNP Paribas Securities Services Automates Processing of Asset Servicing Docs

BNP Paribas Securities Services, a leading global custodian with USD 10.6 trillion in assets under custody[1], has automated the processing of key asset servicing documentation, a major milestone in the bank’s digital transformation programme.

The move, which took 12 months to implement, aims to enhance back office operational efficiency, increase straight-through processing rates and reduce services turn-around times for the benefit of the bank’s clients.

Using Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and machine learning, including Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), BNP Paribas Securities Services is now able to automatically capture, extract and classify data from documents such as fund prospectuses and order confirmations. The resulting structured datasets are then fed directly into the bank’s operational systems.

The bank has so far automated the processing of 500,000 documents a year.

2020-07-13 06:57:10+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.4356, Raw Interest Score: 2.4345,
Positive Sentiment: 0.5972, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

The top 20 most valuable venture-backed AI companies, including Palantir, UiPath, and Databricks — valued at $120 billion total

A list of the 20 most valuable venture-backed companies in artificial intelligence boasts a combined valuation of some $120 billion.

Most of the list are privately-held startups; some of them — namely Waymo and Uber Advanced Technology Group — are subsidiaries of much larger companies, but that are said to be eyeing IPOs of their own.

Investment remains robust despite an uncertain economy, a reflection of the great potential of AI innovation, analysts say.
2020-07-11 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.2864, Raw Interest Score: 1.5198,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2763, Negative Sentiment 0.2211

UBS Big Data tool tracks the risks to companies from activist investors

UBS has released a new Big Data tool to predict and quantify the probability of a company being targeted by activist investors.

The new predictive algorithm, UBS-Guard (Global Utility for Activism Risk and Defence) aims to tackle the threat posed by activist investors undermining strategic business objectives by highlighting the risks of an approach and providing built-in analytics which offer insights into the underlying caus…
2020-07-10 10:40:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.1616, Raw Interest Score: 1.4052,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1756, Negative Sentiment 0.4098

AI, Machine Learning Playing Important Role in Fighting COVID-19

AI and machine learning are playing an important role in fighting the pandemic brought on by COVID-19, with technological innovation and ingenuity being applied to large volumes of data to quickly identify patterns and gain insights. Efforts are underway to speed up research and treatment, and better understand how COVID-19 spreads.

Chatbots employing AI are speeding up communication around the pandemic. One example is…
2020-07-09 21:30:25+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.1349, Raw Interest Score: 1.7178,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2736, Negative Sentiment 0.1976

Deutsche Bank and Google Cloud agree multi-year deal

German banking giant Deutsche Bank has agreed a multi-year partnership with Google Cloud for the provision and joint development of cloud services.

The arrangement will see the bank accelerate its plan to transition services to the cloud but also co-develop products with engineers from Google Cloud with the two parties sharing any revenue that arises.

A letter of intent has been signed and a multi-year contract will be agreed in the coming mont…
2020-07-07 09:05:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.9002, Raw Interest Score: 1.6699,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2330, Negative Sentiment 0.1165

Aligning Data Architecture and Data Strategy

Peter Aiken disagrees with the popular idea that it’s impossible to put a dollar value on Data Architecture.

“It won’t be the right number, but it will be at least a dollar value on it, and if there’s money involved, people should be paying attention to it.”Aiken is an author, an associate professor of Information Systems, a researcher, and the Founding Director of Data Blueprint. He spoke about Data Architecture and Data Strategy with attendees…
2020-07-07 07:35:30+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.8538, Raw Interest Score: 1.3627,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3061, Negative Sentiment 0.2567

Ardent Financial Selects SteelEye For Compliance

SteelEye, the compliance technology and data analytics firm, has been selected by Ardent Financial, a new FCA authorised Securities Dealer, to provide MiFID II and MAR compliance services.

Launched on 8th June, Ardent Financial wanted to use modern best-of-breed tools for compliance from day one. Automation was a top priority, but they also wanted a unified platform which would increase efficiency and allow them to manage, oversee, mitigate, and pre…
2020-07-09 10:00:20+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.8390, Raw Interest Score: 1.4805,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2961, Negative Sentiment 0.0423

Tellius Introduces On-Demand Platform Utilizing Machine Learning to Glean Insights

Tellius, the Guided Insights platform, is releasing Tellius On-Demand, an on-demand SaaS application for business users and analytics teams to quickly understand why metrics change in their data with machine learning automation.

Analyzing data with spreadsheets and visualization tools relies entirely on manual ‘slicing-and-dicing’ of data that takes time and produces incomplete results.

Advanced tools that can process large amounts of data require users to pay a high upfront cost to deploy dedicated resources to meet worst-case scenarios for maximum usage of computing and storage, even when they sit unused for long periods of time.

2020-07-08 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.7316, Raw Interest Score: 1.6680,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1986, Negative Sentiment 0.1986

Altair Shows Off Converged Analytics Lineup

If you’re in the market for analytics or machine learning software, you may want to keep your eyes on Altair Engineering. Best known for its product simulation and computer aided engineering software, Altair has quietly assembled an impressive big data platform that extends from data preparation and business intelligence to streaming analytics and AutoML.

Altair Engineering traces its roots back to 1985, when CEO James Scapa, George Christ, and Mark Kistner founded the Troy, Michigan company to develop CAE software. Its initial product, called HyperWorks, allowed designers to simulate manufactured products, whether it’s a car chassis or an airplane wing.

2020-07-10 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.7268, Raw Interest Score: 1.8019,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2670, Negative Sentiment 0.0267

Op-ed: Hyperwar is coming. America needs to bring AI into the fight to win — with caution

  • Hyperwar, or combat waged under the influence of AI, where human decision making is almost entirely absent from the observe-orient-decide-act (OODA) loop, already is beginning to intrude on military operations.
  • This is the central issue for 21st century armed conflict: the superpower that can master AI, data analytics, and supercomputing, will inevitably prevail in conflict.
  • The human dimension of war will be sorely tested in a hyperwar environment. It will demand the utmost of the services in recruiting, educating and training and leading the human talent able to fight and win

The United States recently sent two aircraft carrier strike groups into the South China Sea in a show of military strength. The move of multiple American warships is in reaction to China holding military exercises in international waters that are contested by Vietnam and the Philippines. The stand-off raises global tensions at a time when each superpower has developed advanced technological capabilities in terms of artificial intelligence, remote imaging, and autonomous weapons systems. It is important officials in each nation understand how emerging technologies speed up decision-making but through crisis acceleration run the risk of dangerous miscalculation.

2020-07-12 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.5984, Raw Interest Score: 1.2009,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2528, Negative Sentiment 0.3792

With Modernization Comes Data Challenges

Modernization is driving many of today’s enterprise data strategies—and cloud stands out as the primary vehicle for attaining this modernization. However, many enterprises are struggling with data quality issues, as well as integrating cloud-based and on-premise data.

That’s the word from a recent survey of 1,840 data executives and professionals, released by Progress (“The 2020 Data Connectivity Survey Report”). The 2019 survey collected input from respondents across more than 13 distinct industries worldwide to identify patterns and insights for ongoing data management strategies.

More than eight in 10 respondents indicated they are in the midst of a modernization effort.

2020-07-13 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.5817, Raw Interest Score: 1.5987,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2108, Negative Sentiment 0.2108

Modern Data Warehousing: Enterprise Must-Haves

To fit into modern analytics ecosystems, legacy data warehouses must evolve – both architecturally and technologically – to deliver the agility, scalability and flexibility that business need to thrive in today’s data-driven economy. Alongside new architectural approaches, a variety of technologies have emerged as key ingredients of modern data warehousing, from data virtualization and cloud services, to Hadoop and Spark, and machine learning and automation. To educate IT decision makers and data warehousing professionals about the must-have capabilities for modern data warehousing today – how they work and how best to use them – DBTA is hosting a special roundtable webinar on November 19th.

2020-11-19 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.5448, Raw Interest Score: 1.6053,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0944, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

UiPath raises $225 million to automate repetitive back-office tasks

Robotic process automation (RPA) startup UiPath today announced it has closed a $225 million funding round, bringing its total raised to over $1.2 billion. While the new round is roughly half the $568 million UiPath raised last April, it catapults the New York-based company’s post-money valuation to $10.2 billion, up from $7 billion in 2019 and $3 billion in 2018.

CEO Daniel Dines says the funding will be used to scale UiPath’s platform and deepen its investments in “AI-powered innovation” as it expands its cloud software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings. The round will also likely lay the groundwork for future strategic deals, following UiPath’s acquisition of startups StepShot and ProcessGold last October.

2020-07-13 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.5355, Raw Interest Score: 1.3822,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1141, Negative Sentiment 0.1014


This news clip post is produced algorithmically based upon CloudQuant’s list of sites and focus items we find interesting. We used natural language processing (NLP) to determine an interest score, and to calculate the sentiment of the linked article using the Loughran and McDonald Sentiment Word Lists.

If you would like to add your blog or website to our search crawler, please email customer_success@cloudquant.com. We welcome all contributors.

This news clip and any CloudQuant comment is for information and illustrative purposes only. It is not, and should not be regarded as investment advice or as a recommendation regarding a course of action. This information is provided with the understanding that CloudQuant is not acting in a fiduciary or advisory capacity under any contract with you, or any applicable law or regulation. You are responsible to make your own independent decision with respect to any course of action based on the content of this post.

The post AI & Machine Learning News. 13, July 2020 appeared first on CloudQuant.


Alternative Data News. 15, July 2020

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Alternative Data News. 15, July 2020

The AltDataNewsletter by CloudQuant

Finding sources and uses for alternative data can be difficult. At CloudQuant we regularly read and search the internet for new sources of data that can be used in our mission to find alpha signals and build quantitative trading strategies. We recognize that we are technology and data junkies so we wrote our own crawler that specifically seeks out web pages, posts, and news articles that give us a snapshot of what is going on in the world of Alt Data. The following is a collection of articles that we think you will find interesting from the past week.


US College Tuition & Fees vs. Overall Inflation [Reddit]

Colleges and universities across the world are frantically working out how to teach thousands of students, usually crammed into lecture halls, in a safer more socially-distanced way.

This week Harvard made headlines after announcing that only 40% of its undergraduates would be invited to live on campus and that all of its courses would be online – with no discount on tuition fees. The total cost to attend Harvard for a year is $72,391 for tuition, room, board, and fees combined.

Harvard may be an extreme example, but it’s indicative of a wider trend. The cost of getting a college degree in the US has risen almost 1200% in just 40 years. During that same time, overall inflation is up ~230%. Rising college costs were pretty tough to take when courses were normal, but paying $30k, $40k or even $50k+ for tuition, feels extreme when the entirety of your teaching could be online.

Originally sent in this chartr newsletter.
Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics
Tool: Excel

2020-07-08  Read the full story…

CloudQuant Thoughts : As a parent of a student about to enter college for a significant amount of money per year I am disgusted by the feedback being given by the colleges. It is understandable, they are businesses, they are trying to survive, they know as little as we do about the future. But had they not engaged in this ridiculous ramping up of college costs they would have had the sympathy of parents and students.

New Forecasting Model by RavenPack Analyzes News to Predict the Winner of the 2020 US Presidential Election

An alternative to polls, this new approach uses sentiment analysis and media attention to forecast election results. RavenPack, a leading big data analytics provider, has launched a free and publicly available website, offering projections and analysis on the upcoming U.S. presidential election.

RavenPack’s forecasting model combines three key inputs:

  • The level of media attention received by a presidential candidate, which has been found to be highly correlated with election success
  • The sentiment for each candidate, measured from thousands of news stories about their policies and personal life, across all 50 US states.
  • Social and economic sentiment by state, which provides a proxy for the sitting president’s approval rating and chances of reelection

Research shows the forecasting model built by RavenPack’s Data Science team correctly predicted the winning candidate in 4 out of the 5 last U.S. presidential elections, with a confidence of greater than 75%, outperforming many traditional polling methods.

2020-07-14 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 6.1900, Raw Interest Score: 1.6188,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3964, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

CloudQuant Thoughts : Build ’em up and knock ’em down. Let’s see how this one does!

Fixed Income Pioneer David Rutter launches LedgerEdge

David E. Rutter has gathered an expert team of financial market and technology professionals in a new company, LedgerEdge, to build an ecosystem for the exchange of data and assets in the corporate bond market.

Corporate bond market participants face serious challenges in discovering liquidity and executing trades without harmful data leakage. The corporate bond market lags behind other asset classes in adoption of digital solutions: $59bn is traded daily, but only 30% of this is traded electronically.

The last ten years have seen innovative new solutions and protocols make strides to improve market efficiency, but they have been limited by the technology available. All have required trade-offs including imprecise order tools, centralized data stores, and data leakage.

LedgerEdge is building on technology only now ready for institutional-grade solutions. The team is using blockchain technology, artificial intelligence, and secure enclave computing to empower users to locate and promote liquidity in markets.

2020-07-15 06:01:06+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.1687, Raw Interest Score: 1.7609,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3707, Negative Sentiment 0.3398

CloudQuant Thoughts : The biggest players have access to the most data at the highest speed. They also benefit from being able to pay to see retail flow (so they can see what you are trading and when – often they provide the trading platform on which you trade!) but they also demand the ability to, as it states in this article, “discover liquidity and execute trades without harmful leakage”. In other words, see it before you do, see what you do and not let you see what they do…. Sound fair? Drag all trades out into the harsh light of truth. With legislation due to pass to allow hedge funds with value under $3.5b to no longer have to declare their holdings, it is becoming less like a level playing field and more like trying to play soccer uphill.

Is R Making a Programming-World Comeback?

For the past few years, the narrative around the R programming language, which is used heavily in data science, has remained much the same: Although academia and specialized data-science firms used R pretty heavily, Python was rapidly eclipsing it as the language of choice for all things data-related.

However, the latest update of the TIOBE Index suggests something incredible: That news of R’s demise has been premature, and the language might be making a bit of a comeback. Specifically, R has jumped up to eighth place on the Index, up from 20th place a year ago.
2020-07-09 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.8641, Raw Interest Score: 1.9094,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1224, Negative Sentiment 0.1714

CloudQuant Thoughts : Whilst Python is our preferred language here at CloudQuant, we appreciate that a number of Data Scientists enjoy working with R and so we have just added support for R to our Data Research environment CQ AI.


ESG Section

This is our ESG section, do not forget to head over to the CloudQuant data catalog where we have various data sets available including a very interesting ESG data set!

ESG Data Coming to U.S. Via Nasdaq

North American Investors and traders interested in gaining exposure to Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) markets are about to gain a competitive advantage thanks to Nasdaq via its recent alliance with TrackInsight. TrackInsight (www.trackinsight.com) is a leading global independent ETF analytics platform that operates a global platform dedicated to ETF search, analysis and selection aimed at professional investors.

TrackInsight currently has over 100,000 unique users and 2,500 qualified professional investors using its platform for their day-to-day ETF screening; it is recognized as the leading source of independent and reliable information for more than 6,000 Exchange Traded Funds listed globally.
2020-07-10 15:27:37+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 7.7970, Raw Interest Score: 2.5401,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3699, Negative Sentiment 0.0740

Refinitiv Debuts Fund ESG Scores

Building on its commitment to connect and advance the global financial community through data and analytics, Refinitiv today announced Lipper Fund ESG Scores to serve as a pivotal data-metric in the transition to sustainable investing – providing comparisons at the fund level for fund managers, advisors and investors.

Refinitiv Lipper Fund ESG Scores brings together the Lipper fund universe of 330,000 fund share classes and its deep holdings con…
2020-07-08 16:18:25+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.1806, Raw Interest Score: 2.2027,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1673, Negative Sentiment 0.0836

BNP Paribas taps into ESG surge with new global sustainability-focused hedge fund launch

BNP Paribas Asset Management has launched a long/short global equity hedge fund which will invest in companies grappling with looming environmental challenges, as interest in ESG (environmental, social and governance) themed hedge fund strategies continues to soar.

BNP’s new Environmental Absolute Return Thematic (EARTH) Fund will trade energy, materials, agriculture and industrials stocks in both developed and emerging markets with market caps of more than USD1 billion.

It will take long punts in innovative companies that are addressing an assortment of environmental challenges – such as carbon emissions, waste production, and food, water and energy concerns – and pair them with short bets on unsustainable firms, or those names whose business models are vulnerable to transition risk.

2020-07-15 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 5.5337, Raw Interest Score: 2.5607,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3283, Negative Sentiment 0.3283


Best Practises In Data Cleaning That Data Analysts Should Know

Data cleaning is one of the most crucial steps to ensure data quality and database integrity. It efficiently allows managing data while determining reliability while making decisions. As the regulatory compliances are becoming more stringent and focused, ensuring high data quality is the need of the hour. Given that organisations have a lot of data internally and externally, and that most of this data is not clean, it may result in errors while running programs that may lead to revenue loss and more. Data management best practices are, therefore, crucial for better analytics.

