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.

another instance of a summer of Bayesian conferences

As it happens, the next MaxEnt conference will happens in London, on 2-6 July, at the Alan Turing Institute, which makes it another perfect continuation of the ISBA meeting in Edinburgh, or of the Computational Statistics summer school in Warwick the week after. But in competition with BAYsm in Warwick and MCqMC in Rennes. I once attended a MaxEnt meeting in Oxford. (Oxford, Mississippi!) Which was quite interesting in the audience it attracted and the focus of the discussions, some of which were exhilaratingly philosophical!

Der Kunst ihre Freiheit [and the scare of the nude]

A poster campaign advertising for several exhibits of modernist painters in Vienna, including major paintings by Egon Schiele, has met with astonishing censoring from the transport companies posting these advertisements. (And by Facebook, which AIs are visibly too artificial and none too intelligent to [fail to] recognise well-known works of art.) Not very surprising, given the well-known conservatism of advertising units in transportation companies, but nonetheless appalling, especially when putting these posters against the truly indecent ones advertising for, e.g., gas guzzling machines and junk food.