put it to the people [last chance?!]

Lies sleeping [book review]

This is the seventh book in the Rivers of London series, by Ben Aaronovitch, which I have been expecting a long time. Avoiding the teasers like The Furthest Station, which appears primarily as a way to capitalise on readers’ impatience. And maybe due to this long wait or simply fatigue of the writer (or reader?!), I found this volume quite weak, from the plot which major danger remains hidden to the duh? title, to the cavalcade of past characters (most of whom I could not place), to the somewhat repetitive interaction of Peter Grant with his colleagues and the boring description of car rides from one place of London to another, to an absence of hidden treasures from the true London, to the lack of new magical features in this universe, to a completely blah ending… Without getting into spoilers, this chase of the Faceless Man should have been the apex of the series, which mostly revolved around this top Evil, should have seen a smooth merging of the rivers when they join and die in the Channel, but the ending of this book is terribly disappointing. Sounds like the rivers are really drying out and should wait for the next monsoon to swell again to engaging pace and fascinating undercurrents! Although it seems the next book is on its way (and should land in Germany).

Meltdown expected, engines stop running…

crowdsourcing, data science & machine learning to measure violence & abuse against women on twitter

Amnesty International just released on December 18 a study on abuse and harassment on twitter account of female politicians and journalists in the US and the UK. Realised through the collaboration of thousands of crowdsourced volunteers labeling  tweets from the database and the machine-learning expertise of the London branch of ElementAI, branch driven by my friend Julien Cornebise with the main purpose of producing AI for good (as he explained at the recent Bayes for good workshop). Including the development of an ML tool to detect abusive tweets, called Troll Patrol [which pun side is clear in French!]. The amount of abuse exposed by this study and the possibility to train AIs to spot [some of the] abuse on line are both arguments that support Amnesty International call for the accountability of social media companies like twitter on abuse and violence propagated through their platform. (Methodology is also made available there.)

Imperial postdoc in Bayesian nonparametrics

Here is another announcement for a post-doctoral position in London (UK) to work with Sarah Filippi. In the Department of Mathematics at Imperial College London. (More details on the site or in this document. Hopefully, the salary is sufficient for staying in London, if not in South Kensington!)

The post holder will work on developing a novel Bayesian Non-Parametric Test for Conditional Independence. This is at the core of modern causal discovery, itself of paramount importance throughout the sciences and in Machine Learning. As part of this project, the post holder will derive a Bayesian non-parametric testing procedure for conditional independence, scalable to high-dimensional conditioning variable. To ensure maximum impact and allow experimenters in different fields to easily apply this new methodology, the post holder will then create an open-source software package available on the R statistical programming platform. Doing so, the post holder will investigate applying this approach to real-world data from our established partners who have a track record of informing national and international bodies such as Public Health England and the World Health Organisation.

lecturer position in Data Centric Engineering and Statistics, Imperial College London

My friend and Warwick colleague Mark Girolami sent me this announcement for a permanent Lecturer position at Imperial [College London], funded by his recent research chair by the Royal Academy of Engineering (congrats, Mark!). Deadline is April 13, so hurry up!!!

 

postdoc position in London plus Seattle

Here is an announcement from Oliver Ratman for a postdoc position at Imperial College London with partners in Seattle, on epidemiology and new Bayesian methods for estimating sources of transmission with phylogenetics. As stressed by Ollie, no pre-requisites in phylogenetics are required, they are really looking for someone with solid foundations in Mathematics/Statistics, especially Bayesian Statistics, and good computing skills (R, github, MCMC, Stan). The search is officially for a Postdoc in Statistics and Pathogen Phylodynamics. Reference number is NS2017189LH. Deadline is April 07, 2018.