NYU to Train Data Scientists for E-Commerce, Pharma, and Other Markets

João-Pierre S. Ruth, Xconomy, February 20, 2013

With all the talk of big data these days, many businesses are still looking for talent to turn massive amounts of information into something they can use. New York University announced Tuesday it is creating a Center for Data Science, along with a master's-level degree program to train big-data professionals for commercial and public sectors.

"There's a continuous flow of data coming from customers and sensors," says Yann LeCun, director of the new center. "Companies have to make sense out of it."

Making more efficient use of big data is growing more critical to business, research, and government entities. NYU sees increasing demand for experts to better harness big data to work in industries that include sensors, e-commerce, and media. "It is very difficult to find data scientists right now on the job market," LeCun says. "It's because there is no place to learn data science."

The theme for the new center, he says, is to bring together people from different academic disciplines such as mathematics, computer science, and statistics. He explains that computer scientists might not know enough math to fill data science jobs, while mathematicians might not know enough computer science. Statisticians also might not be fluent with the computational tools of computer science.

"We're also bringing together people who have data problems—data they want to extract knowledge from," LeCun says. The center will be housed at the university's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and will strive to collaborate with companies such as Google and Facebook that want to leverage information from big data as part of their businesses.

Smaller companies with access to large amounts of data may also want to collaborate with the center, according to LeCun. "Sometimes they have data that can be pooled with other people in their industries," he says.

Why the business interest? Data scientists can help e-commerce companies better understand and target their customers. "If people are buying stuff from your website, you want to propose things they are likely to buy," LeCun says. "There are tools to do this at a simple level, [but] to do this to scale is kind of difficult."

For example, pharmaceutical companies, he says, with vast amounts of data on clinical trials and health insurance companies with information on patients could use data science to help develop suggestions on treatment or courses of action. Utility companies might use big data to better predict system failures or increases in power consumption.

NYU wants to establish partnerships with companies to serve as mentors for students in the program, who must complete capstone projects at the end of their studies. Each project would typically be proposed by a partner company and partially advised by someone from that company. "Students will be confronted with the real world, and the company gets a preview of the students' skills—and perhaps some useful developments on their problem," LeCun says.

Companies might send scientists in residence to work with researchers and faculty at the center to gain new expertise. The companies would also be able take on students as summer interns. And there may be opportunities for companies to fund research projects they are interested in.

The data science center will start taking applications this month, with the master's program expected to launch in the fall with about 25 students. LeCun says 50 to 60 students will annually be accepted going forward into the two-year master's program. Plans for a doctoral program are also in the works.

Should High Schools Teach Big Data?

Given the anticipated shortage of data scientists, some high school educators have jumped in to expose students to big data concepts.

Ellis Booker, Information Week, October 16, 2012.

Changing when advanced database technology is taught has real-world implications, given the realities of today's job market. Both data analytics and big data skills are in high demand in private industry and government.

But there is a looming shortage of workers with these abilities. McKinsey & Co. sounded this alarm back in 2011 with its seminal report that predicted the U.S. would face ashortage of 140,000 to 190,000 workers with the skills to manage and analyze big data.

The popular technology job board Dice.com has seen a spike in listings for "data scientist," up from just a handful a year ago to more than 35 at the start of October. While still an imprecise job designation, "data scientists" command high salaries compared to other IT job titles. (Separately, the unemployment rate for technology professionals dropped in the third quarter to 3.3%, as compared to 4.2% in the same quarter a year ago, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.)

These listings--many of which request a PhD in fields like mathematics, economics, or statistics--today cluster in financial services, retail, and e-commerce. Job listings using the phrase "big data" have increased from around 200 in January to nearly 800 in October.

"But increasingly, every industry is dealing with big data questions," said Alice Hill, managing director of Dice.com and president of Dice Labs.

Preparing the U.S. for future high-tech jobs, specifically ones oriented around data, was also a focus of TechAmerica Foundation's Big Data Commission.

Given the anticipated shortage of data scientists, should students start learning the precepts of big data in high school?Analytics and data science are central to making "business, the global economy, and our society work better," Steve Mills, senior VP and group executive at IBM, and co-chair of the Big Data Commission, said in a statement. "That's why it's critical that our country prepares a new generation of experts who know how to corral today's data deluge for world-changing insights."

The commission's new report, "Demystifying Big Data: A Practical Guide to Transforming the Business of Government," included the following recommendations for skills development: Strengthen and expand public-private partnerships to invest in skills-building initiatives for the federal workforce in the area of big data. These should include formal career tracks for IT managers; an IT leadership academy to provide big data and related training and certification; data-intensive degree programs; and scholarships to prepare a new generation of data scientists.

Big Data In High School?

