Link Roundup December 2020

Cameron Cook

The campus Pandemic-Affected Research Continuation Initiative is helping to support research which has been drastically affected by COVID-19 interruptions.

A recent Educause article speaks about open science from the IT perspective and how to align these to support research innovation.

The Future of Text is a newly published, freely downloadable collection of essays and contributions from a wide range of perspectives across domains and institutions. It may be of interest to those who work with text data, who are in the history of technology/science, or those who are interested in how scholarship may evolve over time.

Maij Xyooj

Amazon Web Services recently announced Amazon SageMaker Clarify, a service that helps reduce bias in machine learning models. According to Amazon VP, Bratin Saha, SageMaker Clarify ‘allows you to have insight into your data and models throughout your machine learning lifecycle.” One can use SageMaker Clarify to detect bias in their data before they start data preparation and building models.

In addition to SageMaker Clarify, Amazon Web Services also announced additional tools that will make it “much easier for developers to build end to-end machine learning pipelines to prepare, build, train, explain, inspect, monitor debug and run custom machine learning models with greater visibility, explainability, and automation at scale.”

Jennifer Patiño

Timnit Gebru, an artificial intelligence researcher, says she was fired by Google for refusing to retract or remove her name from a paper she co-authored called “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” that surveyed research on the energy consumption of training large language models and the dangers of AI models replicating biased language found online while also offering some suggestions for approaches.

Rebekah Jones, a data scientist who formerly worked for the state of Florida had her home raided by agents. She helped create the state’s COVID-19 dashboard and says she was fired when she refused to manipulate data in support of easing coronavirus restrictions. She created her own dashboard for reporting the state’s COVID numbers, Florida COVID Action and has been involved in another project, Covid Monitor, that focuses on covid in schools.