Some of the benefits of data cleaning are:

  • It accelerates data governance while reducing time and cost of implementation to maximise ROI
  • Accurately target customers and drive faster customer acquisition
  • Consolidate applications and cost-saving
  • Improves decision-making capabilities as it supports better analytics
  • It saves valuable resources by removing duplicate and inaccurate data from databases, keeping valuable resources in terms of storage space and processing time
  • It boosts productivity as it saves time in re-analysing work due to mistakes in data and saves from making incorrect decisions

Best Practices For Data Cleaning – Chalk Out A Plan.

2020-07-14 10:30:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.3479, Raw Interest Score: 1.6825,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3761, Negative Sentiment 0.5740

Data Structures & Algorithms I Actually Used Working at Tech Companies

Do you actually use algorithms and data structures on your day to day job? I’ve noticed a growing trend of people assuming algorithms are pointless questions that are asked by tech companies purely as an arbitrary measure. I hear more people complain about how all of this is a purely academic exercise. This notion was definitely popularized after Max Howell, the author of Homebrew, posted his Google interview experience.

This article is a set of real-world examples where data structures like trees, graphs, and various algorithms were used in production. All of these are my first-hand experiences. I hope to illustrate that a generic data structures and algorithms knowledge is not “just for the interview” – but something that you’d likely find yourself reaching for when working at fast-growing, innovative tech companies.
2020-07-14 15:30:35+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.0319, Raw Interest Score: 1.1833,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1407, Negative Sentiment 0.2750

Hedge funds cut losses with stellar Q2 gains as equities lead in June – but industry remains down in tumultuous half-year

A number of hedge fund strategies, including discretionary macro managers and specialist technology and healthcare-focused equity long/short funds, have taken profits in the first half of 2020, as the wider industry continues to claw back losses following the bedlam that rocked markets earlier in the year.

Overall, hedge funds gained close to 2 per cent in the month of June, their third consecutive monthly advance, according to new data from Hedge Fund Research, powered mainly by equities and event driven strategies.

But the HFRI Fund Weighted Composite Index, an investable barometer of the wider industry, remains down for the year despite the recent recovery, which included a striking Q2 rise of more than 9 per cent. In what has been a memorable six-month period for markets, the index dropped 3.49 per cent – a slide stemming largely from agonising losses during March’s coronavirus-fuelled sell-off.
2020-07-09 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.4758, Raw Interest Score: 1.8947,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3008, Negative Sentiment 0.2406

Wilshire Liquid Alternative Index up 0.92 per cent in June

TheWilshire Liquid Alternative Index, which provides a representative baseline for how the broad liquid alternative investment category performs, returned 0.92 per cent in June, underperforming the 1.75 per cent monthly return of the HFRX Global Hedge Fund Index.

The Wilshire Liquid Alternative Index family aims to deliver precise market measures for the performance of diversified liquid alternative investment strategies implemented through mutu…
2020-07-14 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.4537, Raw Interest Score: 3.0006,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1783, Negative Sentiment 0.2080

A monster trading quarter saved the day at JPMorgan and Citigroup. But the second half of 2020 looks grim.

In the first wave of bank earnings, Wall Street traders proved the difference makers. Banks took massive hits as consumer banking faltered and they built up cushions against bad loans. But JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup still beat expectations and turned profits, thanks in large part to stellar trading performances. At JPMorgan, trading revenues reached $9.7 billion — an all-time record.
2020-07-15 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.2620, Raw Interest Score: 1.9236,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2061, Negative Sentiment 0.3160

The nominees for the VentureBeat AI Innovation Awards at Transform 2020

At our AI-focused Transform 2020 event, taking place July 15-17 entirely online, VentureBeat will recognize and award emergent, compelling, and influential work through our second annual VB AI Innovation Awards. Drawn from our daily editorial coverage and the expertise of our nominating committee members, these awards give us a chance to shine a light on the people and companies making an impact in AI.

Here are the nominees in each of the five categories — NLP/NLU Innovation, Business Application Innovation, Computer Vision Innovation, AI for Good, and Startup Spotlight.

2020-07-14 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.8131, Raw Interest Score: 1.8553,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3092, Negative Sentiment 0.0957

Xignite Offers Financial Data APIs to Early Stage Fintechs

Xignite Introduces New Development Program Offering Financial Data APIs to Early Stage Fintechs

Market and financial data solutions provider offering support to next wave of entrepreneurs during these especially challenging times

Xignite, Inc., a provider of market data distribution and management solutions for financial services and technology companies, announced today it has created a new program to assist early stage and start-up financial technology companies during the COVID-19 pandemic. To apply for this program visit https://www.xignite.com/fintech-development-program/.

The costs associated with developing and launching fintech products and apps can be daunting, even in the best of times. A particularly challenging aspect can be the procurement of quality financial and market data. Hidden fees, restrictions on the use of data, poorly written APIs and exchange requirements are just some of the factors, in addition to costs, that can make it difficult for new or small fintechs to survive.

2020-07-14 14:11:04+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.7789, Raw Interest Score: 2.0332,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3441, Negative Sentiment 0.2502

Databases vs. Hadoop vs. Cloud Storage

How can an organization thrive in the 2020s, a changing and confusing time with significant Data Management demands and platform options such as data warehouses, Hadoop, and the cloud? Trying to save money by bandaging and using the same old Data Architecture ends up pushing data uphill, making it harder to use. Rethinking data usage, storage, and computation is a necessary step to get data back under control and in the best technical environments to move business and data strategies forward.

William McKnight, President of the Data Strategy firm the McKnight Consulting Group, offered his advice about the best data platforms and architectures in his presentation, Databases vs. Hadoop vs. Cloud Storage at the DATAVERSITY® Enterprise Analytics Online Conference. McKnight explained that today’s Data Management needs call for leveling up to technology better suited to obtaining all data fast and effectively. He said:

“Getting all data under control is the thing that I say frequently. It means making data manageable, well-performing, available to our user base, believable, advantageous for the company to become data-driven.”

2020-07-15 07:35:56+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.3355, Raw Interest Score: 1.9197,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3200, Negative Sentiment 0.0640

Productizing IT Services for Data Management Projects

Many organizations overcome a lack of data engineers by outsourcing their Data Management needs to IT service providers. Startups, small and mid-sized businesses, and even larger organizations are rich in domain expertise but inexperienced in preparing data for insights, which is why they hire outsiders to perform these vital tasks.

Many organizations overcome a lack of data engineers by outsourcing their Data Management needs to IT service providers. Startups, small and mid-sized businesses, and even larger organizations are rich in domain expertise but inexperienced in preparing data for insights, which is why they hire outsiders to perform these vital tasks.

Although this approach offers some short-term value, the following three challenges reveal why they are inadequate in the long term:

  • Loss of Control: Businesses should own the knowledge for extracting insights from data without being mired in the technical details required to do so. Dependence on service teams for Data Management prevents organizations from controlling access to their own data and data insights. Relying on these “middlemen” for this basic necessity delays time to value, impairs flexibility, and hampers productivity.
  • Difficulty Scaling: Organizations must scale their data teams alongside their business, which quickly proves expensive and impractical. The more business units rely on data, the more data team members are required to match that demand. With this approach, it’s impossible to scale the business without increasing costs for data teams — which aren’t cheap, to begin with.
  • Slow Iterations: The increased time to value of employing service teams makes iterations extremely slow, depriving organizations of agility and delaying time to market in today’s fast-paced, customer-centric world.

2020-07-15 07:25:34+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.3205, Raw Interest Score: 1.8683,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1779, Negative Sentiment 0.3855

Introduction to Python for Data Science – Simple and interactive tutorial for beginners

In this post, you’ll learn about powerful ways to store and manipulate data, and helpful data science tools to begin conducting your own analyses. I will start by introducing you to our friend Python and a field called Data Science in couple words then we will start with the interactive exercises. In the hands-on tutorial section, we will go through the following topics Lists, Functions, and Methods. I can’t wait, let get started!

Python is a general-purpose programming language that is becoming ever more popular for data science. Python also lets you work quickly and integrate systems more effectively. Companies from all around the world are utilizing Python to gather bits of knowledge from their data. The official Python page if you want to learn more.

Data science continues to evolve as one of the most promising and in-demand career paths for skilled professionals. Today, successful data professionals understand that they must advance past the traditional skills of analyzing large amounts of data, data mining, and programming skills.
Almost every interaction we make with tech devices these days includes data — such as our Amazon purchases, Facebook feeds, Netflix recommendations, and even the facial recognition that we use to sign in to our phones.
2020-07-15 02:49:52.501000+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.2075, Raw Interest Score: 1.7925,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1887, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

“A healthy dose of scepticism”: How Cheyne Capital’s Richard Woolf is building success with thematic equity hedge fund

As manager of Cheyne Capital’s Thematic Long/Short Fund, Richard Woolf (pictured) brings what he describes as a “healthy dose of scepticism” to his portfolio management style and trading approach.

His contrarian perspective on markets is underpinned by a broader mix of ideas influenced by technological disruption, societal changes, and economic dislocations arising from the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

2020-07-10 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.0669, Raw Interest Score: 1.4785,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2576, Negative Sentiment 0.3360

Modelling Credit Card Frauds. Is artificially balanced data always…

Credit card frauds are a “still growing” problem in the world. Losses in frauds were estimated in more than US$27 billion in 2018 and are still projected to grow significantly for the next years as this article shows.

With more and more people using credit cards in their daily routine, also increased the interest of criminals in opportunities to make money from that. The development of new technologies puts both criminals and credit card companies in a constant race to improve their systems and techniques.
With that amount of money at stake, Machine Learning is surely not a new word for credit card companies, which have been investing on that long before it was a trend, to create and optimize models of risk and fraud management. This quick video from Visa shows in a friendly way the tip of the iceberg which is a deep and complex system that is worth millions.

In this notebook I will develop a machine learning model using anonymized credit card transaction data, to show what a somewhat simple model can achieve in terms of fraud detection. I will also discuss some relevant points in model selection from a practical perspective.
2020-07-15 00:39:47.247000+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.9436, Raw Interest Score: 1.2231,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2709, Negative Sentiment 0.5172

Aligning Data Architecture and Data Strategy

Peter Aiken disagrees with the popular idea that it’s impossible to put a dollar value on Data Architecture.

“It won’t be the right number, but it will be at least a dollar value on it, and if there’s money involved, people should be paying attention to it.”Aiken is an author, an associate professor of Information Systems, a researcher, and the Founding Director of Data Blueprint. He spoke about Data Architecture and Data Strategy with attendees at the DATAVERSITY® Data Architecture Online Conference.

Data Architecture: Here Whether You Like it or Not
When clients ask Aiken’s company to develop a Data Architecture for their organization, he says they are asking the wrong question. “All organizations have architectures. The question is: do you understand your architecture?” If the existing architecture isn’t documented, he said, then it can’t be understood, and if it’s not understood, it cannot be useful to the organization. “Consequently, people say it is hard to put a dollar value on it.”

2020-07-07 07:35:30+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.8538, Raw Interest Score: 1.3627,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3061, Negative Sentiment 0.2567

BT switches on NB-IoT in UK to underpin country’s “largest” smart water pilot

UK water utility Yorkshire Water is in the final stages of an NB-IoT and AI pilot with BT to connect almost 4,000 acoustic, flow, pressure, and water quality monitors to manage leaks and interruptions in the water network in the north of England.

BT, which owns UK mobile operator EE, has switched on NB-IoT for the first time on the back of the project, which is billed as the “UK’s largest smart water network pilot”. Yorkshire Water said final NB-IoT installations are underway. It said NB-IoT will deliver “significant improvements in data quality and battery life”, enabling it to identify and prevent leaks and network incidents more accurately.

The pilot will integrate data from new and existing sources, and present it in a single management dashboard, which will include a digital twin of the water network in the region. The platform will use artificial intelligence (AI) to cluster data sets, and remove false positives, to accurately inform asset and operational decision making, it said.

2020-07-15 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.8405, Raw Interest Score: 1.7486,
Positive Sentiment: 0.4736, Negative Sentiment 0.1093

How Data Science Is Revolutionising Our Social Visibility

Artificial Intelligence has the potential to revolutionize the social visibility of brands, paving the way for more incisive approaches towards marketing.

The huge potential of AI in social media has led to Markets and Markets forecasting that the industry of deep learning, machine learning and NLP within sales marketing, customer experience management and predictive risk assessment within social platforms will grow to more than $2.1 billion in value by 2023.

The rise of AI has been well documented, but how exactly can it enhance your social media marketing strategies? Let’s take a deeper look into the role that AI is set to play in boosting our exposure on social platforms:

The definition of AI varies depending on who you ask. But the chart above illustrates its value to various organisations. With as much as 84% of businesses believing that AI will aid them in obtaining a competitive advantage over rivals, the potential of the technology is clear.

2020-07-06 23:24:57+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.8377, Raw Interest Score: 1.3043,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2531, Negative Sentiment 0.0487

Google Announces BigQuery Omni To Unify Analytics Experience On Multi-Cloud

Google Cloud kicked off Next OnAir today and announced new solutions across its smart data analytics and security portfolios to help accelerate customers’ ability to digitally transform with cloud computing. Data is one of the most important assets for driving digital transformation but is often siloed across on-premises machines, proprietary systems, or multiple clouds.

The tech giant introduces BigQuery Omni, a multi-cloud analytics solution, that enables customers to bring the power of BigQuery to data stored in Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Azure (coming soon). Today, BigQuery Omni is available in Private Alpha for AWS S3, with Azure support coming soon. BigQuery Omni supports Avro, CSV, JSON, ORC, and Parquet.

Powered by Google Cloud’s Anthos, BigQuery Omni will allow customers to connect directly to their data across Google Cloud, AWS and Azure for analysis without having to move or copy datasets. Through a single user interface, customers will be able to analyze data in the region where it is stored, providing a unified analytics experience.


2020-07-14 12:55:11+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.7311, Raw Interest Score: 1.4282,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2756, Negative Sentiment 0.1002


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The post Alternative Data News. 15, July 2020 appeared first on CloudQuant.

AI & Machine Learning News. 20, July 2020

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AI & Machine Learning News. 20, July 2020

The Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Newsletter by CloudQuant

The Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning News clippings for Quants are provided algorithmically with CloudQuant’s NLP engine which seeks out articles relevant to our community and ranks them by our proprietary interest score. After all, shouldn’t you expect to see the news generated using AI?


TSA Traveler Throughput

TSA Traveler Throughput

I thought I would make one myself this week!

I had to fiddle the ‘Date’ axis in Paint.net as cutecharts does not have very good axis control.

Data Source : https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput
Language : Python Jupyter Labs (CloudQuant) with CuteChart Library (https://github.com/cutecharts/cutecharts.py)
Paint.net : CuteCharts is not great at axis control so had to add the dates manually.
Font : xkcd http://www.xkcd.com/fonts/xkcd-Regular.otf

On 6/26 GAP (Nasdaq:GPS) and Kanye West announced a partnership

Another neat post by redditor pdwp90, one of the QuiverQuant guys.

2020-06-27 Read the full story…

CloudQuant Thoughts : Needless to say, the Robinhood traders went crazy and so did the GPS stock. Its range for the day was $2.63 from an opening price of $12.53. Its end of day volume was 135.5m shares vs the previous day of 10.1m.

UK Uber drivers are taking its algorithm to court – TechCrunch

A group of UK Uber drivers has launched a legal challenge against the company’s subsidiary in the Netherlands. The complaints relate to access to personal data and algorithmic accountability.

Uber drivers and Uber Eats couriers are being invited to join the challenge which targets Uber’s use of profiling and data-fuelled algorithms to manage gig workers in Europe. Platform workers involved in the case are also seeking to exercise a broader suite of data access rights baked into EU data protection law.

It looks like a fascinating test of how far existing legal protections wrap around automated decisions at a time when regional lawmakers are busy drawing up a risk-based framework for regulating applications of artificial intelligence.

2020-07-20 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.3991, Raw Interest Score: 1.0465,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1086, Negative Sentiment 0.3653

CloudQuant Thoughts : A very interesting case and article that wraps up AI, Open Algorithms and Personal Data Ownership!!

These 3 Stocks Have a Killer Advantage

The technology hardware business has a reputation for being very cyclical and economically sensitive. However, the following three stocks — Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (NYSE:TSM), ASML Holdings (NASDAQ:ASML), and NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) — have all absolutely trounced the market this year, despite their hardware-focused businesses and a pandemic-fueled recession.