Among those trying to push big data classes down to the high school level is Alex Philp, PhD. Philp is founder and CTO of TerraEchos, a developer of advanced intelligence and surveillance security systems. Philp has been working with the high schools in Missoula, Mont., and has even created a scholarship program at one--Sentinel High School--to introduce these topics to computer science students.

"[We] cooked up the idea of promoting a merit-based, micro-challenge grant at Sentinel," Philp explains. Currently, four student teams have been awarded grants. "Ultimately, I hope these high school students feed into opportunities at the University of Montana and then ultimately into the most exciting businesses and markets involving big data," Philp said. "This also relates to aspects of the overall economic competitiveness of our country and a renewed commitment to science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM) competency in our country."

Meanwhile, at the university level, Philp has been working with Eric Tangedahl, IT director for the school of business administration at The University of Montana, to create a multidisciplinary course, now in its first year.

"The course draws students from computer science, management information systems, and math," Tangedahl said. "We felt that to tackle these problems, students have to work together in teams, teams with different skill sets," he said.

The three-hour class, now with 18 students, is half lecture about big data and half lab--specifically around IBM Infostream, a programming language that takes advantage of IBM's DB2 and WebSphere platforms.

Another high school on this path is the science and engineering magnet (SEM) school at Yvonne A. Ewell Townview Center in Dallas. SEM, ranked by Newsweek this year as one of the best high schools in the U.S., recently participated in IBM's annual Master the Mainframe Contest for high school students in the U.S. and Canada.

Marilyn Cadenhead, who teaches Advanced Placement computer science at SEM, has many students participating in the contest.

Cadenhead says her students use technology very effectively, and already have a computer-mediated learning style. "This is a digital age, very different from when I was in school," she wrote in an email. "I learned to type on a manual typewriter. If we as teachers do not engage [students] with the latest technology and teaching styles, we will be 'boring' and the students will not be motivated to learn."

"I want my students to know what is going on in the real world," Cadenhead concludes, explaining her enthusiasm for the IBM mainframe contest, as well the annual IBM Innovation summer camp that some SEM students attended this year.

IBM's Innovation summer camp Facebook page describes the program this way: "The students will gain hands-on experience with visualization, mobile application development, Linux, and DB2 coupled with demos of research underway at UTD in mind control, gaming, and robotics."

Other observers, however, point out that big data analysis is powerful precisely because it is about more than raw technology. The highly valued professionals in this space are those who ask the right questions, who can see business-relevant answers inside the data. That kind of maturity and domain expertise is beyond the capacity of high school students, they say.

The University of Montana's Tangedahl concurs. "I wouldn't throw high school student in and expect them to come up with a [big data] program for the Defense department," he said. But, he adds, "you've absolutely got to put the building blocks in place." He recommends adding data statistics and programming classes in high school to better prepare students for college-level classes, like his, that push teams of students to answer "real-world problems."

Like Tangedahl, Dice.com's Hill isn't sold on the idea of pushing big data instruction to high school students. She thinks students should learn relevant technologies, such as data interpretation, data extraction, and data modeling. "It's never too soon to learn those skills," she said.

But TerraEchos' Philp disagrees, arguing it is essential that educators encourage excellence in students at all ages, and not set limits.

"I've spent many years of my life working with thousands of students at various ages, attempting to raise the bar," he said. "High school kids are proposing [projects] that are as good as I'm seeing in college." With motivation, inspiration, and passion, he said, "my experience is, students rise to the occasion."

Brookings Report: Big Data for Education: Data Mining, Data Analytics, and Web Dashboards

Darrell M. West, The Brookings Institution, September 4, 2012

Imagine this scenario: twelve-year-old Susan took a course designed to improve her reading skills. She read short stories and the teacher would give her and her fellow students a written test every other week measuring vocabulary and reading comprehension. A few days later, Susan’s instructor graded the paper and returned her exam. The test showed that she did well on vocabulary, but needed to work on retaining key concepts.

In the future, her younger brother Richard is likely to learn reading through a computerized software program. As he goes through each story, the computer will collect data on how long it takes him to master the material. After each assignment, a quiz will pop up on his screen and ask questions concerning vocabulary and reading comprehension. As he answers each item, Richard will get instant feedback showing whether his answer is correct and how his performance compares to classmates and students across the country. For items that are difficult, the computer will send him links to websites that explain words and concepts in greater detail. At the end of the session, his teacher will receive an automated readout on Richard and the other students in the class summarizing their reading time, vocabulary knowledge, reading comprehension, and use of supplemental electronic resources.

In comparing these two learning environments, it is apparent that current school evaluations suffer from several limitations. Many of the typical pedagogies provide little immediate feedback to students, require teachers to spend hours grading routine assignments, aren’t very proactive about showing students how to improve comprehension, and fail to take advantage of digital resources that can improve the learning process. This is unfortunate because data-driven approaches make it possible to study learning in real-time and offer systematic feedback to students and teachers.

