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Computer Science

A collection of 36 issues

About 85% Problematic: The Trouble With Human-In-The-Loop ML Systems

MIT researchers recently unveiled a system that combines machine learning with input from users to ‘predict 85% of the attacks.’ Each day, the system winnows down millions of rows to a few hundred atypical data points and passes these points on to ‘human experts’ who then label the few hundred

Clarifai(ng) the Future of Clarifai

Clarifai is a promising AI start-up. In a short(ish) time, it has made major progress on an important problem. And it is rapidly rolling out products with lots of business potential. But there are still some things that it could do. As I understand it, the base version of

I Recommend It: A Recommender System For Scholarship Discovery

The rate of production of scholarship has never been higher. And while our ability to discover relevant scholarship per unit of time has never kept pace with the production of knowledge, it has also risen sharply—most recently, due to Google scholar. The efficiency of discovery of relevant scholarship, however,

Beyond Anomaly Detection: Supervised Learning from `Bad' Transactions

Nearly every time you connect to the Internet, multiple servers log a bunch of details about the request. For instance, details about the connecting IPs, the protocol being used, etc. (One popular software for collecting such data is Cisco’s Netflow.) Lots of companies analyze this data in an attempt

Some Aspects of Online Learning Re-imagined

Trevor Hastie is a superb teacher. He excels at making complex things simple. Till recently, his lectures were only available to those fortunate enough to be at Stanford. But now, he teaches a free introductory course on statistical learning via the Stanford online learning platform. (I browsed through the online

Enabling FOIA: Getting Better Access to Government Data at a Lower Cost

Freedom of Information Act is vital for holding the government to account. But little effort has gone into building tools that enable fulfillment of FOIA requests. As a consequence of this underinvestment, fulfilling FOIA requests often means onerous, costly work for government agencies and long delays for the requesters. Here,

The Human and the Machine: Semi-automated approaches to ML

For a class of problems, a combination of algorithms and human input makes for the most optimal solution. For instance, three years ago, software to recreate shredded documents that won the DARPA award used “human[s] [to] verify what the computer was recommending.” The insight is used in character recognition

Big Data Algorithms: Too Complicated to Communicate?

“A decision is made about you, and you have no idea why it was done,” said Rajeev Date, an investor in data-science lenders and a former deputy director of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau From NYT: If Algorithms Know All, How Much Should Humans Help? The assertion that there is no

A Quick Scan: From Paper to Digital

Additional Note: See this presentation on paper to digital (pdf). There are two ways of converting paper to digital data: ‘human OCR and input,’ and machine-assisted. Here are some useful pointers about the latter. Scanning Since the success of so much of what comes after depends on the quality of

Bad Weather: Getting Data on Weather in a ZIP Code on a Particular Date

High-quality weather data are public. But they aren’t easy to make use of. Some thoughts and some software for finding out the weather in a particular ZIP Code on a particular day (or a set of dates). Some brief ground clearing before we begin. Weather data come from weather