Statistics and data science degrees: Overhyped or the real deal?


 at The Conversation“Data science” is hot right now. The number of undergraduate degrees in statistics has tripled in the past decade, and as a statistics professor, I can tell you that it isn’t because freshmen love statistics.

Way back in 2009, economist Hal Varian of Google dubbed statistician the “next sexy job.” Since then, statistician, data scientist and actuary have topped various “best jobs” lists. Not to mention the enthusiastic press coverage of industry applications: Machine learning! Big dataAIDeep learning!

But is it good advice? I’m going to voice an unpopular opinion for the sake of starting a conversation. Stats is indeed useful, but not in the way that the popular media – and all those online data science degree programs – seem to suggest….

While all the press tends to go to the sensationalist applications – computers that watch cat videos, anyone? – the data science boom reflects a broad increase in demand for data literacy, as a baseline requirement for modern jobs.

The “big data era” doesn’t just mean large amounts of data; it also means increased ease and ability to collect data of all types, in all walks of life. Although the big five tech companies – Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft – represent about 10 percent of the U.S. market cap and dominate the public imagination, they employ only one-half of one percent of all employees.

Therefore, to be a true revolution, data science will need to infiltrate nontech industries. And it is. The U.S. has seen its impact on political campaigns. I myself have consulted in the medical devices sector. A few years back, Walmart held a data analysis competition as a recruiting tool. The need for people that can dig into the data and parse it is everywhere.

In a speech at the National Academy of Sciences in 2015, Steven “Freakonomics” Levitt related his insights about the need for data-savvy workers, based on his experience as a sought-after consultant in fields ranging from the airline industry to fast food….(More)”.

Ethics and Data Science


(Open) Ebook by Mike LoukidesHilary Mason and DJ Patil: “As the impact of data science continues to grow on society there is an increased need to discuss how data is appropriately used and how to address misuse. Yet, ethical principles for working with data have been available for decades. The real issue today is how to put those principles into action. With this report, authors Mike Loukides, Hilary Mason, and DJ Patil examine practical ways for making ethical data standards part of your work every day.

To help you consider all of possible ramifications of your work on data projects, this report includes:

  • A sample checklist that you can adapt for your own procedures
  • Five framing guidelines (the Five C’s) for building data products: consent, clarity, consistency, control, and consequences
  • Suggestions for building ethics into your data-driven culture

Now is the time to invest in a deliberate practice of data ethics, for better products, better teams, and better outcomes….(More)”.

Data Science Thinking: The Next Scientific, Technological and Economic Revolution


Book by Longbing Cao: “This book explores answers to the fundamental questions driving the research, innovation and practices of the latest revolution in scientific, technological and economic development: how does data science transform existing science, technology, industry, economy, profession and education?  How does one remain competitive in the data science field? What is responsible for shaping the mindset and skillset of data scientists?

Data Science Thinking paints a comprehensive picture of data science as a new scientific paradigm from the scientific evolution perspective, as data science thinking from the scientific-thinking perspective, as a trans-disciplinary science from the disciplinary perspective, and as a new profession and economy from the business perspective.

The topics cover an extremely wide spectrum of essential and relevant aspects of data science, spanning its evolution, concepts, thinking, challenges, discipline, and foundation, all the way to industrialization, profession, education, and the vast array of opportunities that data science offers. The book’s three parts each detail layers of these different aspects….(More)”.