In this report, I examine the potential for improved research, evaluation, and accountability through data mining, data analytics, and web dashboards. So-called “big data” make it possible to mine learning information for insights regarding student performance and learning approaches.[1] Rather than rely on periodic test performance, instructors can analyze what students know and what techniques are most effective for each pupil. By focusing on data analytics, teachers can study learning in far more nuanced ways.[2] Online tools enable evaluation of a much wider range of student actions, such as how long they devote to readings, where they get electronic resources, and how quickly they master key concepts.


[1] James Manyika, Michael Chui, Brad Brown, Jacques Bughin, Richard Dobbs, Charles Roxburgh, and Angela Byers, “Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity,” McKinsey Global Institute, May, 2011.
[2] Felix Castro, Alfredo Vellido, Angela Nebot, and Francisco Mugica, “Applying Data Mining Techniques to e-Learning Problems,” Studies in Computational Intelligence, Volume 62, 2007, pp. 183-221.

Widening Gap Between Wealthy, Other Classes – and How to Close It – Explored in New E-book from Kauffman Foundation Scholar

Brink Lindsey cites critical need for innovation, investment in human capital in new release from Princeton University Press

Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, August 8, 2012

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (Aug. 8, 2012) – The growing divide between those enjoying economic prosperity and those struggling to make ends meet is a subject that commands conversation among politicians, pundits, scholars, journalists, economists and the like. But the means for narrowing the gap have proved elusive.

In his new e-book, HUMAN CAPITALISM: How Economic Growth Has Made Us Smarter – and More Unequal, Kauffman Foundation senior scholar Brink Lindsey explores the reasons behind today's economic disparity and, more importantly, suggests actions that may help to improve the situation for future generations. Released today, Lindsey's e-book original is the first for Princeton University Press. 

Greater investment in "human capital" is critically needed to stem the divide between society's haves and have-nots, according to Lindsey. He argues that the gap between elites and the rest of the population can best be explained by the ever-growing complexity of modern economies and the barriers to acquiring the skills (human capital) needed to not only survive but thrive in a new economic landscape.

Watch an interview with author Brink Lindsey about his new e-book.

In short, today's economic complexity is making the elite richer — and smarter. Lindsey explains: "As the economy makes ever-greater demands on their minds, the successful are making ever-greater investments in education and other ways of increasing their children's human capital, expanding their cognitive skills and leading them to still higher levels of success. "But unfortunately, as the rich are securely riding this virtuous cycle, the poor are trapped in a vicious one where a pattern of family breakdown, unemployment and dysfunction leads to further erosion of knowledge and skills." Lindsey's research shows that while high-skill jobs are rewarded, mid-level jobs are increasingly automated or outsourced, further widening the gap. Simply retraining workers or teaching skills doesn't address the underlying issues of cultural divisions and polarization that permeate the economy. Fueling the polarization is the resentment of those on the lower end who don't want to hear that the world has changed and that they need better jobs. To redeem the promise of human capitalism, Lindsey says it is necessary to restore the connection between rising complexity and rising human capital across the socioeconomic spectrum. 

 

His recommended solutions include: · maintain growth through policies that encourage entrepreneurship and innovation; · reform K-12 education by unleashing competition; · step up experiments with early childhood interventions that can compensate for disadvantaged environments; · combat social exclusion of low-skilled adults through low-wage job subsidies, changes in disability insurance and penal reform to reduce mass incarceration; · improve higher education by limiting tuition subsidies; and · reform land-use regulation and occupational licensing to facilitate upward mobility. 

 

The e-book is available for $4.99 (ISBN: 9781400845729) from Princeton University Press. An expanded hardcover edition of the book will be published in spring 2013. "Rising income inequality is an issue society can no longer afford to ignore. This book deepens our understanding of the forces behind the problem and is bound to stimulate useful discussion of it." ― Robert H. Frank, author of The Darwin Economy

 

About the Author Brink Lindsey is a senior scholar in Research and Policy for the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, where he uses his expertise in international trade, immigration, globalization and economic development to identify the structural reforms needed to revive entrepreneurial innovation, firm formation and job creation in the wake of the Great Recession. An accomplished author, Lindsey has written several books, including The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America's Politics and Culture; Against the Dead Hand: The Uncertain Struggle for Global Capitalism; and, with Daniel Ikenson, Antidumping Exposed: The Devilish Details of Unfair Trade Law. His writings also have been published widely in major newspapers and leading policy magazines, and he has appeared frequently on television and radio. 

 

Media Contact: Barb Schulte, 816-932-1103, bschulte@kauffman.org, Kauffman Foundation

Panel: The promises and perils of big data

Rachel King, ZDNET, June 5, 2012

Summary: Big data is already enabling many businesses to make better decisions, but it has only made incremental changes in other verticals.

