Issue #247

Jun 5, 2024

​(view in browser)​

​

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the 247th edition of the Data Science Briefing! This month, we are celebrating our 5th anniversary! Thank you for helping to make these five years a great success.

As usual, we have a few surprises planned for this month. To start us off in the best possible way, we're proud to announce that you can now find all of our written content in a single location: The Data For Science substack! All the previous posts in G4Sci and Viz4Sci can now be found there, as well as all of the most significant Medium posts. Check it out!

Over the next few weeks, select paid posts will be available for free, giving you a taste of the content that await you as a subscriber. This week, we're starting off by making all the Causal Inference posts free to read.

And, as always, the most recent posts in each series are always free to read. The most recent post on the Epidemiology series, Epidemiology 303: Metapopulation Models, explores how to connect multiple populations through a travel matrix. In the graph subsection, you'll find all you need to know about k-core Decomposition, while in the Visualization section, you can explore The Effects of Vaccination through a WSJ visualization.

In our regularly scheduled content, we have some Python Notebooks for Fundamentals of Music Processing, learn about how AI weather forecasting is already making huge strides, and 5 myths about platform engineering.

On the academic front, we quantify the impact of misinformation and vaccine-skeptical content on Facebook, survey text generation using generative adversarial networks, and dive into A First Course in Monte Carlo Methods.

This week's book recommendation is "Co-Intelligence" by Ethan Mollick. You can find all the previous book recommendations on our website. In this week's video, we have a tutorial on Generative AI in a Nutshell.

Data shows that the best way for a newsletter to grow is by word of mouth, so if you think one of your friends or colleagues would enjoy this newsletter, go ahead and forward this email to them. This will help us spread the word!

Semper discentes,

The D4S Team

This week's book is "Co-Intelligence" by Ethan Mollick. This book provides an essential and balanced guide to navigating the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Author Ethan Mollick offers a pragmatic perspective on AI's capabilities and limitations, showing how it can effectively augment human abilities. The book's key strength is Mollick's "Four Rules of Co-Intelligence" framework for seamlessly integrating AI into work and life. He demystifies complex AI concepts through engaging examples and practical advice. Mollick paints an optimistic yet grounded vision where humans and AI collaborate harmoniously, complementing each other's strengths to drive innovation. His book equips readers to confidently leverage AI's power while preserving human ingenuity and ethics. In the rapidly changing AI landscape, "Co-Intelligence" is an invaluable resource for business leaders, educators, students, and anyone seeking to thrive by harnessing the benefits of human-AI co-intelligence. Mollick's work provides a roadmap for gaining a competitive edge through co-intelligent collaboration.

1. ​Python Notebooks for Fundamentals of Music Processing [audiolabs-erlangen.de]
2. ​Heuristics on the high seas: Mathematical optimization for cargo ships​ [research.google]
3. ​No physics? No problem. AI weather forecasting is already making huge strides.​ [arstechnica.com]
4. ​Scientists should use AI as a tool, not an oracle​ [aisnakeoil.com]
5. ​ROOT: analyzing petabytes of data, scientifically​ [root.cern]
6. ​5 myths about platform engineering: what it is and what it isn’t​ [cloud.google.com]
7. ​Why, after 6 years, I’m over GraphQL​ [bessey.dev]

• ​Quantifying the impact of misinformation and vaccine-skeptical content on Facebook​ (J. Allen, D. J. Watts, D. G. Rand)
• ​Deception abilities emerged in large language models​ (T. Hagendorff)
• ​Post-January 6th deplatforming reduced the reach of misinformation on Twitter​ (S. D. McCabe, D. Ferrari, J. Green, D. M. J. Lazer, K. M. Esterling)
• ​A survey on text generation using generative adversarial networks (G. H. de Rosa, J. P. Papa)
• ​Analogies Explained: Towards Understanding Word Embeddings​ (C. Allen, T. Hospedales)
• ​Graph structural complexity​ (A. A. Snarskii)
• ​Infection patterns in simple and complex contagion processes on networks​ (D. A. Contreras, G. Cencetti, A. Barrat)
• ​A First Course in Monte Carlo Methods​ (D. Sanz-Alonso, O. Al-Ghattas)

Generative AI in a Nutshell

​

All the videos of the week are now available in our Youtube playlist.