What’s their secret? Each of these companies plays in some of the best long-term growth markets of 5G and artificial intelligence (AI) computing. While the COVID-19 pandemic is clearly weighing on demand for certain tech products, the 5G and AI races are proving to be sectors in which everyone is still competing, and demand for these leading-edge products isn’t slowing down.
2020-07-20 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.2672, Raw Interest Score: 1.1072,
Positive Sentiment: 0.4861, Negative Sentiment 0.1485

CloudQuant Thoughts : Taiwan Semiconductor have also just announced that they will halt all new Huawei orders after US tightens restrictions.

Stock Analysis in Python

It’s easy to get carried away with the wealth of data and free open-source tools available for data science. After spending a little bit of time with the quandl financial library and the prophet modeling library, I decided to try some simple stock data exploration. Several days and 1000 lines of Python later, I ended up with a complete stock analysis and prediction tool. Although I am not confident (or foolish) enough to use it to invest in individual stocks, I learned a ton of Python in the process and in the spirit of open-source, want to share my results and code so others can benefit.

This article will show how to use Stocker, a Python class-based tool for stock analysis and prediction (the name was originally arbitrary, but I decided after the fact it nicely stands for “stock explorer”). I had tried several times to conquer classes, the foundation of object-oriented programming in Python, but as with most programming topics, they never quite made sense to me when I read the books. It was only when I was deep in a project faced with a problem I had not solved before that the concept finally clicked, showing once again that experience beats theoretical explanations! In addition to an exploration of Stocker, we will touch on some important topics including the basics of a Python class and additive models. For anyone wanting to use Stocker, the complete code can be found on GitHub along with documentation for usage. Stocker was designed to be easy to use (even for those new to Python), and I encourage anyone reading to try it out. Now, let’s take a look at the analysis capabilities of Stocker!

2020-07-13 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.8655, Raw Interest Score: 2.1849,
Positive Sentiment: 0.5042, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

CloudQuant Thoughts : An interesting article, but it would be much easier to just sign up to CloudQuant and use a Python based app that is used by professional traders for live trading as well as backtesting!


Transform 2020 digital conference

See all the presentations here

Female leaders talk ethics, representation, and more at Transform 2020’s Women in AI breakfast

At Transform’s second annual Women in AI Breakfast presented by Capital One and Intel, powerful women from tech companies across the industry gathered to talk about how women, particularly women of color, can take their seats at the table in the technology industry.

“Much has been written about the industry’s pipeline problem, and how we can increase diversity in tech companies,” said Carla Saavedra Kochalski, director of conversational AI and messaging products at Capital One who provided opening remarks. “Many say they don’t hire women or people of color candidates because there aren’t enough qualified candidates. And it’s true — there are fewer of women than men with computer science degrees.”

2020-07-17 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.1932, Raw Interest Score: 1.1959,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1443, Negative Sentiment 0.1649

Uber: Tooling is a critical part of AI development and deployment

Uber employs thousands of machine learning models to inform all aspects of its business, according to chief scientist Zoubin Ghahramani. He revealed this tidbit during a session at VentureBeat’s Transform 2020 summit, during which he spoke about Uber’s use of AI and internet of things (IoT) technologies at the edge and in datacenters around the world.

Contrary to popular belief, autonomous vehicles aren’t the top driver of AI and machine learning at Uber, according to Ghahramani. (Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group has been developing and testing self-driving cars for passenger pickup since 2015.) Rather, the bulk of the company’s algorithms are designed to handle natural language interactions across Uber’s mobile apps and to detect fraud and other issues. In May, for example, Uber rolled out an AI system to verify drivers are wearing masks in accordance with the company’s pandemic health and safety policies.

2020-07-17 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.9115, Raw Interest Score: 1.6062,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1606, Negative Sentiment 0.0964

eBay CTO: AI is now an ‘ecosystem’ for us

While eBay could have used any number of existing AI platforms to enhance its various products, the company instead elected to build its own AI system — dubbed Krylov — in-house and make it open source for anyone to use. That decision appears to be paying off.

The San Jose-based company has made no secret of its AI ambitions over the past four years, hoovering up technical talent via a…
2020-07-17 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.5040, Raw Interest Score: 1.4541,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1818, Negative Sentiment 0.2121

Silicon Valley execs and Pentagon AI chief talk AI at the edge

When considering transformational ways to use computer vision on the edge in devices like robots, drones, cameras, and other devices, Booz Allen Hamilton VP Josh Sullivan advises caution, urging people to take security seriously on what’s become a whole new attack vector.

“For me, deploying an AI model in your IT environment is an entirely new attack vector. I’ve seen a model working c…
2020-07-17 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.4663, Raw Interest Score: 1.5513,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2266, Negative Sentiment 0.2440

Alexa and Google Assistant execs on future trends for AI assistants

Businesses and developers making conversational AI experiences should start with the understanding that you’re going to have to use unsupervised learning to scale, said Prem Natarajan, Amazon head of product and VP of Alexa AI and NLP. He spoke with Barak Turovsky, Google AI director of product for the NLU team, at VentureBeat’s Transform 2020 AI conference today as part of a conversation about future trends for AI assistants.

Natarajan called unsupervised learning for language models an important trend for AI assistants and an essential part of creating conversational AI that works for everyone. “Don’t wait for the unsupervised learning realization to come to you yet again. Start from the understanding that you’re going to have to use unsupervised learning at some level of scale,” he said.
2020-07-16 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.3629, Raw Interest Score: 1.7057,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1365, Negative Sentiment 0.0910

How BMW and Malong used edge AI and machine learning to streamline warehouse and checkout systems

During a panel today at VentureBeat’s Transform 2020 conference, speakers including BMW Group’s Jimmy Nassif, Red Hat’s Jered Floyd, and Malong CEO Matt Scott discussed the challenges and opportunities in AI with respect to edge computing and IoT. While each came from a different perspective — Nassif from robotics, Floyd from retail — all three were in agreement that AI has the potential to accelerate existing work while enabling entirely new capabilities.

BMW produces a car every 56 seconds, Nassif says. Millions of parts flow into the automaker’s factories from over 4,500 suppliers involving 203,000 unique parts numbers, which translates to about 100 end-customer options. (99% of orders are completely unique.) As BMW’s car sales doubled over the past decade to 2.5 million in 2019, this created a logistics dilemma — one that was solved in part by Nvidia’s Isaac, Jetson AGX Xavier, and DGX platforms. Nassif says BMW is tapping them to develop five navigation and manipulation robots that transport materials around warehouses and organize individual parts.
2020-07-17 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.5573, Raw Interest Score: 1.0150,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3310, Negative Sentiment 0.2648

Intel VP: AI-aided defect detection is a killer app for industrial IoT

Computer vision has become one of AI’s most promising applications, combining ever-improving cameras with faster and smarter automated object recognition. During today’s Transform 2020 digital conference, Intel VP Brian McCarson spoke with VentureBeat CEO Matt Marshall about computer vision’s role in the growing industrial internet of things (IIoT) market. The conversation highlighted a particularly compelling emergent use case: hugely improved product defect detection that promises to improve the reliability of everything from computer screens to cars.

Manufacturers seeking to eliminate product defects haven’t historically lacked staff or defect screening expertise, McCarson said — they have been held back by limitations of the human eye. In modern consumer products, defects can be microscopic or near-microscopic, such as bad screen pixels or surface issues in aluminum car transmission components. While people are great at detecting motion and changes in patterns, they can’t always spot tiny details like these, so as computer vision evolved, Intel saw an opportunity.
2020-07-17 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.1864, Raw Interest Score: 1.2367,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3975, Negative Sentiment 0.3092


Deutsche’s Corporate Bank Launches First Client-Facing Bot

Deutsche Bank announced the onboarding of a new digital employee, named Blue Bot ‘Yi’ within its Corporate Bank division in China.

Undertaking a client-facing role, the new employee is responsible for handling financial reports including real-time customized transaction reports and cash pooling reports, and for processing direct client enquiries, which has already been successfully done for two of Deutsche Bank’s clients in China.

2020-07-20 09:47:10+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.7368, Raw Interest Score: 2.6327,
Positive Sentiment: 0.4827, Negative Sentiment 0.0439

Goldman and Mastercard invest in Bond

Goldman Sachs and Mastercard have joined a $32 million Series A funding round for Bond, a US startup connecting digital brands to banking partners.

Coatue led the round, with participation from Canaan, B Capital, XYZ Ventures and angels including former Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack.

Bond is building a fintech platform designed to act as a growth engine for “digital brands” that want to provide access to capital to their customers, and banking…
2020-07-20 00:01:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.5659, Raw Interest Score: 2.5487,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2999, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

Want To Learn Keras? Here Are 8 Free Resources

A deep learning library in Python, Keras is an API designed to minimise the number of user actions required for common use cases. It is one of the most used deep learning frameworks among developers and finds a way to popularity because of its ease to run new experiments, is fast and empowers to explore a lot of ideas. Built on top of TensorFlow 2.0, Keras is an industry-strength framework that can scale to large clusters of GPUs or an entire TPU…
2020-07-19 12:30:12+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.3779, Raw Interest Score: 2.7708,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2729, Negative Sentiment 0.0630

Kepler AutoML Targets Next-Gen Business Analysts

As more companies roll out digital infrastructure, they are ingesting greater volumes of data that can be used by business analysts to gauge customer intent and boost transactions. Complexity and lack of data scientists have made that transition harder for mid-size firms looking to monetize “dark” data.

Machine learning vendors are therefore automating key aspects of data science workflows that would allow domain experts to customize pipelines and algorithms based on specific data types. AutoML approaches are promoted as boosting the quantity and quality of machine learning models produced on, say, a monthly basis.
2020-07-15 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.0369, Raw Interest Score: 2.1429,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1323, Negative Sentiment 0.1323

Greater Acceptance of AI Has Resulted in Lower Satisfaction Levels

The COVID-19 crisis has accelerated the use of digital technologies and has increased the application of artificial intelligence (AI) into all aspects of the consumer experience. As the pandemic continues to impact the way consumers interact with businesses and with each other, the demand for contactless or non-touch interfaces increases. This has forced organizations to find new ways to integrate advanced intelligence into the entire customer journey.

2020-07-20 00:05:24+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.8926, Raw Interest Score: 1.3756,
Positive Sentiment: 0.4486, Negative Sentiment 0.1346

Webinar: The bottom line – simplifying digital evolution in financial services

90% of IT leaders in financial services believe their firm will need to invest in digital projects just to survive the rapidly changing market. Today, digitalisation is not only an important strategic development, it’s a fight for survival.

While this provides a new direction for the industry, the reality is that IT leaders and developers in financial services face myriad challenges in the post-digital world – from outdated infrastructure that n…
2020-07-17 14:37:12+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.6323, Raw Interest Score: 1.5579,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2967, Negative Sentiment 0.2967

Databases vs. Hadoop vs. Cloud Storage

How can an organization thrive in the 2020s, a changing and confusing time with significant Data Management demands and platform options such as data warehouses, Hadoop, and the cloud? Trying to save money by bandaging and using the same old Data Architecture ends up pushing data uphill, making it harder to use. Rethinking data usage, storage, and computation is a necessary step to get data back under control and in the best technical environments to move business and data strategies forward.

William McKnight, President of the Data Strategy firm the McKnight Consulting Group, offered his advice about the best data platforms and architectures in his presentation, Databases vs. Hadoop vs. Cloud Storage at the DATAVERSITY® Enterprise Analytics Online Conference. McKnight explained that today’s Data Management needs call for leveling up to technology better suited to obtaining all data fast and effectively.
2020-07-15 07:35:56+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.3355, Raw Interest Score: 1.9197,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3200, Negative Sentiment 0.0640

On Whether AI Can Form ‘Intent’ Including In The Case Of Autonomous Cars

Is AI more akin to humans and therefore able to form intent, or is AI more similar to a toaster and unable to have any substance of intent? Lest you think this is an entirely abstract point and not worthy of real-world attention, consider the legal ramifications of whether AI can form intent and whether this is noteworthy or not.

In our approach to jurisprudence, we give a tremendous amount of importance to intent, sometimes referred to as scienter in legal circles, and criminal law makes use of intent to ascertain the nature of the crime that can be assigned and the penalty that might ride with the crime undertaken. A toaster that goes awry will hopefully be a mildly adverse consequence (I can choose to eat the burnt toast or toss it into the trash), while if an AI system that can drive a car goes awry, the result can be catastrophic.

2020-07-16 12:30:17+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.3202, Raw Interest Score: 1.2711,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0871, Negative Sentiment 0.2460

Crazy Idea No. 46: Making Big Data Beneficial for All

Now here’s a crazy idea: What if the data we all generate on a day to day basis benefited us, instead of the companies that collect it? It may sound nuts at first, but some AI experts see a future in which people hold full control over their data and smart digital assistants infused with AI work to protect and monetize a person’s individual’s data for his or her benefit.

This vision of a more equitable big data world is one that’s held by Sri Ambati. The H2O.ai founder and CEO sees a day not too far in the future in which people are empowered to control their own data as an asset, and even to profit directly from their data, which is something that only a handful of individuals are currently able to do.

“Today, whether we want it or not, our data is stored on giant social networks,” Ambati tells Datanami. “Our clicks are essentially stolen away and leave a fingerprint of who we are digitally. In that sense, we don’t have ownership. We’ve just kind of given carte blanche ownership to the companies with the largest Internet presence, if you will.”

2020-07-17 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.2036, Raw Interest Score: 1.3643,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3234, Negative Sentiment 0.0606

Best Research Papers From ACL 2020

ACL is the leading conference in the field of natural language processing (NLP), covering a broad spectrum of research areas in computational linguistics. Due to the COVID-19 risks, ACL 2020 took place 100% virtually, similar to other big academic conferences of this year.

However, as always, it was the best place to learn about the latest NLP research trends and cutting-edge research papers in language modeling, conversational AI, machine translation, and other NLP research topics.

Following the long-standing tradition, the best paper awards were announced during the last day of the main conference. In this article, we’ve summarized the key research ideas of the papers that received the Best Paper Award and Honorable Mentions at ACL 2020.

  • Beyond Accuracy: Behavioral Testing of NLP Models with CheckList
  • Don’t Stop Pretraining: Adapt Language Models to Domains and Tasks
  • Tangled up in BLEU: Reevaluating the Evaluation of Automatic Machine Translation Evaluation Metrics

2020-07-14 15:20:50+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.0933, Raw Interest Score: 1.8101,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3222, Negative Sentiment 0.2605

AI will augment, not destroy humanity

I’ve spent years talking about Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Bearing in mind that we always talk about AI in the context of the Turing Test – a test that Alan Turing created back in 1950 – it’s not surprising. That test is that we will have achieved the true opportunities for technological development when a machine can fool a panel of experts that it is human. We have not passed that test yet, no matter what you’ve read, but we will. In fact, AI is developing at such a pace that it may be sooner than many expected. We are on the brink of General AI – where machines can multi-task – and I expect we will achieve Super AI – where machines are more intelligent than humans – to be achieved before 2040.

This last category of AI, Super AI, was forecast to be achieved sometime in the 2040s a while ago, and then we enter Skynet, the scary Terminator world of Cyberdine. Actually, no we don’t. That vision of the Terminator is where machines become the enemies of humans. It’s a bit like Ex Machina and other science fiction visions of the future. The scary future where humans make machines that are more intelligent than us and then the machines take over. It’s great science fiction, but it’s not realistic. It’s not realistic as, when you think about it, every movement of technological progress in our past has helped humanity, not destroyed it.
2020-07-15 06:28:08+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.0495, Raw Interest Score: 1.6119,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3635, Negative Sentiment 0.4583

An economic system with growing gaps and an upside-down model

The interaction of Humans and Machines is becoming more core to my focus. Finance is an integral part of our socio-economic fabric and Artificial intelligence (in a very broad sense) is shaping an increasing part of Fintech innovation.

In this post I am inspired from some of the points we raised in the great conversation in June which was part of the Thinkathon of Fintech.TV spearheaded by Dr. Jane Thomason. (Watch Future Economic System and the Role of the Democratic State) with Emily Landis-Walker, Lord (Chris) Holmes MBE, Lawrence Wintermeyer, Lore…
2020-07-14 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.7783, Raw Interest Score: 1.0636,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2704, Negative Sentiment 0.2524

DL Is Not Computationally Expensive By Accident, But By Design

Researchers from MIT recently collaborated with the University of Brasilia and Yonsei University to estimate the computational limits of deep learning (DL). They stated, “The computational needs of deep learning scale so rapidly that they will quickly become burdensome again.”