A roadmap for restoring trust in Big Data


Mark Lawler et al in the Lancet: “The fallout from the Cambridge Analytica–Facebook scandal marks a significant inflection point in the public’s trust concerning Big Data. The health-science community must use this crisis-in-confidence to redouble its commitment to talk openly and transparently about benefits and risks and to act decisively to deliver robust effective governance frameworks, under which personal health data can be responsibly used. Activities such as the Innovative Medicines Initiative’s Big Data for Better Outcomes emphasise how a more granular data-driven understanding of human diseases including cancer could underpin innovative therapeutic intervention.
 Health Data Research UK is developing national research expertise and infrastructure to maximise the value of health data science for the National Health Service and ultimately British citizens.
Comprehensive data analytics are crucial to national programmes such as the US Cancer Moonshot, the UK’s 100 000 Genomes project, and other national genomics programmes. Cancer Core Europe, a research partnership between seven leading European oncology centres, has personal data sharing at its core. The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health recently highlighted the need for a global cancer knowledge network to drive evidence-based solutions for a disease that kills more than 8·7 million citizens annually worldwide. These activities risk being fatally undermined by the recent data-harvesting controversy.
We need to restore the public’s trust in data science and emphasise its positive contribution in addressing global health and societal challenges. An opportunity to affirm the value of data science in Europe was afforded by Digital Day 2018, which took place on April 10, 2018, in Brussels, and where European Health Ministers signed a declaration of support to link existing or future genomic databanks across the EU, through the Million European Genomes Alliance.
So how do we address evolving challenges in analysis, sharing, and storage of information, ensure transparency and confidentiality, and restore public trust? We must articulate a clear Social Contract, where citizens (as data donors) are at the heart of decision-making. We need to demonstrate integrity, honesty, and transparency as to what happens to data and what level of control people can, or cannot, expect. We must embed ethical rigour in all our data-driven processes. The Framework for Responsible Sharing of Genomic and Health Related Data represents a practical global approach, promoting effective and ethical sharing and use of research or patient data, while safeguarding individual privacy through secure and accountable data transfer…(More)”.

#TrendingLaws: How can Machine Learning and Network Analysis help us identify the “influencers” of Constitutions?


Unicef: “New research by scientists from UNICEF’s Office of Innovation — published today in the journal Nature Human Behaviour — applies methods from network science and machine learning to constitutional law.  UNICEF Innovation Data Scientists Alex Rutherford and Manuel Garcia-Herranz collaborated with computer scientists and political scientists at MIT, George Washington University, and UC Merced to apply data analysis to the world’s constitutions over the last 300 years. This work sheds new light on how to better understand why countries’ laws change and incorporate social rights…

Data science techniques allow us to use methods like network science and machine learning to uncover patterns and insights that are hard for humans to see. Just as we can map influential users on Twitter — and patterns of relations between places to predict how diseases will spread — we can identify which countries have influenced each other in the past and what are the relations between legal provisions.

Why The Science of Constitutions?

One way UNICEF fulfills its mission is through advocacy with national governments — to enshrine rights for minorities, notably children, formally in law. Perhaps the most renowned example of this is the International Convention on the Rights of the Child (ICRC).

Constitutions, such as Mexico’s 1917 constitution — the first to limit the employment of children — are critical to formalizing rights for vulnerable populations. National constitutions describe the role of a country’s institutions, its character in the eyes of the world, as well as the rights of its citizens.

From a scientific standpoint, the work is an important first step in showing that network analysis and machine learning technique can be used to better understand the dynamics of caring for and protecting the rights of children — critical to the work we do in a complex and interconnected world. It shows the significant, and positive policy implications of using data science to uphold children’s rights.

What the Research Shows:

Through this research, we uncovered:

  • A network of relationships between countries and their constitutions.
  • A natural progression of laws — where fundamental rights are a necessary precursor to more specific rights for minorities.
  • The effect of key historical events in changing legal norms….(More)”.

The Democratization of Data Science


Jonathan Cornelissen at Harvard Business School: “Want to catch tax cheats? The government of Rwanda does — and it’s finding them by studying anomalies in revenue-collection data.

Want to understand how American culture is changing? So does a budding sociologist in Indiana. He’s using data science to find patterns in the massive amounts of text people use each day to express their worldviews — patterns that no individual reader would be able to recognize.

Intelligent people find new uses for data science every day. Still, despite the explosion of interest in the data collected by just about every sector of American business — from financial companies and health care firms to management consultancies and the government — many organizations continue to relegate data-science knowledge to a small number of employees.

That’s a mistake — and in the long run, it’s unsustainable. Think of it this way: Very few companies expect only professional writers to know how to write. So why ask onlyprofessional data scientists to understand and analyze data, at least at a basic level?

