EDA: Neuromorphic Computing w/ Alon + Alex Dominating Hackathons
Spiking Neural Networks, ChatGPT API launch, AI hackathons
Hi Folks,
Thanks to Alon Glazer for talking to the group about his research in Spiking Neural Networks and to everyone who attended the session. The talk was extremely insightful about a new area of research into a specific type of neural networks that are much more efficient from an energy perspective. If you are interested in seeing the slides he presented, you can check them out here:
As we near the Excel conference, a lot of noise is generating (see what we did there) around AI and investment therein. We’ve been going back and forth on what it means to invest in this space: whether or not it is the new technological gold rush, from what investment vehicles is money flowing into AI (crypto?), and a lot of other fun topics. This article from Andreessen Horowitz is a nice summary of what top investors are thinking. Share your thoughts with us in the WhatsApp group!
As we (already) look to the 2024 elections in the U.S., I thought it was helpful to read about FiveThirtyEight’s retrospective on their polling models from the 2022 midterm elections. Here’s a nice overview of their article (which I still highly recommend reading):
“While some polling firms badly missed the mark, in the aggregate the polls had one of their most accurate cycles in recent history. As a result, FiveThirtyEight’s forecasts had a pretty good year, too. Media proclamations of a “red wave” occurred largely despite polls that showed a close race for the U.S. Senate and a close generic congressional ballot. It was the pundits who made the red wave narrative, not the data.
With that said, the polls weren’t perfect.
Polling averages and forecasts did slightly underestimate Democrats, though the differences were modest — certainly less than the extent to which they underestimated Republicans in 2016 and 2020.
Some pollsters — such as Trafalgar Group and Rasmussen Reports, which have a history of Republican-leaning polling — had a conspicuously poor year.
There are different methods of polling aggregation and forecasting. The margins in the polling averages from RealClearPolitics were on average 1.3 percentage points more favorable to Republicans in the most competitive Senate races1 than those published by FiveThirtyEight. Similarly, RCP’s generic ballot polling average was 1.3 points more favorable to the GOP than FiveThirtyEight’s. In this article, I’ll only be evaluating FiveThirtyEight’s forecasts, but methodological choices made a difference.
Finally, Democrats’ relatively strong year — although there were some precedents for it — defied a lot of midterm history. It’s not just that the polls did better than the conventional wisdom; they also did well relative to political science or “fundamentals”-based forecasting methods.
And big shoutout to Alex who over the past few weeks won not one, but 2 AI hackathons!
- Justin, Alex, Dan, Shany, Shai
Intro-Level Material
(Blog Post) Donald Trump did not win in 2016 because the establishment "split the field"
(Blog Post) Data team as % of workforce: A deep dive into 100 tech scaleups
(Video) Low-Ops ML: Easing Work for Data Scientists Dealing w/ Models in Production
(Podcast) Preparing for the Implementation of the EU AI Act and Other AI Regulations
(Blog Post) Using AI to reclaim Native languages
(Dashboard) Purifying Wastewater for Rural Communities
Intermediate Material
(Blog Post) Unleashing ML Innovation at Spotify with Ray
(Blog Post) How DoorDash Upgraded a Heuristic with ML to Save Thousands of Canceled Orders
(Blog Post) An Introduction to Knowledge Graphs
(Launch) ChatGPT API Now Available
Advanced Material
(Blog Post) Python’s Multiprocessing Problem
Upcoming
3/7 - 3/8: Convergence 2023
3/11 - 3/18: NYC Open Data Week
3/14 - 3/15: LeadDev NYC
3/16: StaffPlus NYC
Jobs, jobs, jobs
Send us any data science jobs you come across, and we’ll post them here!
NLP Data Scientist Co-Founder (Remote/DC) | GovPro AI
Data Science Analyst (NYC) | The Federal Reserve
Database Administrator (NYC) | Ronald McDonald House
Gun Violence Prevention Data Analyst (Syrcause, NY) | City of Syracuse
Innovation and Technology Summer Intern (Boston, MA) | City of Boston
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