SAN FRANCISCO – Big data offers a lot of promise and opportunities for improving our society — especially for business and education purposes — but there are a lot of hurdles to get around first.

A few of those pitfalls and perils were discussed in detail during a panel discussion at The Economist’s two-day summit about information, which kicked off on Tuesday afternoon.

Economist data editor Kenneth Cukier got the ball rolling during a series of rolling interviews exploring the promise and perils of the data deluge.

Jeff Hammerbacher, chief scientist of Cloudera, posited that the most interesting thing going on in big data today is making data preparation more granular.

“The more you zoom in, the more pathologies you find,” Hammerbacher said.

When Cukier pressed if this meant that big data can’t always be trusted for one reason or another, Hammerbacher countered by asking, “If you can’t trust the data, what can you trust?”

“It’s hard for me to think of a case where measuring more makes you less certain,” Hammerbacher asserted.

One of the barriers towards big data at the moment, Hammerbacher hypothesized, is that we’re in this “brief pocket of time” where people involved in statistics and computer science have an advantage over most of the population in this field, allowing them to draw information and conclusions that most people can’t.

“It’s fun to exploit this inefficiency,” Hammerbacher joked, but he predicting that our tools will automate big data analytics for everyone within 10 to 15 years.

Hammerbacher continued the rolling interview style by following up with Geoffrey Nunberg, an adjunct professor at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley.

Nunberg commented that there has been progress in using big data sources in linguistics and how language is used as a tool in different communities, but that change has been more incremental rather than a “quantum leap.”

Looking at Google Translate, Nunberg admitted that the online translation tool is “so much better than systems we had a long time ago.” But the problem is that it is still hard to tell the difference because Google Translate still doesn’t usually produce results that even a “first year” language student would offer.

As an observer of language in the cultural scene, Nunberg said that he uses data analytics this all the time to see the way words are changing in meaning. For example, Nunberg cited the word “elite” used to be usually modified by financial terms, but now it is more associated with the media.

Turning towards social networks, Juliette Powell, author of the book, 33 Million People in the Room, cited social media as a medium “to co-create the future together” using connected technology.

When it comes to understanding data sets, Powell outlined four core elements that any Internet user would recognize that are vital for understanding big data analytics going forward: digital literacy, digital trust, platform transparency, and access.

But what is most interesting to Powell are the people themselves, adding that we shouldn’t get caught up in data sets and forget the relationships.

“It’s all about trust,” Powell asserted, explaining that we choose the information we share and that fact needs to be kept in mind when analyzing big data.

One topic that always seems to come up when discussing either social media or big data is privacy. Circling back, Cukier argued that this is not the central problem to big data, but rather “propensity” and the possibility that we’re going to have algorithims predicting our behaviors.

See also: http://www.economist.com/events-conferences/americas/information-2012

Sal Khan's 'Academy' sparks a tech revolution in education

Marco R. della Cava, USA TODAY, May 30, 2012

  

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – Most people don't wake up in the morning thinking about how to best explain the financial collapse of the Thai baht in the 1990s. But most people aren't Sal Khan. 

"When I started, you wouldn't have imagined that some crazy dude in a closet making videos would help lead this charge," says Salman Khan. "But my mission is to have every precocious 13-year-old in the world have access to every bit of information they could ever want."

"When I started, you wouldn't have imagined that some crazy dude in a closet making videos would help lead this charge," says Salman Khan. "But my mission is to have every precocious 13-year-old in the world have access to every bit of information they could ever want." 

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It's not much past 9 a.m., and Khan, 36, founder of the online educational non-profit Khan Academy, gets set to record his 3,081st video lecture in a small office with a view of air conditioning ducts.

"In 1997, you see, there was a devaluation of the Thai currency," Khan says into a beefy microphone as he makes crude sketches on his monitor. 

If you want gleaming high-tech, go down the road to Google's campus. If you're looking for a revolution, this is the right address.

Ever since quitting his job as a successful hedge-fund analyst two years ago to dedicate himself full time to this labor of love, Khan has managed to win fans worldwide and goad skeptical educators.

His simply narrated, faceless home videos on everything from algebra to French history have been viewed half a billion times. Last year, a number of schools began "flipping" their classrooms, having students study Khan videos by night and do homework with teachers by day.

In the process, Khan has fueled the debate over tech's growing influence on education while garnering the support of powerful friends.

"At 3,000 lessons online, Sal's personal ability as a teacher is remarkable," says Bill Gates, whose mention of Khan Academy at a conference in Aspen, Colo., in 2010 put the website on the map. "Bringing this kind of creativity and new assessment tools for teachers could make a profoundly positive difference in education."