The researchers analysed 1,058 research papers from the arXiv pre-print repository and other benchmark references in order to understand how the performance of deep learning techniques depends on the computational power of several important application areas.
2020-07-20 09:30:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.7509, Raw Interest Score: 1.7834,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3082, Negative Sentiment 0.1761

To Centralize or Not to Centralize Your Data–That Is the Question

Should you strive to centralize your data, or leave it scattered about? It seems like it should be a simple question, but it’s actually a tough one to answer, particularly because it has so many ramifications for how data systems are architected, particularly with the rise of cloud data lakes.

In the old days, data was a relatively scarce commodity, and so it made sense to invest the time and money to centralize it. Companies paid millions of dollars to ensure their data warehouses were filled with the cleanest and freshest data possible, for historical reporting and analytics use cases.
2020-07-14 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.7451, Raw Interest Score: 1.5156,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2747, Negative Sentiment 0.1418

Mosaic Smart Data Launches Stand-Alone Data Normalisation

Mosaic Smart Data (Mosaic), the real-time capital markets data analytics company, is launching its data normalisation process as a new stand-alone service. Mosaic will employ its best-in-class enrichment technology and flexible data model to process firms’ transaction data, allowing institutions to analyse their activity in a given asset class at both the micro and macro levels, and in real-time, for the first time.

Mosaic Smart Data has combined its deep domain expertise in financial products, data science and software engineering to develop a service that cleanses, normalises and enriches streaming data in real-time for all major FICC asset classes including cash and derivatives. The service can be provided in the cloud or deployed on premises behind the client’s firewall. The resulting data is stored and made available via an API allowing data to be accessed remotely, making digital and distributed working feasible.
2020-07-20 09:15:19+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.6087, Raw Interest Score: 1.6614,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2110, Negative Sentiment 0.3428

Building an Open Cloud Data Lake Future

The explosion of data and the need for business agility to leverage that data for competitive advantage are driving a massive surge of data lake innovation. We’ve moved past first-generation on-premises Hadoop-based data lakes to focus on building next-generation data platforms in the cloud. Organizations of all sizes recognize that cloud data lakes, with separation of compute and data, give them the flexibility and freedom they need both today and tomorrow.

A key advantage of cloud data lakes is their open architecture, which minimizes the risk of vendor lock-in as well as the risk of being locked out of future industry innovation. As the cloud data lake evolves to support a wide range of production analytical and data processing use cases, it’s important to ensure that it maintains this open architecture in the future. A rich ecosystem of open source projects, technology vendors and cloud providers has emerged to make that a reality.
2020-07-20 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.5925, Raw Interest Score: 1.3843,
Positive Sentiment: 0.4027, Negative Sentiment 0.0503

With Modernization Comes Data Challenges

Modernization is driving many of today’s enterprise data strategies—and cloud stands out as the primary vehicle for attaining this modernization. However, many enterprises are struggling with data quality issues, as well as integrating cloud-based and on-premise data.

That’s the word from a recent survey of 1,840 data executives and professionals, released by Progress (“The 2020 Data Connectivity Survey Report”). The 2019 survey collected input from respondents across more than 13 distinct industries worldwide to identify patterns and insights for ongoing data management strategies.
2020-07-13 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.5817, Raw Interest Score: 1.5987,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2108, Negative Sentiment 0.2108

5 Typical Mindset Mistakes of Aspiring Data Scientists

I’ve worked with over 500 aspiring data scientists in the last few years and I’ve seen some typical mindset mistakes they tend to make. In this article, I’d like to share five of these.

2020-07-20 13:08:59.981000+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.5408, Raw Interest Score: 1.4256,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3075, Negative Sentiment 0.3494

Machine Learning challenges in legacy organisations

Fans of machine learning suggest it as a possible solution for everything. From customer service to finding tumours, any industry in which big data can be easily accessed, analysed and organised is ripe for bringing about new and compelling use cases. This is especially attractive for legacy organisations, such as financial services firms, looking to gain an advantage.

These businesses are usually well embedded in their markets, fighting with competitors over small margins and looking for new ways to innovate and drive efficiency. They also have an abundance of historical and contemporary data to exploit. One asset any start-up lacks is owned historical data, which gives legacy firms an edge in the competitive landscape. The promise of machine learning is therefore particularly seductive – feed in your extensive customer and business insights along with your desired outcome and let algorithms work out the best path forward.
2020-07-14 15:15:03 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.5202, Raw Interest Score: 1.6064,
Positive Sentiment: 0.4431, Negative Sentiment 0.2216

Standard Chartered signs quantum computing research deal with USRA

Standard Chartered has signed a quantum computing research agreement with the Universities Space Research Association (USRA). Standard Chartered has worked with USRA on quantum research since 2017

Standard Chartered’s Dr. Alexei Kondratyev, global head of data science and innovation, leads the collaboration.

Kondratyev and USRA had success in investigating the quantum annealing approach to computational problems in portfolio optimisation. The bank says that there are a number of promising use cases for quantum computing. These include machine learning and discriminative models with uses in credit scoring and generating trading signals.

2020-07-16 10:30:22+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.4746, Raw Interest Score: 1.5494,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3541, Negative Sentiment 0.1328

IT Industry Embraces Data-Led Approach As New Buzzword Emerges

Feel like you’re hearing the word “data-driven” more than ever? Here’s what to know about the IT industry’s latest data-led approach.

Over recent years the term ‘data-driven’ has become somewhat of a buzzword. For more than 10 years, it has been widely accepted that all businesses, including those who are already technology-centric, should embrace advancements in digital technology. It was believed that the best way to achieve this was to become increasingly data-driven. Today, an ever-expanding body of evidence suggests that the future of business, which includes those in the IT sector, is not data-driven, but rather data-led. This shift is partially due to the fact that, despite their best intentions, many businesses were battling to become as ‘data-driven’ as they believed they should be. A new buzzword has emerged and data-led decision making is impacting all corners of the IT industry.

A data-led IT firm can utilize artificial intelligence (AI) to create one-on-one conversations with its clients.
2020-07-19 23:27:32+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.4704, Raw Interest Score: 1.2038,
Positive Sentiment: 0.6125, Negative Sentiment 0.0845

The LIBOR transition: why financial organisations need to work smarter and not harder

For the last 50 years global banks have based their short-term interest rates on a market reference rate known as the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR). It’s estimated that $350 trillion dollars in financial derivatives and other financial products are tied to LIBOR via contracts. This critical information is stored in scanned images of lengthy and unstructured documents within bank records.

Following multiple criminal settlements dating back to 2012 after the discovery of “rate fixing” known as the LIBOR scandal the rate is being withdrawn at the end of 2021. This leaves banks around the world with a problem – any contracts that persist beyond December next year that rely on the existence of LIBOR are not legal/valid. Now the challenge is to rewrite millions of contracts requiring a substantial legal spend and administrative effort to maintain regulatory compliance.

More technically savvy organisations are taking a very different approach. They are looking to the very latest advances in AI and Machine Learning to solve the problem far more quickly, efficiently and with lower costs. Cognitive Machine Reading (CMR) provides the core technology at the heart of a complete end-to end-solution constructed by partners, EvoluteIQ.
2020-07-16 23:01:20+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.3275, Raw Interest Score: 1.2283,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1271, Negative Sentiment 0.2541

Turn Your Data into Revenue with Azure Data Analytics

Fully unlocking the value of your data and streaming analytics on Azure to deliver meaningful insights means developing a plan for managing, optimizing, securing, and scaling data to meet the unique requirements of your business.

In this webinar, Jeremy Frye and Dan King, Navisite’s data analytics experts, will provide a roadmap to delivering Azure data analytics quickly and efficiently within your organization.

Join our webinar as we:

  • Outline the state of typical environments relative to data analytics capabilities
  • Review the underlying Azure tools and technologies that can support your strategy
  • Share a practical roadmap for leveraging Azure enhancements and advanced analytics
  • Explain how Azure Data Analytics Services can support your business

2020-07-16 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.2676, Raw Interest Score: 1.3605,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2268, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

Gartner reveals Top Supply Chain Technology Trends in 2020

AI in the supply chain consists of a toolbox of technology options that help companies understand complex content, engage in a natural dialogue with people, enhance human performance, and take over routine tasks.

“AI technology is present in a lot of already existing solutions, but its capabilities evolve on a constant basis,” Mr. Titze added. “Currently, the technology primarily helps supply chain leaders solve long-standing challenges around data silos and governance. Its capabilities allow for more visibility and integration across networks of stakeholders that were previously remote or disparate.”

2020-07-20 09:39:58+10:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.2214, Raw Interest Score: 1.4617,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1949, Negative Sentiment 0.0585

Gaussian Process Regression on Molecules in GPflow

This post demonstrates how to train a Gaussian Process (GP) to predict molecular properties using the GPflow library by creating a custom-defined Tanimoto kernel to operate on Morgan fingerprints. Please visit my GitHub repo for the Jupyter notebook!

In this example, we’ll be trying to predict the experimentally-determined electronic transition wavelengths of molecular photoswitches, a class of molecule that undergoes a reversible transformation between its E and Z isomers upon irradiation by light.
2020-07-19 22:56:52.816000+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.1996, Raw Interest Score: 0.9893,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1254, Negative Sentiment 0.1811

Democratizing Data: Do Your People Have the Access They Need?

Organizations have invested heavily in engineering resources to centralize data across the enterprise, often creating sophisticated environments with robust data pipelines. But even as they have successfully gathered and corralled data this way, many still struggle with effectively sharing and orchestrating the data across the enterprise.

That’s a pressing concern because, to successfully experiment, explore and activate data for the entire organization, IT, analytics and marketing teams must all have the data access they need to succeed. This notion isn’t new, but for many businesses, despite their commitment to democratizing data, that access—leveraging each group’s strengths—is insufficient or absent.
2020-07-13 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.1806, Raw Interest Score: 1.1229,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3417, Negative Sentiment 0.2116


This news clip post is produced algorithmically based upon CloudQuant’s list of sites and focus items we find interesting. We used natural language processing (NLP) to determine an interest score, and to calculate the sentiment of the linked article using the Loughran and McDonald Sentiment Word Lists.

If you would like to add your blog or website to our search crawler, please email customer_success@cloudquant.com. We welcome all contributors.

This news clip and any CloudQuant comment is for information and illustrative purposes only. It is not, and should not be regarded as investment advice or as a recommendation regarding a course of action. This information is provided with the understanding that CloudQuant is not acting in a fiduciary or advisory capacity under any contract with you, or any applicable law or regulation. You are responsible to make your own independent decision with respect to any course of action based on the content of this post.

The post AI & Machine Learning News. 20, July 2020 appeared first on CloudQuant.

Alternative Data News. 22, July 2020

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Alternative Data News. 22, July 2020

The AltDataNewsletter by CloudQuant

Finding sources and uses for alternative data can be difficult. At CloudQuant we regularly read and search the internet for new sources of data that can be used in our mission to find alpha signals and build quantitative trading strategies. We recognize that we are technology and data junkies so we wrote our own crawler that specifically seeks out web pages, posts, and news articles that give us a snapshot of what is going on in the world of Alt Data. The following is a collection of articles that we think you will find interesting from the past week.


Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) Section

ESG is taking over this Alternative Data Blog Post, it seems like all anyone is talking about is ESG. Don’t forget that we at CloudQuant also have Alternative Data-Sets available including a splendid ESG dataset. Head over to our Data Catalog page for more information.

BlackRock’s Fink Says U.S. Proposal to Limit ESG Investing Will Only Boost Interest

Applying environmental, social and governance (ESG) principles to investing is consistent with a manager’s fiduciary responsibility, and a U.S. Department of Labor proposal will “accelerate” interest in ESG investing, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said in an interview after the world’s largest money manager reported second-quarter earnings.

Fink was speaking about a proposed rule by the Labor Department that would discourage retirement plans from making investments based on ESG considerations. Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia has said such investments were often made to achieve a social or political end.

BlackRock predicts there will be $1.2 trillion in global sustainable ETF assets by 2030 and is expanding its sustainable funds lineup.

2020-07-17 00:00:00 Read the full story…

BlackRock Has ‘Big Ambitions’ In Fixed Income ETFs

BlackRock had record quarterly inflows of $57bn (€50bn) in fixed income exchange-traded funds which the fund manager said validated its big ambitions for the asset class going forward.

Today BlackRock reported that in the second quarter of this year it had $100bn of total net inflows, representing 10% annualized organic base fee growth.

Larry Fink, chairman and chief executive, said in a statement: “iShares fixed income ETFs and BlackRock’s act…
2020-07-17 17:13:31+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.7853, Raw Interest Score: 1.8634,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1242, Negative Sentiment 0.0311

BNP Paribas taps into ESG surge with new global sustainability-focused hedge fund launch

BNP Paribas Asset Management has launched a long/short global equity hedge fund which will invest in companies grappling with looming environmental challenges, as interest in ESG (environmental, social and governance) themed hedge fund strategies continues to soar.

BNP’s new Environmental Absolute Return Thematic (EARTH) Fund will trade energy, materials, agriculture and industrials stocks in both developed and emerging markets with market caps of more than USD1 billion.

It will take long punts in innovative companies that are addressing an assortment of environmental challenges – such as carbon emissions, …
2020-07-15 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 5.5337, Raw Interest Score: 2.5607,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3283, Negative Sentiment 0.3283

“An excellent tool”: New study by AIMA and Simmons & Simmons probes ESG short-selling ethics

Short selling is essential in enabling investors to hedge against ESG risks, and has bolstered market transparency by uncovering corporate wrongdoing and environmental negligence, according to a new study by the Alternative Investment Management Association and global law firm Simmons & Simmons.

The paper – ‘Short Selling and Responsible Investing’ – probed how the booming trend of ESG (environmental, social, and governance) investing interacts with short selling, the often-criticised practice that is central to most traditional hedge fund strategies.

The study found that responsible investing does not necessarily require long holding periods, and suggested shorting can be “an excellent tool” for achieving two key goals for responsible investors: mitigating undesired ESG risks, such as climate damage, and creating an economic impact by influencing the nature of capital flows through ‘active’ investing.

ESG is now seen as a key factor in many hedge funds’ portfolio-building processes, as boardrooms grapple with ongoing challenges such as climate change and improving corporate governance.
2020-07-22 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.3016, Raw Interest Score: 1.9334,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3272, Negative Sentiment 0.5354

HSBC Launches ESG Portfolio Reporting Service

HSBC launched a reporting service that provides asset owners and managers with independent measurement of how focused their listed asset investments are on environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) issues.

The new service will allow asset owners, such as insurance companies, pension funds and sovereign wealth funds, and the asset managers that invest their money, to keep track of the ESG ratings of their large holdings and help them meet the increasing demand for greater transparency and more insight in this area.
2020-07-22 10:39:39+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.9851, Raw Interest Score: 1.8242,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3317, Negative Sentiment 0.0000


TSA Traveler Throughput

TSA Traveler Throughput

I know, I already put this on the AI and Machine Learning blog post earlier this week but I made this one myself and it is more appropriate for the Alternative Data Blog!

Data Source : https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput
Language : Python Jupyter Labs (CloudQuant) with CuteChart Library (https://github.com/cutecharts/cutecharts.py)
Paint.net : CuteCharts is not great at axis control so had to add the dates manually.
Font : xkcd http://www.xkcd.com/fonts/xkcd-Regular.otf

How easy was this, grab the data from TSA and run this little python script…

pip install cutecharts
import cutecharts.charts as ctc
import pandas as pd
from cutecharts.globals import use_jupyter_lab; use_jupyter_lab()
df = pd.read_csv('TSA.csv', parse_dates=['date'],infer_datetime_format=True) # csv of data from www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput
df = df.iloc[::-1] # Flip!
df['Date'] = df.apply(lambda row: str(row.date)[0:-5], axis = 1)
chart = ctc.Line('TSA Checkpoint Travel Numbers',width='1000px',height='800px')
chart.set_options(y_tick_count = 10, labels=list(df['Date']), x_label='This Year', y_label='Last Year')
chart.add_series('This Year', list(df['thisyr']))
chart.add_series('Last Year', list(df['lastyr']))
chart.load_javascript() # allows notebooks to display cutecharts
chart.render_notebook() # change this to chart.render() if not using a jupyter notebook.

Farmer’s share of a chocolate bar – Vizzu.COM

Also Coffee

Read the full story…

CloudQuant Thoughts : Finding, processing data and finding interesting outcomes is only one part of our jobs. If you cannot present your data in a beautiful and clear manner then all the work that went before is for nought. Vizzu.com is a particularly nice service for animating data.