Relegating all data knowledge to a handful of people within a company is problematic on many levels. Data scientists find it frustrating because it’s hard for them to communicate their findings to colleagues who lack basic data literacy. Business stakeholders are unhappy because data requests take too long to fulfill and often fail to answer the original questions. In some cases, that’s because the questioner failed to explain the question properly to the data scientist.

Why would non–data scientists need to learn data science? That’s like asking why non-accountants should be expected to stay within budget.

These days every industry is drenched in data, and the organizations that succeed are those that most quickly make sense of their data in order to adapt to what’s coming. The best way to enable fast discovery and deeper insights is to disperse data science expertise across an organization.

Companies that want to compete in the age of data need to do three things: share data tools, spread data skills, and spread data responsibility…(More)”.

Doing good data science


Mike Loukides, Hilary Mason and DJ Patil at O’Reilly: “(This post is the first in a series on data ethics) The hard thing about being an ethical data scientist isn’t understanding ethics. It’s the junction between ethical ideas and practice. It’s doing good data science.

There has been a lot of healthy discussion about data ethics lately. We want to be clear: that discussion is good, and necessary. But it’s also not the biggest problem we face. We already have good standards for data ethics. The ACM’s code of ethics, which dates back to 1993, is clear, concise, and surprisingly forward-thinking; 25 years later, it’s a great start for anyone thinking about ethics. The American Statistical Association has a good set of ethical guidelines for working with data. So, we’re not working in a vacuum.

And, while there are always exceptions, we believe that most people want to be fair. Data scientists and software developers don’t want to harm the people using their products. There are exceptions, of course; we call them criminals and con artists. Defining “fairness” is difficult, and perhaps impossible, given the many crosscutting layers of “fairness” that we might be concerned with. But we don’t have to solve that problem in advance, and it’s not going to be solved in a simple statement of ethical principles, anyway.

The problem we face is different: how do we put ethical principles into practice? We’re not talking about an abstract commitment to being fair. Ethical principles are worse than useless if we don’t allow them to change our practice, if they don’t have any effect on what we do day-to-day. For data scientists, whether you’re doing classical data analysis or leading-edge AI, that’s a big challenge. We need to understand how to build the software systems that implement fairness. That’s what we mean by doing good data science.

Any code of data ethics will tell you that you shouldn’t collect data from experimental subjects without informed consent. But that code won’t tell you how to implement “informed consent.” Informed consent is easy when you’re interviewing a few dozen people in person for a psychology experiment. Informed consent means something different when someone clicks on an item in an online catalog (hello, Amazon), and ads for that item start following them around ad infinitum. Do you use a pop-up to ask for permission to use their choice in targeted advertising? How many customers would you lose? Informed consent means something yet again when you’re asking someone to fill out a profile for a social site, and you might (or might not) use that data for any number of experimental purposes. Do you pop up a consent form in impenetrable legalese that basically says “we will use your data, but we don’t know for what”? Do you phrase this agreement as an opt-out, and hide it somewhere on the site where nobody will find it?…

To put ethical principles into practice, we need space to be ethical. We need the ability to have conversations about what ethics means, what it will cost, and what solutions to implement. As technologists, we frequently share best practices at conferences, write blog posts, and develop open source technologies—but we rarely discuss problems such as how to obtain informed consent.

There are several facets to this space that we need to think about.

First, we need corporate cultures in which discussions about fairness, about the proper use of data, and about the harm that can be done by inappropriate use of data can be considered. In turn, this means that we can’t rush products out the door without thinking about how they’re used. We can’t allow “internet time” to mean ignoring the consequences. Indeed, computer security has shown us the consequences of ignoring the consequences: many companies that have never taken the time to implement good security practices and safeguards are now paying with damage to their reputations and their finances. We need to do the same when thinking about issues like fairness, accountability, and unintended consequences….(More)”.