Gates' enthusiasm is shared by Silicon Valley philanthropist and Academy backer Ann Doerr, wife of renowned tech investor John Doerr. "Sal imparts a sense of dignity; he assumes each (viewer) is intelligent," says Doerr, who adds that providing free access to knowledge that "allows students to become empowered, drive their own education and test their mettle just seems right."

Khan is taking that praise and sprinting with it.

Where he once was an army of one, the staff has been ramped up to 32, including the recent high-profile addition of Google's first hired employee, programming ace Craig Silverstein. The staff's immediate mission is to further broaden the site's content and improve assessment and feedback features so the Khan Academy experience becomes more interactive.

"We have 6 million visitors a month, so we think that students helping each other is the future," Khan says. "That community can become as popular as the videos themselves. It'll be like having free private tutors in the cloud."

Next up: Camp Khan

Khan's plans are no less ambitious on the ground. This summer, he'll launch the first Khan Academy Discovery Lab in Palo Alto, Calif., a small, project-based summer camp "that's like a lab for us, so we can learn more about how kids learn," he says. If it's a hit, the labs will expand nationwide next year.

And after, perhaps a bricks-and-mortar Khan Academy. "I wouldn't want to be the headmaster of such a place per se, because I want to work on stuff that scales," he says. "But it's a cool idea. A place where teachers make what an engineer would make, where the ideas we have can be on display."

Those ideas have caused friction in the education community. Though critiques vary, most hinge on the inference that classroom-based teachers aren't as important as we thought.

"If a teacher is just lecturing like a computer might, maybe that teacher should be replaced. But the truth is, most teachers don't just drone on, they educate," says Frank Noschese, a physics teacher at John Jay High in Cross River, N.Y., whose personal website dedicates a tab to Khan Academy criticism.

"Some teachers are getting pressure from their administrators to flip their classrooms, but it might not be the right thing for them," Noschese says. "When I first learned about the site, I eagerly e-mailed it around, saying it could be a useful tool. But now all of sudden it's supposed to be reforming education?"

That bandwagon phenomenon is at the root of the grumbling, says Kevin Bushweller, executive editor of Education Week Digital Directions.

"Khan's timing is perfect, because students and parents are living in the age of YouTube, where video watching is routine," he says. "Certainly schools need to evaluate what's best for their kids and curriculum. That said, technology is here, and doing the same old thing just won't work."

Suney Park agrees. The sixth-grade math teacher at Eastside College Prep in nearby East Palo Alto recently flipped her classroom using Khan Academy videos, and now feels liberated. "I had my doubts, but now I feel like the conductor of an orchestra, and if I have to tell the violins to go on with their stuff while I help the brass catch up, I can do it," Park says. "I couldn't go back to the regular way of teaching."

Voice behind the videos

Love it or hate it, Khan Academy is part of a looming tech-education iceberg, says Victor Hu, head of education technology and services for Goldman Sachs. He says that from 2002 to 2006, venture capital firms put $300 million into about 50 tech-ed deals; since 2007, $2 billion has gone into 230 deals.

"Technology is doing to education what it's done to countless other industries: disrupting it," Hu says. "Where education once was static, bound to a textbook, now it's moving to a global, interdisciplinary model."

But even Hu is impressed by Khan's rapid and improbable success. "To go from making videos for your cousins to promoting a new model for education in a few short years is amazing," he says. "But it's also the best thing that can happen to this space. It needs more smart people who care."

By any yardstick, Khan is both. Raised by a single mother in suburban New Orleans, Khan attended a local public school, where "we had smart kids, and we had metal detectors."

He was one of the smart ones, eventually not only captaining the math team but also taking graduate-level mathematics courses at the University of New Orleans. Massachusetts Institute of Technology offered him a scholarship, and four years later, he graduated with two bachelor's degrees and one master's in computer science and math.

"Being a bit crazy intellectually is normal here, and that characterizes Sal," says Anant Agarwal, an early Khan mentor at MIT who now is president of edX, a newly formed non-profit online-education partnership between MIT and Harvard.

"Sal and I have our debates, but we agree that adding a tech dimension to education will have a huge impact worldwide," says Agarwal, whose edX project is echoed by news that Stanford, Princeton, the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania have partnered with Coursera.org to offer classes online.

"What makes Sal's videos particularly engaging is just his personality," Agarwal says. "It's his voice. You feel like he's there next to you, explaining things."

But Khan's almost laid-back delivery belies a fierce drive.

"Besides having a great sense of humor, Sal is also very intense and dedicated," says Shantanu Sinha, who met Khan in high school, roomed with him at MIT and now is Khan Academy's president and COO.

Sinha recalls walking miles in the snow with Khan so the two could tutor gifted children nearby. "He became that focused with his videos," he says. "Heck, he was that focused when he went looking for a wife."

