A Citizen's Guide to Artificial Intelligence


Book Description

A concise but informative overview of AI ethics and policy. Artificial intelligence, or AI for short, has generated a staggering amount of hype in the past several years. Is it the game-changer it's been cracked up to be? If so, how is it changing the game? How is it likely to affect us as customers, tenants, aspiring home-owners, students, educators, patients, clients, prison inmates, members of ethnic and sexual minorities, voters in liberal democracies? This book offers a concise overview of moral, political, legal and economic implications of AI. It covers the basics of AI's latest permutation, machine learning, and considers issues including transparency, bias, liability, privacy, and regulation.







The Data Science Design Manual


Book Description

This engaging and clearly written textbook/reference provides a must-have introduction to the rapidly emerging interdisciplinary field of data science. It focuses on the principles fundamental to becoming a good data scientist and the key skills needed to build systems for collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data. The Data Science Design Manual is a source of practical insights that highlights what really matters in analyzing data, and provides an intuitive understanding of how these core concepts can be used. The book does not emphasize any particular programming language or suite of data-analysis tools, focusing instead on high-level discussion of important design principles. This easy-to-read text ideally serves the needs of undergraduate and early graduate students embarking on an “Introduction to Data Science” course. It reveals how this discipline sits at the intersection of statistics, computer science, and machine learning, with a distinct heft and character of its own. Practitioners in these and related fields will find this book perfect for self-study as well. Additional learning tools: Contains “War Stories,” offering perspectives on how data science applies in the real world Includes “Homework Problems,” providing a wide range of exercises and projects for self-study Provides a complete set of lecture slides and online video lectures at www.data-manual.com Provides “Take-Home Lessons,” emphasizing the big-picture concepts to learn from each chapter Recommends exciting “Kaggle Challenges” from the online platform Kaggle Highlights “False Starts,” revealing the subtle reasons why certain approaches fail Offers examples taken from the data science television show “The Quant Shop” (www.quant-shop.com)




Ecological Informatics


Book Description

This book introduces readers to ecological informatics as an emerging discipline that takes into account the data-intensive nature of ecology, the valuable information to be found in ecological data, and the need to communicate results and inform decisions, including those related to research, conservation and resource management. At its core, ecological informatics combines developments in information technology and ecological theory with applications that facilitate ecological research and the dissemination of results to scientists and the public. Its conceptual framework links ecological entities (genomes, organisms, populations, communities, ecosystems, landscapes) with data management, analysis and synthesis, and communicates new findings to inform decisions by following the course of a loop. In comparison to the 2nd edition published in 2006, the 3rd edition of Ecological Informatics has been completely restructured on the basis of the generic conceptual f ramework provided in Figure 1. It reflects the significant advances in data management, analysis and synthesis that have been made over the past 10 years, including new remote and in situ sensing techniques, the emergence of ecological and environmental observatories, novel evolutionary computations for knowledge discovery and forecasting, and new approaches to communicating results and informing decisions.




Think Like a Data Scientist


Book Description

Summary Think Like a Data Scientist presents a step-by-step approach to data science, combining analytic, programming, and business perspectives into easy-to-digest techniques and thought processes for solving real world data-centric problems. Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About the Technology Data collected from customers, scientific measurements, IoT sensors, and so on is valuable only if you understand it. Data scientists revel in the interesting and rewarding challenge of observing, exploring, analyzing, and interpreting this data. Getting started with data science means more than mastering analytic tools and techniques, however; the real magic happens when you begin to think like a data scientist. This book will get you there. About the Book Think Like a Data Scientist teaches you a step-by-step approach to solving real-world data-centric problems. By breaking down carefully crafted examples, you'll learn to combine analytic, programming, and business perspectives into a repeatable process for extracting real knowledge from data. As you read, you'll discover (or remember) valuable statistical techniques and explore powerful data science software. More importantly, you'll put this knowledge together using a structured process for data science. When you've finished, you'll have a strong foundation for a lifetime of data science learning and practice. What's Inside The data science process, step-by-step How to anticipate problems Dealing with uncertainty Best practices in software and scientific thinking About the Reader Readers need beginner programming skills and knowledge of basic statistics. About the Author Brian Godsey has worked in software, academia, finance, and defense and has launched several data-centric start-ups. Table of Contents PART 1 - PREPARING AND GATHERING DATA AND KNOWLEDGE Philosophies of data science Setting goals by asking good questions Data all around us: the virtual wilderness Data wrangling: from capture to domestication Data assessment: poking and prodding PART 2 - BUILDING A PRODUCT WITH SOFTWARE AND STATISTICS Developing a plan Statistics and modeling: concepts and foundations Software: statistics in action Supplementary software: bigger, faster, more efficient Plan execution: putting it all together PART 3 - FINISHING OFF THE PRODUCT AND WRAPPING UP Delivering a product After product delivery: problems and revisions Wrapping up: putting the project away




Social Science Research


Book Description

This book is designed to introduce doctoral and graduate students to the process of conducting scientific research in the social sciences, business, education, public health, and related disciplines. It is a one-stop, comprehensive, and compact source for foundational concepts in behavioral research, and can serve as a stand-alone text or as a supplement to research readings in any doctoral seminar or research methods class. This book is currently used as a research text at universities on six continents and will shortly be available in nine different languages.