Hands-On Guide To Using YFinance API In Python

YFinance came as a support to those who became helpless after the closure of Yahoo Finance historical data API, as many programs that relied on it stopped working. YFinance was created to help the programs and users who were relying on the Yahoo Finance API. It solves the problem by allowing users to download data using python and it has some great features also which makes it favourable to use for stock data analysis.

Finance not only downloads the Stock Price data it also allows us to download all the financial data of a Company since its listing in the stock market. It’s easy to use and is blazingly fast. This library is pretty famous for Financial Data Analysis.

In this article, we will explore YFinance and learn what we can do. The stock we will be working on here is Pfizer, a Pharmaceutical Company listed in NASDAQ. YFinance is highly recommended for Financial Reporting as it provides you with each and every detail you require about the company and its stock. Through this article, we will cover the following points:-

  • Download and Analyze Stock Data using YFinance
  • Finding various Information on Downloaded Data
  • Visualize the Stock Data

2020-07-22 10:30:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.6887, Raw Interest Score: 1.4654,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0505, Negative Sentiment 0.0842

CloudQuant Thoughts : yfinance is a really nice library, you should try it out.

Academic Project Used Marketing Data to Monitor Russian Military Sites

Commercially available location data is increasingly used for sensitive surveillance by researchers, government agencies. In 2019, a group of Americans was observing the cellphone signals coming from military sites across Eastern Europe.

At one of the locations, the Nyonoksa Missile Test Site in northern Russia, the group identified 48 mobile devices present on Aug. 9, one day after a mysterious radiation spike there generated international headlines and widespread speculation that a Russian missile test had gone wrong.

2020-07-18 08:00:00 Read the full story…

CloudQuant Thoughts : This is only interesting because it is the military. We are all leaking huge amounts of data all day every day. And before we get too cocky at this second Russian military phone gaffe (first was “we are not in Ukraine” yet their soldiers were tweeting GPS tagged photos saying they were!), our US military have previously leaked the entire shape of their training facilities from soldiers fitbits and soldiers in Afghanistan have leaked their locations by carrying around their mobile phones and facebooking/tweeting.

Democratizing Data: Do Your People Have the Access They Need?

Organizations have invested heavily in engineering resources to centralize data across the enterprise, often creating sophisticated environments with robust data pipelines. But even as they have successfully gathered and corralled data this way, many still struggle with effectively sharing and orchestrating the data across the enterprise.

That’s a pressing concern because, to successfully experiment, explore and activate data for the entire organization, IT, analytics and marketing teams must all have the data access they need to succeed. This notion isn’t new, but for many businesses, despite their commitment to democratizing data, that access—leveraging each group’s strengths—is insufficient or absent.

2020-07-13 Read the full story…

How Does Data Management Drive Efficiency for Organizations?

Data-driven analytics continue to deliver sophisticated solutions for manufacturing efficiency, early disease detection, and smart capabilities building in workplaces. Thus, industry operators and leaders continue raise their expectations and demands from data technologies with every passing year. Looking Behind the Curtain: What Really Drives Value from Data reveals some insights that global managers can learn from.

Brent Gleeson of Forbes, who regularly contributes about organizational excellence, warns that in spite of having the best infrastructure, technological support, and military intelligence, the United States could not stop many attacks against them. This important observation signals the need for speedy, data-enabled, decision-making at a time of crisis.
2020-07-21 07:35:02+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.3911, Raw Interest Score: 2.5047,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3354, Negative Sentiment 0.2620

8 Best Open-Source Tools for Data Mining One Must Know

One of the popular terms in machine learning techniques is data mining. It is the process of extracting hidden or previously unknown and potentially useful information from the large sets of data. The outcome can be for analysing and achieving meaningful insights for the development of an organisation.

In this article, we list down the eight best open-source data mining tools one must know. (The list is in alphabetical order)

  1. Apache Mahout
  2. DataMelt
  3. ELKI
  4. Knime
  5. Orange
  6. Rattle
  7. scikit-learn
  8. Weka

2020-07-21 12:30:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.9135, Raw Interest Score: 2.2195,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2065, Negative Sentiment 0.0516

Kerala Govt (India) Launches AI Course For Graduates

The Additional Skill Acquisition Programme (ASAP) of the Higher Education Department in Kerala has come up with a new artificial intelligence and machine learning course for graduates. It has been introduced with the aim of improving the employability of graduates in the state and equipping them with skills to meet industry requirements.

The course aims to help students in the areas of gaming, speech recognition, language detection and robotics. The course designed is 776-hours long and is aimed at creating skilled professionals who can fill the demand in areas of data science, AI and ML.

The program called the AI Machine Learning Developer Programme for Graduates will help gain practical knowledge and prepare for new-age jobs such as AI/ML scientist, data scientists, ML engineer, robotics scientists, business intelligence developers, AI research scientists and more.
2020-07-21 05:53:51+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.6415, Raw Interest Score: 2.2088,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1606, Negative Sentiment 0.1205

Databases vs. Hadoop vs. Cloud Storage

How can an organization thrive in the 2020s, a changing and confusing time with significant Data Management demands and platform options such as data warehouses, Hadoop, and the cloud? Trying to save money by bandaging and using the same old Data Architecture ends up pushing data uphill, making it harder to use. Rethinking data usage, storage, and computation is a necessary step to get data back under control and in the best technical environments to move business and data strategies forward.

William McKnight, President of the Data Strategy firm the McKnight Consulting Group, offered his advice about the best data platforms and architectures in his presentation, Databases vs. Hadoop vs. Cloud Storage at the DATAVERSITY® Enterprise Analytics Online Conference. McKnight explained that today’s Data Management needs call for leveling up to technology better suited to obtaining all data fast and effectively. He said: “Getting all data under control is the thing that I say frequently. It means making data manageable, well-performing, available to our user base, believable, advantageous for the company to become data-driven.”
2020-07-15 07:35:56+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.3355, Raw Interest Score: 1.9197,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3200, Negative Sentiment 0.0640

Will Value Investing Continue To Work?

Why Value Investing Works? We cannot be sure that value investing will beat the market. What has worked in the past is not predictive of what will work in the future. However, if we dig deeper into why value investing has worked for a long time, we are likely to get insights into what may or may not continue to work in the future.

First, what do we mean when we say “value investing?” Historically, most people using this term have referred to the practice of purchasing stocks at a price that is low relative to some fundamental measure such as earnings or book value. The term was used in contrast to “growth investing” which typically involved purchasing stocks at relatively high ratios of earnings or book value based on the expectation that the company’s future growth potential would compensate for that starting disadvantage.
2020-07-17 20:36:37+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.9705, Raw Interest Score: 1.7638,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2682, Negative Sentiment 0.3198

We Need A Lot More Than Data: How Startups Can Harness AI

You open your phone, take an eye exam, and find out your risk of Alzheimer’s 3-5 years ahead even though you have no symptoms.

A doctor takes data (CT scans, genomic tests, blood labs, demographics etc) as inputs, the software is trained specifically on the patient’s biomarkers, and gives a recommendation what drugs would work best.

Veterinarians find out what drugs approved for humans can be repurposed to crush a dog’s specific cancer. Eventually the data can be used for humans since cancer is a shared malady.

These are not pipe dreams but examples of real companies — Neurotrack, Onc.ai, and FidoCure (full disclosure: invested through Tau Ventures) respectively. Personalized medicine, which has been science fiction for generations, is less fiction and more science these days. In many ways AI is the army and startups the generals of this revolution. This post is not about the promises and pitfalls of AI but really where the world is today, highlighting invariably the opportunities.
2020-07-19 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.8973, Raw Interest Score: 1.2926,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2452, Negative Sentiment 0.0669

Systemic Racism is Strengthened by Data Science.

Why The Data Tells You To Be Racist.

With the current political climate, I took it upon myself to dive into data science and discover ways in which the field is compromised by racism and discrimination. What I found is nothing short of shocking.

Through this article, I hope to highlight ways in which machine learning and data science are being used to explicitly penalize underprivileged societies across the world. We’ll go through a plethora of examples as well as ways in which we — as people — can counteract these recurring biases.

Without the right precautions in place, machine learning — the backbone technology that drives decision making in a wide array of sectors — explicitly castigates underprivileged communities. Left alone, algorithms will count a black defendant’s race as a strike against them; yet, several data scientists in the community are supporting calls to turn off the safeguards and unleash the hells of computerized prejudice.
2020-07-21 23:19:52.574000+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.8141, Raw Interest Score: 1.3816,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0987, Negative Sentiment 0.6908

Statistical Measures of Central Tendency

In statistics, measures of central tendency are a set of “middle” values representative of the data points. Central tendency describes the distribution of data focusing on the central location around which all other data are clustered. It is the opposite of dispersion that measures how far the observations are scattered with respect to the central value.

As we will see below, central tendency is an elementary statistical concept, yet a widely used one. Among the measures of central tendency mean, median and mode are most frequently cited and used. Below we will see why they are important in the field of data science and analytics.
2020-07-21 23:20:36.362000+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.7969, Raw Interest Score: 1.4403,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1172, Negative Sentiment 0.1507

Is Tesla’s green investment bubble about to burst?

Tesla’s nosebleed-inducing rise in share price shows no sign of slowing down. From lows of $185 last May, the company’s shares reached new highs of $1,643 this week ahead of its crucial second-quarter earnings on Wednesday.

Long doubted and dismissed, it has now posted three consecutive quarters of profit, including one that took it through a global pandemic. It is worth $250bn, the most valuable car company in the world, and it attracts devoted…
2020-07-22 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.7022, Raw Interest Score: 1.3436,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2495, Negative Sentiment 0.2687

Mosaic Smart Data Launches Stand-Alone Data Normalisation

Mosaic Smart Data (Mosaic), the real-time capital markets data analytics company, is launching its data normalisation process as a new stand-alone service. Mosaic will employ its best-in-class enrichment technology and flexible data model to process firms’ transaction data, allowing institutions to analyse their activity in a given asset class at both the micro and macro levels, and in real-time, for the first time.

Mosaic Smart Data has combined its deep domain expertise in financial products, data science and software engineering to develop a service that cleanses, normalises and enriches streaming data in real-time for all major FICC asset classes including cash and derivatives. The service can be provided in the cloud or deployed on premises behind the client’s firewall. The resulting data is stored and made available via an API allowing data to be accessed remotely, making digital and distributed working feasible.

2020-07-20 09:15:19+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.6087, Raw Interest Score: 1.6614,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2110, Negative Sentiment 0.3428

Machine Learning challenges in legacy organisations

Fans of machine learning suggest it as a possible solution for everything. From customer service to finding tumours, any industry in which big data can be easily accessed, analysed and organised is ripe for bringing about new and compelling use cases. This is especially attractive for legacy organisations, such as financial services firms, looking to gain an advantage.

These businesses are usually well embedded in their markets, fighting with competitors over small margins and looking for new ways to innovate and drive efficiency. They also have an abundance of historical and contemporary data to exploit. One asset any start-up lacks is owned historical data, which gives legacy firms an edge in the competitive landscape. The promise of machine learning is therefore particularly seductive – feed in your extensive customer and business insights along with your desired outcome and let algorithms work out the best path forward.
2020-07-14 15:15:03 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.5202, Raw Interest Score: 1.6064,
Positive Sentiment: 0.4431, Negative Sentiment 0.2216


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AI & Machine Learning News. 27, July 2020

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AI & Machine Learning News. 27, July 2020

The Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Newsletter by CloudQuant

The Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning News clippings for Quants are provided algorithmically with CloudQuant’s NLP engine which seeks out articles relevant to our community and ranks them by our proprietary interest score. After all, shouldn’t you expect to see the news generated using AI?


Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt: Let’s Start a School for A.I.

If you’re interested in becoming a technologist for the federal government, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt wants to teach you how to code.

According to OneZero, Schmidt has partnered up with former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert O. Work to create a school for folks who want to become government coders. This U.S. Digital Service Academy would operate like a regular school, offering coursework and degree tracks, and focus on cutting-edge technology subjects such as cybersecurity and artificial intelligence (A.I.).

As OneZero points out, the federal government is very interested in technologists who can craft new innovations in A.I. “We are engaged in an epic race for A.I. supremacy,” the publication quotes Rick Perry, secretary of the Department of Energy, as telling an NSCAI conference in 2019. “As I speak, China and Russia are striving to overtake us. Neither of these nations shares our values or our freedoms.”

2020-07-23 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 1.8424, Raw Interest Score: 1.4056,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2743, Negative Sentiment 0.0686

CloudQuant Thoughts : The US needs to move fast to stay up with China on AI. There are few restrictions on the use of data or technology in China so we are fairly hamstrung from the get go.

Tech execs urge Washington to accelerate AI adoption for national security

Tech company CEOs may be heading to Washington, D.C. next week to take part in antitrust hearings in Congress, but this week high-profile executives from companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google gave the president, Pentagon, and Congress advice on how the United States can maintain AI supremacy over other nations. Today, the National Security Commission on AI released a set of 35 recommendations, ranging from the creation of an accredited university for training AI talent to speeding up Pentagon applications of AI in an age of algorithmic warfare.

The National Security Council on AI (NSCAI) was created by Congress in 2018 to advise national AI strategy as it relates to defense, research investments, and strategic planning. Commissioners include AWS CEO Andy Jassy, Google Cloud chief AI scientist Andrew Moore, and Microsoft chief scientist Eric Horvitz. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt acts as chair of the group. Coming amid concerns over China’s rise as an economic and military power and AI’s increasing use in businesses and governments, the group’s recommendations may have a long-lasting impact on the United States government and the world.

2020-07-22 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.8346, Raw Interest Score: 1.4833,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1181, Negative Sentiment 0.2494

CloudQuant Thoughts : Whilst the tech CEOs sudden concern about America’s AI supremacy seems more of a “look over here” magic act distraction than genuine concern, it IS a MAJOR problem and it DOES need to be addressed. Whereas a lot of Washington’s concerns regarding the tech companies is based around “perceived” political bias, techs power does need to be addressed. I for one would tend to agree that the threat from Chinese AI dominance is greater than the threat from big Tech’s monopolies.

What You Need To Know About NVIDIA And University of Florida’s $70 million AI Partnership

The University of Florida and NVIDIA this week launched a collaborative initiative under which the two rolled out a plan to create the world’s fastest AI supercomputer in academia, providing 700 petaflops of AI performance.

The ambitious project is going to be worth $70 million, which includes a donation of $25 million from University of Florida alumnus and NVIDIA co-founder Chris Malachowsky, and $25 million in hardware, software, training and services from NVIDIA. The University of Florida will invest an extra $20 million for an AI-centric supercomputing and data centre.

“We’ve built a replicable, powerful model of public-private collaboration for everyone’s benefit,” stated Malachowsky, in an online event featuring leaders from both the UF and NVIDIA. A distinguished alumnus of UF, Malachowsky has served in a number of leadership roles at NVIDIA right from the beginning. He has not only been a leader at NVIDIA but also owns close to 40 patents, and worked extensively on integrated-circuit design and methodology.

2020-07-27 06:36:24+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.1959, Raw Interest Score: 1.4752,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2984, Negative Sentiment 0.0497

CloudQuant Thoughts : I am generally not one for corporate sponsorship in schools (high school food should not be sponsored by corporate organizations), but I do feel that Nvidia can help us to move US education to the forefront of AI and ML.

Study proves AI robots can boost social skills in children on autism spectrum

Artificial intelligence (AI) robots are changing the world we live in by helping us to not only expand our physical abilities but augment our behavioral patterns and boost our social skills as well. At present, approximately 1 in 54 children born in the USA is on the autism spectrum. Many of these children face a range of social, communication, and emotional challenges on a daily basis. Although traditional speech and behavior therapy can have a significant impact on a child’s development, these interventions are often extremely time-intensive and expensive. It is also very difficult to effectively apply a one-size-fits-all approach as each child experiences a unique set of challenges. Thankfully, the development of new AI in-home robotic companions is helping to supplement traditional therapies, enhancing a child’s development considerably.

A team of researchers based at the University of Southern California has successfully created a socially-assistive robot known as “Kiwi” to use in a study. The robot is able to teach math and social skills to children on the autism spectrum. By making use of video and audio data as well as eye contact and verbal dialogue, Kiwi can determine whether a child is immersed in a training activity or not. When it is detected that the child is not engaging in the activity, the robot will react accordingly and try to re-engage them for an extended period of time. During the initial testing phase of the robot, Kiwi managed to accurately predict a child’s level of engagement 90% of the time.
2020-07-21 11:47:21+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 1.8971, Raw Interest Score: 1.2577,
Positive Sentiment: 0.4509, Negative Sentiment 0.2373

CloudQuant Thoughts : If AI can help to engage and draw out children who struggle with communication that will be a huge positive for society and for those youngsters.