Khan found one, rheumatologist Umaima Marvi, during his time at Harvard Business School, which he attended after an ill-fated foray into the dot-com space at the turn of the millennium. The couple have two children, a 3-year-old boy and a 10-month-old girl.

If Khan is pushing his academy for anyone, it would seem to be for that next generation. He got off a hedge-fund track that was promising high-seven-figure payoffs so he could pilot this startup, one he is particularly thrilled offers no lure of stock options and instant riches.

"I saw firsthand what that did to people (during the dot-com years), and it was ugly," he says. "Sometimes people in Silicon Valley are a bit confused, 'Oh, you're not for profit?' But the core ethos of the valley isn't to buy a Bentley. It's to innovate, do well, and then help the next generation innovate. So we're just part of that."

Khan says he has had no problems luring top talent, and Silverstein's decision to come on board last fall is a case in point. "At first I just thought I'd donate some money, but then I thought it'd be better to donate my time," says Silverstein, whose job is to help other new engineers make the site's user experience more intuitive, something he pioneered at Google.

"Search was a bit like where we're at with Khan Academy. There was a lot out there, and it was just a matter of helping people find what they needed fast," he says. "Who knows where this will go? But helping people learn things is a nice challenge to have."

An argument with oomph

Back in his small office, Khan is holding forth — OK, call it lecturing — on why a college degree may not mean what it used to.

It's full of reasoned examples ("College must give you a job? Well, no, a computer science degree from Berkeley will give you a job, but you go some random place, it's not clear what will happen to you") and makes a simple point (create globally recognized tests that define mastery, which ignores whether the student had come upon that knowledge at Oxford or by sitting in his basement watching videos).

Yet what's most fun is watching Khan make his argument. As with his faceless videos, he is engaging for some indefinable yet undeniable reason. But what if Khan stops making those videos? Will folks keep watching?

"We're letting others in now," says Khan, noting that Stanford will soon put medical classes on his website. "But hopefully they realize from what I've done that it can't be a professor at a whiteboard with PowerPoint. It has to be bite-size and conversational, and no faces."

Khan swivels in his desk chair, then grins broadly.

"When I started, you wouldn't have imagined that some crazy dude in a closet making videos would help lead this charge. But my mission is to have every precocious 13-year-old in the world have access to every bit of information they could ever want."

In other words, his target is the 13-year-old version of Salman Amin "Sal" Khan.

From Student to Teacher

Key steps on Sal Khan’s road from proud math geek to passionate online educator:

·       At Grace King High School in Metairie, La., (other famous alums: Ellen DeGeneres and Donna Brazile), Khan — valedictorian in 1994 — takes advanced-placement math classes. School rules compel all AP students to join the math club, where Khan finds he enjoys mentoring younger students.

·       After graduating from MIT in 1998, Khan uses his computer science degrees to join the start-up meVC as its chief technology officer. He’s on the road to riches when the bubble bursts. He attends Harvard Business School, where he falls in love with Umaima Marvi and the study of capital markets.

·       Rejected by most hedge funds for lack of experience, Khan finds a mentor in Daniel Wohl, who brings him on board Wohl Capital Management in Boston, which soon moves to Palo Alto, Calif. In 2004, Khan help his 13-old-cousin, Nadia, with math problems by making videos in his free time.

·       In 2008, Wohl closes out his fund. He encourages Khan to start his own hedge fund, but the market collapse looms. In 2009, Khan ends his hedge fund work and uses a small donation from philanthropist Ann Doerr to create Khan Academy. A year later, Bill Gates cites Khan’s videos at a conference, and donations flow.

In late 2010, a few Bay Area schools agree to “flip” their curriculums, using Khan videos as homework. Khan accelerates the growth of his non-profit, hiring engineers, management consultants and former teachers. But his biggest coup comes in late 2011 when he lands Craig Silverstein, the man who created Google’s tech architecture as its first employee.

Big Data: California Chosen as Home for Computing Institute

John Markoff, The New York Times, April 30, 2012

BERKELEY, Calif. — The Simons Foundation, which specializes in science and math research, has chosen the University of California, Berkeley, as host for an ambitious new center for computer science, the university plans to announce on Tuesday. 

The foundation’s $60 million grant to establish the center, to be called the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at U.C. Berkeley, underscores the growing influence of computer science on the physical and social sciences. An interdisciplinary array of scientists will explore the mathematical foundations of computer science and attack problems in fields as diverse as health care, astrophysics, genetics and economics. 

“We’ve been talking to astronomers, climate scientists, fluid mechanics people, quantum physicists and cognitive scientists,” said Richard M. Karp, a Berkeley computer scientist who will be the institute’s director. 