Data Science and Big Data Analytics


Book Description

Data Science and Big Data Analytics is about harnessing the power of data for new insights. The book covers the breadth of activities and methods and tools that Data Scientists use. The content focuses on concepts, principles and practical applications that are applicable to any industry and technology environment, and the learning is supported and explained with examples that you can replicate using open-source software. This book will help you: Become a contributor on a data science team Deploy a structured lifecycle approach to data analytics problems Apply appropriate analytic techniques and tools to analyzing big data Learn how to tell a compelling story with data to drive business action Prepare for EMC Proven Professional Data Science Certification Get started discovering, analyzing, visualizing, and presenting data in a meaningful way today!




Introduction to Data Science


Book Description

Introduction to Data Science: Data Analysis and Prediction Algorithms with R introduces concepts and skills that can help you tackle real-world data analysis challenges. It covers concepts from probability, statistical inference, linear regression, and machine learning. It also helps you develop skills such as R programming, data wrangling, data visualization, predictive algorithm building, file organization with UNIX/Linux shell, version control with Git and GitHub, and reproducible document preparation. This book is a textbook for a first course in data science. No previous knowledge of R is necessary, although some experience with programming may be helpful. The book is divided into six parts: R, data visualization, statistics with R, data wrangling, machine learning, and productivity tools. Each part has several chapters meant to be presented as one lecture. The author uses motivating case studies that realistically mimic a data scientist’s experience. He starts by asking specific questions and answers these through data analysis so concepts are learned as a means to answering the questions. Examples of the case studies included are: US murder rates by state, self-reported student heights, trends in world health and economics, the impact of vaccines on infectious disease rates, the financial crisis of 2007-2008, election forecasting, building a baseball team, image processing of hand-written digits, and movie recommendation systems. The statistical concepts used to answer the case study questions are only briefly introduced, so complementing with a probability and statistics textbook is highly recommended for in-depth understanding of these concepts. If you read and understand the chapters and complete the exercises, you will be prepared to learn the more advanced concepts and skills needed to become an expert.




Am I Making Myself Clear?


Book Description

What we don’t know can hurt us—and does so every day. Climate change, health care policy, weapons of mass destruction, an aging infrastructure, stem cell research, endangered species, space exploration—all affect our lives as citizens and human beings in practical and profound ways. But unless we understand the science behind these issues, we cannot make reasonable decisions—and worse, we are susceptible to propaganda cloaked in scientific rhetoric. To convey the facts, this book suggests, scientists must take a more active role in making their work accessible to the media, and thus to the public. In Am I Making Myself Clear? Cornelia Dean, a distinguished science editor and reporter, urges scientists to overcome their institutional reticence and let their voices be heard beyond the forum of scholarly publication. By offering useful hints for improving their interactions with policymakers, the public, and her fellow journalists, Dean aims to change the attitude of scientists who scorn the mass media as an arena where important work is too often misrepresented or hyped. Even more important, she seeks to convince them of the value and urgency of communicating to the public. Am I Making Myself Clear? shows scientists how to speak to the public, handle the media, and describe their work to a lay audience on paper, online, and over the airwaves. It is a book that will improve the tone and content of debate over critical issues and will serve the interests of science and society.




Communicating Science Effectively


Book Description

Science and technology are embedded in virtually every aspect of modern life. As a result, people face an increasing need to integrate information from science with their personal values and other considerations as they make important life decisions about medical care, the safety of foods, what to do about climate change, and many other issues. Communicating science effectively, however, is a complex task and an acquired skill. Moreover, the approaches to communicating science that will be most effective for specific audiences and circumstances are not obvious. Fortunately, there is an expanding science base from diverse disciplines that can support science communicators in making these determinations. Communicating Science Effectively offers a research agenda for science communicators and researchers seeking to apply this research and fill gaps in knowledge about how to communicate effectively about science, focusing in particular on issues that are contentious in the public sphere. To inform this research agenda, this publication identifies important influences â€" psychological, economic, political, social, cultural, and media-related â€" on how science related to such issues is understood, perceived, and used.