Facebook details the AI simulation tool it built to find bugs and vulnerabilities

Facebook today detailed Web-Enabled Simulation (WES), an approach to building large-scale simulations of complex social networks. As previously reported, WES leverages AI techniques to train bots to simulate people’s behaviors on social media, which Facebook says it hopes to use to uncover bugs and vulnerabilities.

In person and online, people act and interact with one another in ways that can be challenging for traditional algorithms to model, according to Facebook. For example, people’s behavior evolves and adapts over time and is distinct from one geography to the next, making it difficult to anticipate the ways a person or community might respond to changes in their environments.

2020-07-23 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.4510, Raw Interest Score: 1.1605,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0981, Negative Sentiment 0.2942

CloudQuant Thoughts : The idea that Facebook has built a walled off version of Facebook and set bots free to attempt to scam and target other users is fascinating from the white paper “WES systems are distinct because they turn lots of bots loose on something very close to an actual social media platform, not a mockup mimicking its functions.”


Bias in AI/ML

Four steps for drafting an ethical data practices blueprint – TechCrunch

In 2019, UnitedHealthcare’s health-services arm, Optum, rolled out a machine learning algorithm to 50 healthcare organizations. With the aid of the software, doctors and nurses were able to monitor patients with diabetes, heart disease and other chronic ailments, as well as help them manage their prescriptions and arrange doctor visits.

Optum is now under investigation after research revealed that the algorithm (allegedly) recommends paying more attention to white patients than to sicker Black patients.

Today’s data and analytics leaders are charged with creating value with data. Given their skill set and purview, they are also in the organizationally unique position to be responsible for spearheading ethical data practices. Lacking an operationalizable, scalable and sustainable data ethics framework raises the risk of bad business practices, violations of stakeholder trust, damage to a brand’s reputation, regulatory investigation and lawsuits.

Here are four key practices that chief data officers/scientists and chief analytics officers (CDAOs) should employ when creating their own ethical data and business practice framework.
2020-07-24 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.8346, Raw Interest Score: 1.4046,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3137, Negative Sentiment 0.2727

Researchers find evidence of bias in facial expression data sets

Researchers claim the data sets often used to train AI systems to detect expressions like happiness, anger, and surprise are biased against certain demographic groups. In a preprint study published on Arxiv.org, coauthors affiliated with the University of Cambridge and Middle East Technical University find evidence of skew in two open source corpora: Real-world Affective Faces Database (RAF-DB) and CelebA.

Machine learning algorithms become biased in part because they’re provided training samples that optimize their objectives toward majority groups. Unless explicitly modified, they perform worse for minority groups — i.e., people represented by fewer samples. In domains like facial expression classification, it’s difficult to compensate for skew because the training sets rarely contain information about attributes like race, gender, and age. But even those that do provide attributes are typically unevenly distributed.

2020-07-24 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.2425, Raw Interest Score: 0.9615,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0247, Negative Sentiment 0.1479

Leaders from Google, Adobe, and more talk benefits and bias at the Conversational AI Summit

“I’m extremely excited about the future of the intersection between conversational AI and the multitude of platforms that are being developed around these capabilities,” said Linden Hillebrand, VP Global Customer Success and Support at Cloudera during his opening remarks at the Transform 2020 Conversational AI Summit.

Over the course of the day tech giants from Adobe and Capital One to Google, Amazon, and Twitter spoke about how they’re using conversational AI to solve problems for their businesses in new and innovative ways.

The technology is being leveraged for both text chatbots and the NLP-powered voice assistants that are increasingly able to understand intent and offer a seamless, personalized user experience, helping automate the majority of customer interactions. But in most sessions, panelists emphasized that implementing these AI technologies also means tackling some of the bigger picture issues, including fairness, explainability, and elimination of bias.

Here’s a look at some of the top panels of the day, featuring leaders from Capital One, Google Assistant, and more.

2020-07-21 Read the full story…


RBC, Red Hat, Nvidia Deal

RBC moves AI unit to new private cloud platform

Royal Bank of Canada has moved applications under development at its artificial intelligence research unit Borealis AI to a high-performance private cloud infrastructure with support from Red Hat and Nvidia.

The bank says the new private cloud – which utilises Red Hat OpenShift and Nvidia’s DGX AI computing systems – has the ability to run thousands of simulations and analyse millions of data points in a fraction of the time than it could before.
2020-07-24 00:01:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.7552, Raw Interest Score: 1.6028,
Positive Sentiment: 0.5575, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

Royal Bank of Canada and Borealis AI announce new AI private cloud platform, developed with Red Hat and NVIDIA

RBC’s AI private cloud platform is the first-of-its-kind in Canada to deliver intelligent software applications and boost operational efficiency Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) and its AI research institute Borealis AI have partnered with Red Hat and NVIDIA to develop a new AI computing platform designed to transform the customer banking experience and help keep pace with rapid technology changes and evolving customer expectations.

As AI models become more efficient and accurate, so do the computational complexities associated with them. RBC and Borealis AI set out to build an in-house AI infrastructure that would allow transformative intelligent applications to be brought to market faster and deliver an enhanced experience for clients. Red Hat OpenShift and NVIDIA’s DGX AI computing systems power this private cloud system that delivers intelligent software applications and boosts operational efficiency for RBC and its customers.

2020-07-24 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.6095, Raw Interest Score: 1.5379,
Positive Sentiment: 0.4732, Negative Sentiment 0.0526

RBC taps Red Hat and Nvidia for new AI private cloud

Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) and its AI research institute Borealis have partnered with Red Hat and Nvidia. RBC says its trading execution and insights have already improved.

The partnership aims to create an in-house artificial intelligence infrastructure. The new build will allow “transformative intelligent applications” to reach the market faster. The bank has deployed Red Hat OpenShift and Nvidia’s DGX AI to power this new cloud platform. RBC claims its new cloud has the ability to run “thousands of simulations and analyse millions of data points.”

2020-07-27 09:30:15+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.0936, Raw Interest Score: 1.5926,
Positive Sentiment: 0.4191, Negative Sentiment 0.1676


How American Express Leverages ML To Achieve Lowest Card Fraud Rates In The World

The American Express Company, also known as Amex, is an multinational banking and financial services corporation headquartered in New York City. The company is a financial giant with 114 million cards in force, 64,000 employees worldwide and $1.24 trillion worldwide billed business.

For Amex, there are billions of transactions going through its system every month. With such a volume of card transactions, it is not just the dollar amount which is high, the network also generates massive amounts of data, including trillions of transactional data combinations which need to be analysed in almost real time

In such a situation, advanced techniques in machine learning and deep learning are essential, and the company uses them extensively in detecting and preventing frauds. But how does Amex do that on such a large scale?

2020-07-17 Read the full story…

10 Indian Startups That Are Leading The AI Race: 2020

The number of AI startups in India has increased tremendously over the years. Apart from being adopted in major industries, Artificial intelligence has become a way of doing business in other niche areas such as farming or even security. To recognise the unconventional startups in the AI space, Analytics India Magazine comes with a list of 10 such exceptional startups that are leading the AI race every year. In this year’s list, we have covered startups that are not more than 3 to 4 years old and have headquarters in India. Most of these startups are funded externally and are working hard to bring about exceptional transformation in the Indian tech ecosystem.

  • Ajna AI
  • Agricx
  • Expertrons
  • Innefu
  • Intello Labs
  • RayReach
  • Salesken AI
  • Spyne
  • Tericsoft
  • Vernacular AI

2020-07-22 Read the full story…

AI and Machine Learning Gain Momentum with Algo Trading & ATS Amid Volatility

An increasing number of capital markets firms are adopting machine learning and other artificial intelligence techniques to build algorithmic trading systems that learn from data without relying on rules-based systems.

With the hiring of data scientists, advances in cloud computing, and access to open source frameworks for training machine learning models, AI is transforming the trading desk. Already the largest banks have rolled out self-learning algorithms for equities trading.

Machine learning is a natural next step of algorithmic trading because machine learning identifies patterns and behaviors in historical data and learns from it,” said Robert Hegarty, managing partner, Hegarty Group, a consultancy focusing on financial services, technology, data, and AI/machine learning.

While traditional algorithms are created by programmers and quant strategists, these algorithms based on if/then rules do not learn on their own; they need to be updated. “With machine learning, you turn it over to the machine to learn the best trading patterns and update the algorithms automatically, with no human intervention,” said Hegarty. “That’s the big differentiator.”

2020-07-21 11:47:21+00:00 Read the full story…

Machine Learning challenges in legacy organisations

Fans of machine learning suggest it as a possible solution for everything. From customer service to finding tumours, any industry in which big data can be easily accessed, analysed and organised is ripe for bringing about new and compelling use cases. This is especially attractive for legacy organisations, such as financial services firms, looking to gain an advantage.

These businesses are usually well embedded in their markets, fighting with competitors over small margins and looking for new ways to innovate and drive efficiency. They also have an abundance of historical and contemporary data to exploit. One asset any start-up lacks is owned historical data, which gives legacy firms an edge in the competitive landscape. The promise of machine learning is therefore particularly seductive – feed in your extensive customer and business insights along with your desired outcome and let algorithms work out the best path forward.

However, established businesses such as these are also the ones that can face the biggest challenges in driving value through machine learning due to technical debt, poor infrastructure and low-quality data, leading to higher costs of deployment as well as higher maintenance costs.

2020-07-14  Read the full story…

MSCI announces strategic alliance with Microsoft to accelerate innovation in the global investment industry

MSCI Inc. (NYSE: MSCI) and Microsoft Corp. have formed a strategic alliance to accelerate innovation among the global investment industry. By bringing together the power of Microsoft’s cloud and AI technologies with MSCI’s global reach through its portfolio of investment decision support tools, the companies will unlock new innovations for the industry and enhance MSCI’s client experience among the world’s most sophisticated investors, including asset managers, asset owners, hedge funds and banks.

MSCI logoInitially, the companies will focus on migrating MSCI’s existing products, data and services onto Azure as its preferred cloud platform in stages, starting with its Index and Analytics solutions followed by its Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) products and ratings; Real Estate data and solutions; and MSCI’s risk analytics platform Beon. By modernizing MSCI’s data and analytics services and infrastructure, the companies will be able to deliver new capabilities which will help investors more swiftly and efficiently manage data and understand the drivers of risk and performance.

In addition, MSCI and Microsoft will explore collaboration opportunities to drive climate risk and ESG solutions, leveraging Microsoft’s Azure and Power Platform and MSCI’s ESG and climate solutions capabilities. This future collaboration, in line with both organizations’ commitment to sustainability, is intended to help investors better understand and interpret the business risks and opportunities that climate change brings.

2020-07-23 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.1789, Raw Interest Score: 1.6583,
Positive Sentiment: 0.7005, Negative Sentiment 0.1144

Fine Tune Bert For Text Classification

With the advancement in deep learning, neural network architectures like recurrent neural networks (RNN and LSTM) and convolutional neural networks (CNN) have shown a decent improvement in performance in solving several Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks like text classification, language modeling, machine translation, etc.

However, this performance of deep learning models in NLP pales in comparison to the performance of deep learning in Computer Vision. One of the main reasons for this slow progress could be the lack of large labeled text datasets. Most of the labeled text datasets are not big enough to train deep neural networks because these networks have a huge number of parameters and training such networks on small datasets will cause overfitting.

Another quite important reason for NLP lagging behind computer vision was the lack of transfer learning in NLP. Transfer learning has been instrumental in the success of deep learning in computer vision. This happened due to the availability of huge labeled datasets like Imagenet on which deep CNN based models were trained and later they were used as pre-trained models for a wide range of computer vision tasks. That was not the case with NLP until 2018 when the transformer model was introduced by Google. Ever since the transfer learning in NLP is helping in solving many tasks with state of the art performance.

2020-07-20 18:30:39+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.6484, Raw Interest Score: 1.6565,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1232, Negative Sentiment 0.3017

Greater Acceptance of AI Translates to Lower Satisfaction Levels

The use of artificial intelligence to improve the customer experience has increased significantly as a result of COVID-19. However, while trust and acceptance of AI overall has increased, there has been a drop in satisfaction due to increased consumer expectations, particularly for later-stage interactions where a more humanized experience is preferred.

The COVID-19 crisis has accelerated the use of digital technologies and has increased the application of artificial intelligence (AI) into all aspects of the consumer experience. As the pandemic continues to impact the way consumers interact with financial institutions and with each other, the demand for contactless or non-touch interfaces, such as chatbots, increases. This has forced organizations to find new ways to integrate advanced intelligence into the entire customer journey.

According to an Economist Intelligence Unit survey from March and April of 2020, 77% of bank executives believed the the ability to extract value from AI will sort the winners from the losers in banking. AI platforms were the second highest priority area of technology investment, behind only cybersecurity, according to the survey. The importance of AI adoption is only likely to increase in the post-pandemic era.

Unfortunately, the increased focus on the potential and use of AI has not been reflected in higher levels of satisfaction. Instead, satisfaction levels with AI have actually decreased since 2018.

2020-07-20 00:05:24+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.8699, Raw Interest Score: 1.4336,
Positive Sentiment: 0.4357, Negative Sentiment 0.1265

BigData Lake for Financial Services – Need to stress on Platform Governance

As Banks and Insurance firms have already embraced Data Lakes for their Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning capabilities, it is important to look for continuous Return on Investment on the platform.

If a Data Lake is not well maintained, it can turn into a swamp while finding usable data can confuse the data consumers. Most challenges can be solved by including an active platform governance of the Data Lake.

2020-07-26 15:14:01 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.3002, Raw Interest Score: 2.4514,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0845, Negative Sentiment 0.3381

Maintaining the Human Element in Machine Learning – Gigaom

BEGINS: WEDNESDAY, JUL 29, 202012:00 PM CDT
Join us for this free 1-hour webinar from GigaOm Research. The webinar features GigaOm analyst Andrew Brust and special guest Nicolas Omont from Dataiku, a leader across the entire AI lifecycle.

In this 1-hour webinar, you will discover:

  • The types of ML models where the human element is most critical
  • How non-empirical factors figure into the model fairness equation
  • The respective roles of data scientists and ML engineers in the ML monitoring process
    Automated and human components of model explainability

Machine learning (ML) and ML operations platforms are becoming increasingly popular and sophisticated. That’s a good thing, as it transforms AI initiatives from science projects to rigorous engineering efforts. But with such platforms comes the temptation of automation, scripting the whole ML process, not just optimizing models, but monitoring their drift in accuracy and retraining them. While some automation is good, humans play a critical role.

Elements of fairness are contextual and involve tradeoffs. Changes in data may require retraining or restructuring a model’s features, depending on circumstances and current events. All of this requires human judgment, carefully integrated with automated management and algorithmic learning. Humans have to be part of the workflow, included in the feedback loop, and involved in the process.

2020-07-29 12:00:24-05:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.5104, Raw Interest Score: 1.9011,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2852, Negative Sentiment 0.1901

The Largest CAD Dataset Released With 15M Designs

In an attempt to automate industrial designing, researchers from Princeton University and Columbia University introduced a large dataset of 15 million two-dimensional real-world computer-aided designs — SketchGraphs. Along with that to facilitate research in ML-aided design, they also launched an open-source data processing pipeline.

Introduced during the International Conference on Machine Learning, SketchGraphs is aimed to train the artificial intelligence machine with this large dataset, in order to expertise it to assist humans in creating CAD models. In a recent paper, researchers revealed that each of the CAD sketches is represented with a geometric constraint graph and the understanding of the line and shape sequence in which the design was initially created. This will enable the predictions of what is going to be designed next.

There have been many CAD data sets available by voxel or mesh, which have allowed users to work on sampling realistic 3D shapes for creating CAD models. However, these models are usually not modifiable in parametric design settings and thus not preferred for engineering workflows. SketchGraphs, on the other hand, approaches parametric modelling instead of focusing on 3D shape modelling.

2020-07-25 07:30:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.3669, Raw Interest Score: 1.3736,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1282, Negative Sentiment 0.0183

Guided Labeling Episode 2: Label Density

The Guided Labeling series of blog posts began by looking at when labeling is needed — i.e., in the field of machine learning when most algorithms and models require huge amounts of data with quite a few specific requirements. These large masses of data need to be labeled to make them usable. Data that is structured and labeled properly can then be used to train and deploy models.

In the first episode of our Guided Labeling series, An Introduction to Active Learning, we looked at the human-in-the-loop cycle of active learning. In that cycle, the system starts by picking examples it deems most valuable for learning, and the human labels them. Based on these initially labeled pieces of data, a first model is trained. With this trained model, we score all the rows for which we still have missing labels and then start active learning sampling. This is about selecting or re-ranking what the human-in-the-loop should be labeling next to best improve the model.