Part science and part engineering, computer science has long been viewed warily by scientists in other disciplines. But that is changing, not only because the computer has become the standard scientific instrument but also because “computational thinking” offers new ways to analyze the vast amounts of data now accessible to scientists. This new approach — what researchers call the “algorithmic” or “computational” lens — is transforming science in much the way the microscope and telescope did. When computer scientists train their sights on other disciplines, said Christos H. Papadimitriou, a Berkeley computer scientist who will help manage the institute, “truths come out that wouldn’t have come out otherwise.” 

Moreover, the flood of experimental results generated by inexpensive sensors, combined with the Internet’s ubiquitous connectivity, is threatening to drown scientists in vast data sets often called “big data.” 

“I do think there is this idea that big data is happening,” said Peter Norvig, Google’s director of research. “Now there is more acceptance pencil and paper alone won’t solve all of our problems.” 

Tuesday’s announcement is part of a broader trend toward expanding support for research in computational theory. The Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science and Engineering was created last fall at Boston University to turn a computational lens on an array of disciplines. (It is named for the former Lebanese prime minister who was assassinated in 2005; he was also a former trustee of the university.) 

“It’s analytics with big data, it’s the ability to compute and analyze in massive parallel architectures,” said Jeannette M. Wing, head of the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon University. “All the science and engineering disciplines realize this is part of the future.” 

Dr. Karp, the Simons Institute’s new director, cited the example of the Berkeley cosmologist Joshua Bloom, who has automated the process of identifying interesting events in the night sky. Each evening the system must choose from millions of options. 

“What should we track tomorrow?” Dr. Karp said. “There is a continually changing decision process. It’s an online computation process par excellence.” 

The institute will not be a scientific computing center, said Alistair Sinclair, a Berkeley computer scientist who will serve as its associate director. “An astronomer won’t come along with data and we all sit down and create algorithms to process his data,” he said. “It goes deeper than that. The astronomer will come and talk about the nature of his problems.”

The institute will have about 70 visiting researchers at any one time, including faculty members, postdoctoral researchers and graduate students. It will begin operating later this year and be fully operational in 2013. 

The Simons Foundation, created by the hedge fund billionaire and philanthropist James H. Simons, has given hundreds of millions of dollars for research in autism, math and physical sciences, and life sciences — and, last year, $150 million from both the organization and its founders to Stony Brook University on Long Island. 

Dr. Simons, who earned his doctorate in mathematics at Berkeley, was chairman of the math department at Stony Brook before creating Renaissance Technologies, a private investment firm. Forbes magazine estimates his current worth at $10.6 billion.

Paul Krugman: Wasting Our Minds

Paul Krugman, The New York Times, April 29, 2012

In Spain, the unemployment rate among workers under 25 is more than 50 percent. In Ireland almost a third of the young are unemployed. Here in America, youth unemployment is “only” 16.5 percent, which is still terrible — but things could be worse. 

And sure enough, many politicians are doing all they can to guarantee that things will, in fact, get worse. We’ve been hearing a lot about the war on women, which is real enough. But there’s also a war on the young, which is just as real even if it’s better disguised. And it’s doing immense harm, not just to the young, but to the nation’s future. 

Let’s start with some advice Mitt Romney gave to college students during an appearance last week. After denouncing President Obama’s “divisiveness,” the candidate told his audience, “Take a shot, go for it, take a risk, get the education, borrow money if you have to from your parents, start a business.” 

The first thing you notice here is, of course, the Romney touch — the distinctive lack of empathy for those who weren’t born into affluent families, who can’t rely on the Bank of Mom and Dad to finance their ambitions. But the rest of the remark is just as bad in its own way.

I mean, “get the education”? And pay for it how? Tuition at public colleges and universities has soared, in part thanks to sharp reductions in state aid. Mr. Romney isn’t proposing anything that would fix that; he is, however, a strong supporter of the Ryan budget plan, which would drastically cut federal student aid, causing roughly a million students to lose their Pell grants. 

So how, exactly, are young people from cash-strapped families supposed to “get the education”? Back in March Mr. Romney had the answer: Find the college “that has a little lower price where you can get a good education.” Good luck with that. But I guess it’s divisive to point out that Mr. Romney’s prescriptions are useless for Americans who weren’t born with his advantages. 

There is, however, a larger issue: even if students do manage, somehow, to “get the education,” which they do all too often by incurring a lot of debt, they’ll be graduating into an economy that doesn’t seem to want them. 

You’ve probably heard lots about how workers with college degrees are faring better in this slump than those with only a high school education, which is true. But the story is far less encouraging if you focus not on middle-aged Americans with degrees but on recent graduates.  

Unemployment among recent graduates has soared; so has part-time work, presumably reflecting the inability of graduates to find full-time jobs. Perhaps most telling, earnings have plunged even among those graduates working full time — a sign that many have been forced to take jobs that make no use of their education. 

College graduates, then, are taking it on the chin thanks to the weak economy. And research tells us that the price isn’t temporary: students who graduate into a bad economy never recover the lost ground. Instead, their earnings are depressed for life. 