Ethics as Methods: Doing Ethics in the Era of Big Data Research—Introduction


Introduction to the Special issue of Social Media + Society on “Ethics as Methods: Doing Ethics in the Era of Big Data Research”: Building on a variety of theoretical paradigms (i.e., critical theory, [new] materialism, feminist ethics, theory of cultural techniques) and frameworks (i.e., contextual integrity, deflationary perspective, ethics of care), the Special Issue contributes specific cases and fine-grained conceptual distinctions to ongoing discussions about the ethics in data-driven research.

In the second decade of the 21st century, a grand narrative is emerging that posits knowledge derived from data analytics as true, because of the objective qualities of data, their means of collection and analysis, and the sheer size of the data set. The by-product of this grand narrative is that the qualitative aspects of behavior and experience that form the data are diminished, and the human is removed from the process of analysis.

This situates data science as a process of analysis performed by the tool, which obscures human decisions in the process. The scholars involved in this Special Issue problematize the assumptions and trends in big data research and point out the crisis in accountability that emerges from using such data to make societal interventions.

Our collaborators offer a range of answers to the question of how to configure ethics through a methodological framework in the context of the prevalence of big data, neural networks, and automated, algorithmic governance of much of human socia(bi)lity…(More)”.

‘Data is a fingerprint’: why you aren’t as anonymous as you think online


Olivia Solon at The Guardian: “In August 2016, the Australian government released an “anonymised” data set comprising the medical billing records, including every prescription and surgery, of 2.9 million people.

Names and other identifying features were removed from the records in an effort to protect individuals’ privacy, but a research team from the University of Melbourne soon discovered that it was simple to re-identify people, and learn about their entire medical history without their consent, by comparing the dataset to other publicly available information, such as reports of celebrities having babies or athletes having surgeries.

The government pulled the data from its website, but not before it had been downloaded 1,500 times.

This privacy nightmare is one of many examples of seemingly innocuous, “de-identified” pieces of information being reverse-engineered to expose people’s identities. And it’s only getting worse as people spend more of their lives online, sprinkling digital breadcrumbs that can be traced back to them to violate their privacy in ways they never expected.

Nameless New York taxi logs were compared with paparazzi shots at locations around the city to reveal that Bradley Cooper and Jessica Alba were bad tippers. In 2017 German researchers were able to identify people based on their “anonymous” web browsing patterns. This week University College London researchers showed how they could identify an individual Twitter user based on the metadata associated with their tweets, while the fitness tracking app Polar revealed the homes and in some cases names of soldiers and spies.

“It’s convenient to pretend it’s hard to re-identify people, but it’s easy. The kinds of things we did are the kinds of things that any first-year data science student could do,” said Vanessa Teague, one of the University of Melbourne researchers to reveal the flaws in the open health data.

One of the earliest examples of this type of privacy violation occurred in 1996 when the Massachusetts Group Insurance Commission released “anonymised” data showing the hospital visits of state employees. As with the Australian data, the state removed obvious identifiers like name, address and social security number. Then the governor, William Weld, assured the public that patients’ privacy was protected….(More)”.

Data infrastructure literacy


Paper by Jonathan Gray, Carolin Gerlitz and Liliana Bounegru at Big Data & Society: “A recent report from the UN makes the case for “global data literacy” in order to realise the opportunities afforded by the “data revolution”. Here and in many other contexts, data literacy is characterised in terms of a combination of numerical, statistical and technical capacities. In this article, we argue for an expansion of the concept to include not just competencies in reading and working with datasets but also the ability to account for, intervene around and participate in the wider socio-technical infrastructures through which data is created, stored and analysed – which we call “data infrastructure literacy”. We illustrate this notion with examples of “inventive data practice” from previous and ongoing research on open data, online platforms, data journalism and data activism. Drawing on these perspectives, we argue that data literacy initiatives might cultivate sensibilities not only for data science but also for data sociology, data politics as well as wider public engagement with digital data infrastructures. The proposed notion of data infrastructure literacy is intended to make space for collective inquiry, experimentation, imagination and intervention around data in educational programmes and beyond, including how data infrastructures can be challenged, contested, reshaped and repurposed to align with interests and publics other than those originally intended….(More)”