There are different active learning sampling strategies, and in today’s blog post, we want to look at the label density technique.

2020-07-24 07:35:35+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.3176, Raw Interest Score: 1.4785,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0786, Negative Sentiment 0.0315

Trucking Industry in Early Stage of Adopting AI to Help Move Freight

AI is making inroads in the trucking industry, where it is used to optimize loads and drive predictive maintenance, thereby lowering costs.

Coyote Logistics had developed a network of 35,000 contract carriers and a range of software applications designed to help deliver short-term trucking services to shipping companies. Customer UPS liked it so much they bought the company, paying $1.8 billion in 2015.

Today the UPS Supply Chain Solutions unit is considered a leader by Gartner in what it calls the Third-Party Logistics market. In recent news, Coyote released an update to its Dynamic Route Optimization program that aims to streamline operations and reduce uncertainty for carriers by planning consistent loads on optimized routes.

It’s helping solve problems for truckers. “Like all carriers, inconsistent load volume, rates and schedule gaps are significant sources of stress that are exacerbated by market volatility,” stated Eric Lewis, VP of Operations at Ed Lewis Trucking, in a recent Coyote press release. “Dynamic Route Optimization from Coyote has helped us remove uncertainty from our weekly operations by strategically stringing shipments together so we can keep our fleet full and moving, while providing our drivers the amount of miles per week they were promised.”

2020-07-23 21:30:02+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.1027, Raw Interest Score: 1.3734,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2289, Negative Sentiment 0.2146

AI Weekly: The promise and shortcomings of OpenAI’s GPT-3

Facebook continues to face fallout from bias and discrimination issues, with multiple news outlets reporting that Instagram’s content moderation algorithm was 50% more likely to flag and disable the accounts of Black users than White users. Facebook and Instagram are now creating teams to examine how algorithms impact the experiences of Black and Latinx users, as well as users from other specific groups.

Also this week: Executives from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft gave leaders in Washington more than 30 recommendations to help the U.S. maintain an edge over other nations in AI. Recommendations include recruiting AI practitioners for a reserve corps that would do part-time government work and creating an accredited academy for the U.S. government to train AI talent.

But arguably the biggest story this week was the beta release of GPT-3, a language model capable of a great range of tasks, like summarization, text generation to write articles, and translation. Tests made especially to analyze GPT-3 found it can also complete many other tasks, like unscrambling words and using words it has only seen defined once in sentences.

2020-07-24 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.0983, Raw Interest Score: 1.4411,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1658, Negative Sentiment 0.2168

Safehub taps building-mounted motion sensors and AI to detect earthquakes

Safehub, whose platform enables businesses to monitor their buildings for signs of earthquakes, today closed a $5 million seed round. The company says it will use the capital to accelerate deployment to Fortune 500 customers as it expands its engineering team.

A recent FEMA study pegged U.S. losses from earthquakes at $4.4 billion per year. (Each year, there are on average about 15 earthquakes with a magnitude of 7 or greater, strong enough to cause damage in the billions and significant loss of life.) In spite of the risk, more than 60% of U.S. small businesses don’t have a formal emergency-response plan and fail to back up their sensitive data offsite.

2020-07-23 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.5695, Raw Interest Score: 1.3154,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0897, Negative Sentiment 0.5680

The Journey to Effective Data Management in High Performance Computing (HPC)

Imagine a simple interface for data search across an organization’s local and cloud storage. The search would return relevant data types, their location, and automatically extracted metadata. From there, advanced analytics could be performed in a serverless environment, and scale seamlessly to the cloud as needed. Results files would be presented in an interactive, configurable, and shareable format. Large raw data files could be transferred to collaborators in an efficient, parallel format over high speed, low latency connections.

While this visionary solution sounds like an incredible way to advance research and take advantage of diverse datasets, such a solution does not exist. When it comes to managing petascale datasets, most organizations don’t know where to start.

2020-07-23 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.5614, Raw Interest Score: 1.3930,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2097, Negative Sentiment 0.1648

A researcher created a ‘Weird A.I. Yancovic’ algorithm that generates parodies of existing songs, and now the record industry is accusing him of copyright violations

A researcher created a machine learning model that creates new lyrics to existing songs, much in the same way that parody singer Weird Al Yankovic does.

But the algorithm, dubbed “Weird A.I. Yancovic,” has landed creator Mark Riedl in hot water with the record industry, according to a Vice report.

Twitter took down one of his videos, which featured the instrumental section of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” after a coalition of major record compan…
2020-07-24 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.4825, Raw Interest Score: 0.9239,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0637, Negative Sentiment 0.1274

IT Industry Embraces Data-Led Approach As New Buzzword Emerges

Feel like you’re hearing the word “data-driven” more than ever? Here’s what to know about the IT industry’s latest data-led approach.

A data-led IT firm can utilize artificial intelligence (AI) to create one-on-one conversations with its clients. This can effectively be achieved by making use of both first- and third-party data in order to gain a greater understanding of the client’s unique needs. In IT, complex algorithms can assist IT consultants with infrastructure planning and design for specific projects. High-level data-led insights such as these make it possible to make pertinent decisions without any significant human intervention. Many business owners strive towards being able to set goals and plan at the same time. Data-led IT solutions can make it considerably easier for business entities to achieve just this.
2020-07-19 23:27:32+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.4704, Raw Interest Score: 1.2038,
Positive Sentiment: 0.6125, Negative Sentiment 0.0845

Quantexa raises $64.7 million for AI platform that extracts insights from big data

Big data analytics startup Quantexa today closed a $64.7 million financing round at a valuation “well north of a quarter billion dollars,” which a spokesperson told VentureBeat will be put toward accelerating the company’s product roadmap and expansion in Europe, North America, and Asia Pacific regions. It comes after a year in which Quantexa landed customers like SBC, Standard Chartered Bank, and OFX and expanded the availability of its platform to more than 70 countries.

Enterprises have multiple data buckets to wrangle — upwards of 93% say they’re storing data in more than one place — and some of those buckets inevitably become underused, partially used, or forgotten. A Forrester survey found that between 60% and 73% of all data within corporations is never analyzed for insights or larger trends, while a separate Veritas report found that 52% of information stored by organizations is of unknown value. The opportunity cost of this unused data is substantial, with the Veritas report pegging it as a cumulative $3.3 trillion by the year 2020 if the current trend holds.

020-07-23 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.2853, Raw Interest Score: 1.4710,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1313, Negative Sentiment 0.2364

Power Plant Energy Output Prediction: Weekend Hackathon #13

Weekend hackathons are fun, aren’t they! In our last weekend hackathon, we introduced a new and unique problem statement using UCI open dataset. But, we were big-time disappointed as some of the participants ended up probing the leaderboard. However, we decided to host an open UCI dataset competition again this weekend. So In this weekend hackathon, we have trained a machine learning model to perturb the target column instead of manually adding the noise. Yes, you heard it right, In this hackathon, we are challenging all the MachineHackers to capture our leaderboard and prove their mettle by competing against MachineHack’s AI.

2020-07-24 11:55:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.2585, Raw Interest Score: 0.9819,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0298, Negative Sentiment 0.2975

StuffThatWorks raises $9 million to build an AI-powered, crowdsourced medical knowledge platform

StuffThatWorks, a startup leveraging AI, crowdsourcing, and machine learning to match patients with treatments, today closed a $9 million seed round. CEO Yael Elish says the proceeds will be used to accelerate go-to-market efforts as the company’s platform experiences pandemic-driven growth.

In response to the worsening global health crisis, patients and providers have sought out digital health and medical solutions to problems induced by COVID-19. In regions under lockdown, remote visits are now one of the key ways for patients to connect with specialists. Moreover, data and health platforms that pair providers with support data analytics have become critical for information-sharing, research, and analysis.

StuffThatWorks was cofounded by Elish, a founding member and former head of product at Google-owned Waze; CTO Ron Held, previously on the Israel Defense Force’s intelligence team; and chief data scientist Yossi Synett. Elish spent years helping a family member cope with a medical condition that also took a toll on her family’s life. After months of online research, he discovered a medical treatment that was more effective than what she’d been prescribed.

This experience inspired Elish to launch StuffThatWorks, a portal that taps AI to enable patients to share personal treatments and discover options that work best for them.

2020-07-23 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.0029, Raw Interest Score: 1.0566,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2026, Negative Sentiment 0.2461

RetrieveGAN AI tool combines scene fragments to create new images

Researchers at Google, the University of California at Merced, and Yonsei University developed an AI system — RetrieveGAN — that takes scene descriptions and learns to select compatible patches from other images to create entirely new images. They claim it could be beneficial for certain kinds of media and image editing, particularly in domains where artists combine two or more images to capture each’s most appealing elements.

AI and machine learning hold incredible promise for image editing, if emerging research is any indication. Engineers at Nvidia recently demoed a system — GauGAN — that creates convincingly lifelike landscape photos from whole cloth. Microsoft scientists proposed a framework capable of producing images and storyboards from natural language captions. And last June, the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab launched a tool — GAN Paint Stu…
2020-07-22 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 1.9369, Raw Interest Score: 1.0244,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1938, Negative Sentiment 0.1107

What Is Scalability and How Do You Build for It? 6 Engineers Weigh In.

When you think of scalability, think of Black Friday.

At least that’s what Alex Bugosh, a principal software engineer at Jellyvision, does.

“The classic problem of scalability is that of an e-commerce system,” Bugosh said. “It needs to be able to handle the traffic of Black Friday while being economical enough to run the rest of the year.”

An e-commerce system that lags or experiences downtime can impact sales and user experience dramatically,…
2020-07-21 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 1.8267, Raw Interest Score: 1.2819,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3128, Negative Sentiment 0.2024

Executive Interview: Perry Lea, Book Author, Entrepreneur, Director of Architecture: Microsoft

Perry Lea is a 30-year veteran technologist. He spent over 20 years at Hewlett-Packard as a chief architect and distinguished technologist of the LaserJet business. He then led a team at Micron as a technologist and strategic director, working on emerging compute using in-memory processing for machine learning and computer vision. Perry’s leadership extended to Cradlepoint, where he pivoted the company into 5G and the Internet of Things (IoT). Soon afterwards, he co-founded Rumble, an industry leader in edge/IoT products. He was also a principal architect for Microsoft’s Xbox and xCloud and today is a director of architecture for Microsoft. Perry has degrees in computer science and computer engineering, and an EngrD in electrical engineering from Columbia University. He is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and a senior member/ distinguished speaker of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). He holds 50 patents, with 30 pending.
2020-07-23 21:30:09+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 1.8259, Raw Interest Score: 1.1920,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1587, Negative Sentiment 0.1098


This news clip post is produced algorithmically based upon CloudQuant’s list of sites and focus items we find interesting. We used natural language processing (NLP) to determine an interest score, and to calculate the sentiment of the linked article using the Loughran and McDonald Sentiment Word Lists.

If you would like to add your blog or website to our search crawler, please email customer_success@cloudquant.com. We welcome all contributors.

This news clip and any CloudQuant comment is for information and illustrative purposes only. It is not, and should not be regarded as investment advice or as a recommendation regarding a course of action. This information is provided with the understanding that CloudQuant is not acting in a fiduciary or advisory capacity under any contract with you, or any applicable law or regulation. You are responsible to make your own independent decision with respect to any course of action based on the content of this post.

The post AI & Machine Learning News. 27, July 2020 appeared first on CloudQuant.

Alternative Data News. 29, July 2020

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Alternative Data News. 29, July 2020

The AltDataNewsletter by CloudQuant

Finding sources and uses for alternative data can be difficult. At CloudQuant we regularly read and search the internet for new sources of data that can be used in our mission to find alpha signals and build quantitative trading strategies. We recognize that we are technology and data junkies so we wrote our own crawler that specifically seeks out web pages, posts, and news articles that give us a snapshot of what is going on in the world of Alt Data. The following is a collection of articles that we think you will find interesting from the past week.


The Top Trending Google Searches in Every US State Throughout the 2010s

The map shows the highest trending Google searches for every state. Trending searches from 2010 to 2020 were taken from Google’s annual Year in Search summary.

Google Trends provides weekly relative search interest for every search term, along with the interest by state. Using these two datasets for each term, we’re able to calculate the relative search interest for every state for a particular week. Linear interpolation was used to calculate the daily search interest.

As the 2020 Year In Search summary is not yet available, topics were sourced from Google’s Trending Searches page. These topics were supplemented with archived copies of the same page through the Wayback Machine.

Google Trends provides weekly relative search interest for every search term, along with the interest by state. Using these two datasets for each term, we’re able to calculate the relative search interest for every state for a particular week. Linear interpolation was used to calculate the daily search interest.

Tools: Excel, Python and Blender 2.8
Sources: Trending topics from 2010 to 2019 were taken from Google’s annual Year in Search summary.

Read the full story…

CloudQuant Thoughts : It is fascinating to watch trends spread across the US and sometimes fail to break in particular states where they have their own thing going on. An this is just beautiful data science, it is truly wonderful when someone with two quite different interests (Data Science and Blender) manages to bring them together to makes something that few others could create.

Percent of Adults Who Sleep <7 Hours in US per County

Source: https://www.countyhealthrankings.org/app/wyoming/2020/measure/factors/143/datasource

Tools: python for data processing; vega + js for the plot

Created for https://city-data.com

2020-07-27 Read the full story…

CloudQuant Thoughts : A good nights sleep is thought to be one of the most important things for human health and happiness. Who knows how useful alternative data like this could be?

Hedge funds are overhauling the way they use alt data to find winning stocks as the crisis forces even quants to think big-picture like macro investors

Alternative data is an increasingly important part of hedge funds’ investment processes, but the pandemic has changed the way firms use the info.

Traditionally, quants and long-term stock-pickers use data to compare companies against each other, to find a winner in a certain field.

The virus, however, has the entire world waiting on a restart — and it has turned just about every money manager into a macro investor, constantly thinking about the..

2020-07-25 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.2853, Raw Interest Score: 1.6977,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1078, Negative Sentiment 0.0539

CloudQuant Thoughts : Going from trying to track exactly what people are buying in stores to nothing more than which stores are they going into is no rocket science. A large number of physical retail stores are going to go bankrupt before this Corona Virus has passed.

Essentia Analytics Data Shows Where Alpha Is Lost And Found

Research by Essentia Analytics, which provides behavioral data analytics and consulting for professional investors, identified how managers could have saved an average of 94 basis points of performance per year by selling stocks earlier.

Clare Flynn Levy, founder and chief executive of Essentia Analytics, told Markets Media: “Firms need to have the right data to determine the factors that create alpha as each portfolio, and each manager, is different. The dataset should include all their deals over at least five years as well as the relevant market data.”

Over three months Essentia’s research team analyzed 60 portfolios over 14 years and tracked 24 ‘categorizers’, ranging from equity sector to holding period to decision day of the week, across six broad investment decision categories, or skills: stock picking, size adjusting, entry timing, exit timing, scaling in and scaling out.

2020-07-24 Read the full story (at marketsmedia)…
2020-07-28 13:28:04+00:00 Read the full story (at tradersmagazine)…
Weighted Interest Score: 5.7064, Raw Interest Score: 1.8621,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1510, Negative Sentiment 0.2516

CloudQuant Thoughts : Repeatedly re-running your models with alternative exit strategies and grouping the results by as many difference factors as you can think of is essential to keep ahead of the game. Fortunately, in this day and age, it is quite simple to do!

Nasdaq Has Record US Equities And Options Volumes

Nasdaq reported that combined U.S. equities and options markets set a quarterly record for trading volume, boosting revenue in Market Services by 22% from a year ago. The exchange group said electronically operated equities, options and fixed income markets operated at high performance levels during the surge of trading volume related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Adena Friedman, president and chief executive of Nasdaq, said in a statement: “Our foundational markets are demonstrating their resilience and the power of a distributed, electronic market model, handling record volumes through multiple periods of extreme volatility.”
2020-07-22 20:36:09+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.9952, Raw Interest Score: 1.9871,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1197, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

CloudQuant Thoughts : Whilst not Alternative Data, this does demonstrate the hyperactivity of the market and where there is hyperactivity there will be (alternative) data that helps you to see though the noise.

Building a Python Covid-19 Dashboard using Streamlit

In data visualization, dashboards are the Graphical User Interfaces which display data in an informative and highly interactive way. It contains various plots such as bars, pies, line charts etc. that are actually the visualizations of a dataset by which we can derive some useful information. Dashboards are useful because they are easy to understand and provide us with a clear picture of the key performance indicators.