What the young need most of all, then, is a better job market. People like Mr. Romney claim that they have the recipe for job creation: slash taxes on corporations and the rich, slash spending on public services and the poor. But we now have plenty of evidence on how these policies actually work in a depressed economy — and they clearly destroy jobs rather than create them. 

For as you look at the economic devastation in Europe, you should bear in mind that some of the countries experiencing the worst devastation have been doing everything American conservatives say we should do here. Not long ago, conservatives gushed over Ireland’s economic policies, especially its low corporate tax rate; the Heritage Foundation used to give it higher marks for “economic freedom” than any other Western nation. When things went bad, Ireland once again received lavish praise, this time for its harsh spending cuts, which were supposed to inspire confidence and lead to quick recovery. 

And now, as I said, almost a third of Ireland’s young can’t find jobs. 

What should we do to help America’s young? Basically, the opposite of what Mr. Romney and his friends want. We should be expanding student aid, not slashing it. And we should reverse the de facto austerity policies that are holding back the U.S. economy — the unprecedented cutbacks at the state and local level, which have been hitting education especially hard. 

Yes, such a policy reversal would cost money. But refusing to spend that money is foolish and shortsighted even in purely fiscal terms. Remember, the young aren’t just America’s future; they’re the future of the tax base, too. 

A mind is a terrible thing to waste; wasting the minds of a whole generation is even more terrible. Let’s stop doing it.

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New Online University, headed by Larry Summers

TechCrunch, April,  2012

The Minerva Project is aiming to rethink the role of colleges and universities, taking into account the ways in which the Web has completely altered the distribution of and access to information.

The Minerva Project aims to offer a liberal arts education that is defined by an “extraordinarily rigorous” learning and admissions process. Not only does Minerva want to attract the same bright young minds that attend Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, it wants a global student body, both at home and abroad.

Just like traditional institutions, Minerva will be a four-year university, with two semesters, and four classes per semester. But, for the first year, Minerva students will live in their home countries, learning the core curriculum, so that by their sophomore year, in spite of language differences, all the students will have the same basics.

Then, from the start of their sophomore year through graduation, students will be encouraged to live in a new country (or at the very least, a new city) every semester. In this way, Minerva wants its education to be informed by experience and by the resources available online: “We’re not going to offer a single foreign language class, but if you’re not trilingual by the end of your four years, you won’t graduate,” Nelson says.

Restoring Contemplation

How Disconnecting Bolsters the Knowledge Economy

Jessie Mannisto, American Library Association Office of Information Technology Policy, March 2012

While constant access to information enabled by digital devices has done much to improve our lives, it also exacts costs with respect to our attention and productivity that are especially harmful in a knowledge based economy. Increased public awareness of the impact of our information consumption habits—and ways to develop a healthier “information diet”—will help mitigate the negative impacts of constant connectivity.

To build this awareness, librarians and educators can teach information consumers to differentiate actively between gathering and processing information and help them understand when and how each of these modes of thought will benefit them. Libraries also can provide services and spaces that promote contemplation within the modern information infrastructure. Software developers and system engineers can contribute

by creating products and services that promote contemplation. Researchers can help us better understand the costs of constant connectivity and tailor an information infrastructure that better supports creative and analytical thought—and, ultimately, a higher quality of life.

MIT Sloan course to tackle 'Big Data'

Chris Reidy,  The Boston Globe,   February 01, 2012,

Companies are now so overwhelmed by information overload that the MIT Sloan School of Management said it is gearing up to teach a two-day course that aims to help executives cope with massive data dumps and extract meaningful insights from real-time digital data.

Set for March 27 and March 28, the course is titled, “Big Data: Making Complex Things Simpler.” In an MIT Sloan press release, professor Erik Brynjolfsson, director of MIT’s Center for Digital Business, commented on the phenomenon of “Big Data.” According to Brynjolfsson, companies adept at using “Big Data” are “around 5 percent more productive and profitable than their competitors.”

Professor Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland, director of MIT’s Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program, also teaches in the Big Data program.
“Many managers undervalue the worth of data, but really it is like money in your bank account and you should be getting a return on it,” Pentland said in a statement. “This program will show managers how to capture the benefits of data such as creating better customer analytics or capturing real-time consumer preferences.”

Mobile phones are one rich source of Big Data, Pentland noted. On Black Friday, the big shopping day on the Friday after Thanksgiving, projections on sales could be based on mobile phone activity. Even more intriguing perhaps, mobile phone activity has the potential to help saloon-keepers to track the movements of potential patrons.

“We could predict Black Friday sales before certain stores make their own announcements based on how many mobile phones were in their parking lots that day,” Pentland said. “We also can find out which bars are popular at 9:00 p.m. versus 11:00 p.m. with this type of mobile phone data.”