Streamlit is an open-source python library that allows us to build beautiful, highly interactive, and informative dashboards easily. It also allows us to create custom based Machine Learning and Data Science applications. Every time we save the code streamlit runs from top to bottom and displays the changes in seconds because it is incredibly quick. The UI of streamlit is visually appealing and already loaded so that we don’t have to write the code about the UI of the app.

2020-07-29 11:30:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.4520, Raw Interest Score: 0.9605,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1298, Negative Sentiment 0.0649

CloudQuant Thoughts : A neat but simple looking python library, could be fun!


ESG Section

CloudQuant Thoughts : Simple stating that ESG is the best form of investment at the moment may be a little over simplistic. Examine the stocks that are listed in ESG ETFs and you may be surprised. Also, looking at our first ESG story this week – Tesla, how much of the growth of ESG investments is down to the likes of Tesla and Amazon (it may be shocking to some that Amazon is even considered an ESG stock). Don’t forget that CloudQuant also has curated datasets available including ESG datasets. Head over to our Data Catalog for more information.

Is Tesla’s green investment bubble about to burst?

Elon Musk’s EV giant occupies a unique position, ‘miles ahead of the competition’. But with rivals lining up, how long can it stay there?

Tesla’s nosebleed-inducing rise in share price shows no sign of slowing down. From lows of $185 last May, the company’s shares reached new highs of $1,643 this week ahead of its crucial second-quarter earnings on Wednesday. Long doubted and dismissed, it has now posted three consecutive quarters of profit, including one that took it through a global pandemic. It is worth $250bn, the most valuable car company in the world, and it attracts devoted fans like no-one else.

Its success is often pinned on charismatic chief executive Elon Musk, and the company’s early adoption of the electric vehicle technology that is becoming increasingly mainstream amid widespread incentives pushing carmakers away from gasoline. Tesla also occupies a unique position in the market. It’s a green company, but also a manufacturing company and a technology company. This means it attracts investment from all three sectors, and can capitalise on a resurgent interest in “green” stocks.

Interest in funds and shares driven by ESG (environmental, social, governance) priorities is growing. Data from financial services firm Morningstar showed that the first quarter of this year was a record one for sustainable funds.

2020-07-22 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.7022, Raw Interest Score: 1.3436,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2495, Negative Sentiment 0.2687

DOL Plan to Limit ESG in 401(k)s Draws Growing Opposition

Opposition to the Labor Department’s proposal to limit environmental, social and governance focused investments in 401(k) plans is growing, along with requests for a longer comment period.

Morningstar, Heartland Capital Strategies, Principles for Responsible Investment and Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) have written comment letters opposing the proposal along with 41 Democratic members of the House, 13 Democratic members of the Senate and others.

In addition, a coalition of trade groups representing financial institutions with business in the defined contribution space are asking Labor for a 30-day extension to the public comment period on the proposal that is scheduled to end on July 30. They include the American Bankers Association, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, the Insured Retirement Institute, the Investment Company Institute, the Defined Contribution Institutional Investment Association, the Investment Adviser Association and the SPARK Institute.

2020-07-27 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.6001, Raw Interest Score: 1.2922,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0630, Negative Sentiment 0.4570

4 Reasons To Take Another Look At Sustainable Investing In 2020

Looking for investment opportunities in 2020’s ever-changing markets? Why this could be a good time. If you thought sustainable investing was just a do-gooder approach, it’s time to take another look.

With all that’s changed in 2020 so far, you may not have realized that sustainable investing is emerging as a way forward. Sustainable funds are seeing a surge in assets, and some of the world’s largest asset managers see growing opportunities in sustainable investing.

If sustainable investing hasn’t been on your radar, here are four reasons why it’s worth paying attention to it now.

1. Major investment firms see sustainable investing as the future.
2. Fund companies are launching sustainable funds at a record pace.
3. Sustainable investing is being used to help manage risk in uncertain times.
4. Performance has become a top reason to invest sustainably.

2020-07-28 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.9029, Raw Interest Score: 2.0971,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2913, Negative Sentiment 0.1553

Net Flows Into Passive ESG Funds Have Outpaced Active

The US SIF Foundation today released The Rise of ESG in Passive Investments, a report that explores the growth of passive ESG (environmental, social and governance) investing and the debate on the effectiveness of passive versus active ESG funds. The paper draws on publicly available data and insights from the US SIF Foundation research advisory committee and from additional asset manager members of US SIF.

While the vast majority of sustainably invested assets are in actively managed ESG funds, net flows into passively managed ESG funds have in recent yea…
2020-07-29 09:17:57+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.7729, Raw Interest Score: 2.1157,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1058, Negative Sentiment 0.0353

HSBC Forms Dedicated ESG Solutions Team

HSBC announced the formation of a dedicated Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Solutions unit to help clients around the world rebuild and transition their businesses and economies in a more sustainable way post-COVID-19.

HSBC has taken a leading global role in ESG financing in recent years and the new unit will more effectively focus the bank’s full range of capabilities and expertise in providing clients with ESG-related advice, strategies and financing ideas.

The ESG unit will form part of a new Strategic Solutions Group, within the bank’s Capital Financing & Investment Banking Coverage division. The group will also comprise two other components – one focusing on Corporate Finance Solutions and one on Financial Institutions & Capital Solutions. They will link closely with HSBC’s sector and product bankers to provide strategic advice and financing ideas tailored to specific industries and market sectors.
2020-07-28 13:06:46+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.2774, Raw Interest Score: 1.8839,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2581, Negative Sentiment 0.0258


How Does Data Management Drive Efficiency for Organizations?

Data-driven analytics continue to deliver sophisticated solutions for manufacturing efficiency, early disease detection, and smart capabilities building in workplaces. Thus, industry operators and leaders continue raise their expectations and demands from data technologies with every passing year. Looking Behind the Curtain: What Really Drives Value from Data reveals some insights that global managers can learn from.

Brent Gleeson of Forbes, who regularly contributes about organizational excellence, warns that in spite of having the best infrastructure, technological support, and military intelligence, the United States could not stop many attacks against them. This important observation signals the need for speedy, data-enabled, decision-making at a time of crisis.

In The Benefits of Leading Data-Driven Organizational Change, Gleeson points out that a lack of adequate technology preparedness, lack of technology application training, and lack of informed decision-making mindset probably all contributed to the national disaster in September 2001. Transformational decision-making, according to Gleeson, requires a “shift in mindset and culture.”
2020-07-21 07:35:02+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.3911, Raw Interest Score: 2.5047,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3354, Negative Sentiment 0.2620

Improving massively imbalanced datasets in machine learning with synthetic data

We will use synthetic data and a few concepts from SMOTE to improve model accuracy for fraud, cyber security, or any classification with an extremely limited minority class

Handling imbalanced datasets in machine learning is a difficult challenge, and can include topics such as payment fraud, diagnosing cancer or disease, and even cyber security attacks. What all of these have in common are that only a very small percentage of the overall transactions are actually fraud, and those are the ones that we really care about detecting. In this post, we will boost accuracy on a popular Kaggle fraud dataset by training a generative synthetic data model to create additional fraudulent records. Uniquely, this model will incorporate features from both fraudulent records and their nearest neighbors, which are labeled as non-fraudulent but are close enough to the fraudulent records to be a little “shady”.

Our imbalanced dataset : For this post, we selected the popular “Credit Card Fraud Detection” dataset on Kaggle. This dataset contains labeled transactions from European credit card holders in September 2013. To protect user identities, the dataset uses dimensionality reduction of sensitive features into 27 floating point columns (V1–27) and a Time column (the number of seconds elapsed between this transaction and the first in the dataset). For this post, we will work with the first 10k records in the Credit Card fraud dataset- click below to generate the graphs below in Google Colaboratory.
2020-07-27 15:18:13.069000+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 4.1391, Raw Interest Score: 1.2868,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3309, Negative Sentiment 0.6127

Explorium raises $31 million to automate data prep with AI

Explorium, a Tel Aviv-based startup developing an automated data and feature discovery platform, today closed a $31 million funding round. The capital infusion comes after several banner months for Explorium, which has tripled its customer base since last September and incorporated data relevant to more industries and verticals.

Feature engineering — the process of using domain knowledge to extract features from raw data via data-mining techniques — is arduous. According to a Forbes survey, data scientists spend 80% of their time on data preparation, and 76% view it as the least enjoyable part of their work. It’s also expensive — Trifecta pegs the collective data prep cost for organizations at $450 billion.

Explorium aims to solve this by acting as a repository for a company’s information, connecting siloed internal data to thousands of external sources on the fly. Using machine learning, it claims to automatically extract, engineer, aggregate, and integrate the most relevant features from data to power sophisticated predictive algorithms, evaluating hundreds before scoring, ranking, and deploying the top performers.
2020-07-28 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.8652, Raw Interest Score: 2.0949,
Positive Sentiment: 0.0582, Negative Sentiment 0.1455

NVIDIA, BMW, Red Hat, and more on the promise of AI, edge computing, and computer vision

On the third day of Transform 2020, the IoT, AI at the Edge, and Computer Vision Summit presented by NVIDIA underscored the tremendous promise of these technologies. IoT is being leveraged in more transformative ways than ever, the limits of compute power on devices keep getting pushed, and computer vision models are becoming faster and more accurate.

But innovation also brings new challenges. Leaders from NVIDIA, BMW, Pinterest, Intel, Uber, and Red Hat among others gathered to talk about the most important new use cases and the most urgent issues: from ensuring greater user privacy to enabling lower latency, accelerating better search and personalization, advancing automation, delivering real-time intelligence, and more.

Implementing new AI technologies also brings new responsibilities like security, governance, accuracy, and explainability, as well as a major focus on eliminating biases around race and gender.

Here’s a look at some of the top panels of the summit.
2020-07-28 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.8492, Raw Interest Score: 1.6980,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2743, Negative Sentiment 0.1306

Top 10 Free Data Science Podcasts One Can Binge During This Lockdown

In today’s fast-paced world, podcasts have proved to be an incredibly great source of learning for data scientists who are willing to learn more from all the possible resources available. Alongside, amid COVID, when the majority of data professionals are working from home, podcasts are turning out to be an excellent way to not only upskill themselves but also to pass leisure time.

Not only AI and data science podcasts would help these professionals to be updated with latest trends and researches but also help them in understanding the core working of various data science applications. Furthermore, many of these data science podcasts also invite some of the renowned minds of the industry for data science professionals to gain more understanding of this industry.

COVID lockdown can be monotonous and daunting for many, and thus to make good use of the leisure time, data scientists can get their hands on some of the informative and exciting AI and data science podcasts. In this article, we are going to share some of the data science podcasts that one can binge during this lockdown.

020-07-29 07:30:00+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.5767, Raw Interest Score: 1.9941,
Positive Sentiment: 0.3234, Negative Sentiment 0.0539

Why Metadata is Even More Important Than Data

Most companies, whether in finance, retail, or government sectors, are seeking to make the most of their data to gain a competitive advantage. But not many organizations are making effective use of metadata. Arguably, data on its own can be meaningless, but when combined with metadata, it turns into information that can be exploited and, when aggregated with other datasets, delivers the insight that every organization needs to improve decision-making.

A recent Veritas Report on unlocking the value of data found that, on average, employees lose two hours a day searching for data, resulting in a 16 percent drop in workforce efficiency. For an organization of 1,000 workers that are dependent on data, the inability to find the right data at the right time costs that organization £16m a year. If run correctly, a metadata project will deliver significant time and cost savings in the short-term and enhance the effectiveness of data projects in the medium-to-longer term.

Therefore, all companies should ask themselves: Why not explore a metadata project to see how it can deliver savings and unlock future value from data?
2020-07-29 07:25:22+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.1880, Raw Interest Score: 1.6287,
Positive Sentiment: 0.4886, Negative Sentiment 0.1629

Transparency: a Step Towards Fairness

Pulse, a recent machine learning image reconstruction algorithm, sparked a lot of controversy. The purpose of the model was to reconstruct blurry, low resolution images. Unfortunately, when a low resolution image of President Obama was provided as input to the model, the result was the following:

Some machine learning experts attributed the model’s racial bias to the unevenness in the training data. They argued that FlickFaceHQ, the dataset on which the model was pretrained, contained mostly images of white faces. Because of that, the model learned to reconstruct white faces most of the time. Their argument has some merit. Indeed, according to the paper that introduced PULSE, even the data used to evaluate the model, CelebAHQ, “has been noted to have a severe imbalance of white faces compared to faces of people of color (almost 90% white).” It is reasonable to expect that if a deep neural network is trained and evaluated on uneven datasets, not only will it learn to classify more often the most frequent class but also its evaluation will not accurately display this discrepancy.
2020-07-27 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 3.0438, Raw Interest Score: 1.5255,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1291, Negative Sentiment 0.4694

BestX Launches Post-Trade TCA For Equities

BestX, State Street’s foreign exchange and fixed income best execution analytics platform, announced today that it has expanded its award-winning execution analytics software and launched a post-trade transaction cost analysis (“TCA”) module for equity markets. Covering global stock markets, the new functionality provides clients with benefits of the unique BestX web interface alongside flexible data analysis, report configuration and generation.

“We responded to our clients’ needs by expanding BestX to provide a full multi-asset class offering,” said Pete Eggleston, BestX Co-Founder. “Whilst launching fixed income at the end of 2018, it quickly became clear that clients wanted one application to analyse all of their trading. The desire to consolidate data and vendors is a trend that we anticipate will accelerate over the next few years and we needed to ensure we were positioned appropriately for this.”
2020-07-29 10:59:28+00:00 Read the full story (at marketsmedia)…
2020-07-29 12:30:00 Read the full story (at finextra)…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.8451, Raw Interest Score: 1.8460,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1582, Negative Sentiment 0.0000

Learn Data Science in a Flash!?

I was a trained classical pianist in my previous professional life. Remember those infomercials claiming that you could learn to play the piano in a flash? This has been an ongoing joke between my husband and me for years. From time to time, he threatens to achieve in mere four hours what took me years of blood, sweat, and tears!

So far, however, it has remained an empty threat (thankfully). I think most reasonable people understand these programs do not turn a complete newbie into a professional pianist in only a handful of hours.

I have always and strongly encouraged people to learn and enjoy playing the piano. It fosters appreciation for the work of other musicians more deeply and perhaps even collaborate under the right circumstances. However, offering the skill as a professional service for a fee is an entirely different matter. It would be irresponsible for me to encourage that to someone who has only some cursory training.

Can You Learn Data Science in a Flash? : The same is true of data science, or anything else for that matter. The COVID pandemic has accelerated the process of making digitization into a minimum necessity to stay competitive or even survive. We should encourage others to learn about data so they can appreciate it and be more intelligent about it. It is essential today.

2020-07-23 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.3199, Raw Interest Score: 1.2649,
Positive Sentiment: 0.2333, Negative Sentiment 0.3070

Metadata Repository Basics: From Database to Data Architecture

Companies use a metadata repository to store and share information about data or metadata. Metadata repositories, once thought limited to databases or diagrams, have evolved sophisticated Data Architectures, driving businesses to transform the marketplace digitally.

Take the New South Wales (NSW) government’s Spatial Digital Twin, which went live in February 2020. NSW, an Australian state containing Sydney, envisioned a more efficient and better state infrastructure, including “major hospital upgrades.”

In response, Data61 created a 3D-model of Sydney, providing capabilities to see future changes and past construction. Magda, the system and power behind this digital twin, relies on a metadata repository to make tons of data faster to search and understand and to pull in even more data sets. From that metadata repository, hooked up to a data repository and data depository, Australians can digitally plan and build structures in real-time.
2020-07-29 07:35:13+00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.3191, Raw Interest Score: 1.2884,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1610, Negative Sentiment 0.0859

Dice Tech Job Report: Q2 Offers Optimism for Tech Industry

How is the COVID-19 pandemic impacting the job market? The latest edition of the Dice Tech Job Report analyzed data from the second quarter, giving us a fuller picture of how employers are dealing with the current landscape.

Although nationwide tech postings in the second quarter of this year were down when compared to the same quarter in 2019, there was much positivity within the data nonetheless. For example, many tech hubs showed continued growth, along with technologist occupations that build, maintain, and expand tech infrastructure.

During the May-June period, as companies regained even more of their equilibrium, hiring picked up for “core” technologist occupations, including data engineers (a 51 percent increase Month-over-Month)…
2020-07-28 00:00:00 Read the full story…
Weighted Interest Score: 2.2832, Raw Interest Score: 1.7635,
Positive Sentiment: 0.1735, Negative Sentiment 0.1446


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