DevIntel LLC

09/14/2013

Data science is progressing fast, but how much are we really keeping up in development? Still just statistics? Come on!!!

Shared with Dropbox

07/02/2013

Well researched, Mr. Press! (Eagerly waiting for DevIntel's coverage on Forbes by the same author)

The story of how data scientists became sexy is mostly the story of the coupling of the mature discipline of statistics with a very young one--computer science. The term “Data Science” has emerged only recently to specifically designate a new profession that is expected to make sense of the vast [....

03/25/2013

NetMob May 1-3, 2013 in Cambridge, MA looks at analyzing mobile phone datasets for D4D intelligence

With a special event on the Data for Development (D4D) challenge. "I can't say how impressed I was with the quality and quantity of the submissions." "There is some incredibly good work in here."

02/12/2013

Interesting article...

In a study that represents a potential cultural shift in how basic science research can be conducted, researchers from Harvard Medical School, Harvard Business School and London Business School have demonstrated that a crowdsourcing platform pioneered in the commercial sector can solve a complex bio...

12/10/2012

And we are at the cutting edge of this Digital Tide...

How is the digital tide taking care of the digital divide? Do you remember the digital divide? At the start of the new millennium, there was global concern that poor countries, especially in Africa, would be twice left out: economically and also technologically. Fortunately, the digital divide never...

11/07/2012

A predictive model outdoes all the election pundits put together!

Barack Obama may have comfortably won re-election in the electoral college, and squeaked a victory in the popular vote. But here is the absolute, undoubted winner of this election: Nate Silve

10/15/2012

"The Uncertainty is what makes the Prediction business so big."

These are the days of uncertainty. The pollsters tell us so. Yet jumping to conclusions has never been so popular.

10/15/2012

Interesting read.

Everyone who spends time with children knows how incredibly much they learn. But how can babies and young children possibly learn so much so quickly? In a recent article in Science, I describe a promising new theory about how babies and young children learn and the slew of research that...

10/13/2012

Does anyone know an Indian/Chinese/Brazilian healthcare organization that wants to do better analytics of its data and create predictive models of health outcomes? We could do it for FREE!

10/11/2012

The frontier of AI - how can we use all this power to serve the bottom billion?

IBM's Watson -- a Smartphone Assistant To Put Siri to Shame?ByBA McKenna- September 15, 2012| Tickers:AAPL,BRK-A,IBM,NUAN|0 CommentsEmailPrintBA is a member of The Motley Fool Blog Network -- entries represent the personal opinions of our bloggers and are not formally edited.IfIBM(NYSE:IBM)has its...

10/04/2012

An interesting case study

AshlingDATE:08.02.2012Palantir donated software to theInternational Consortium of Investigative Journalists(ICIJ) in support of a four-part investigative series on the global trade and illegal trafficking of human tissue. ICIJ broke the story at the Google Ideas Summit on Illicit Networks on July 17...

09/28/2012

A PGM (Probabilistic Graphical Model) based medical diagnostic algorithm - imagine a mobile enabled community health worker in remote India accessing this algorithm via an API to diagnose patients!

Google Tech Talk April 23, 2009 ABSTRACT A Practical Computer Program that Diagnoses Diseases in Actual Patients, presented by Carlos Feder. Several so calle...

09/24/2012

In all the talk about Big Data, certain perspectives are casually overlooked. One is the environment perspective, which might have serious implications as data grows exponentially:

Is the speed and reach of the Internet worth the energy used by data centers or should we abandon our need for any instantaneous information?

09/20/2012

A never ending debate in the data science space. It's sad that it's always this or that - instead of wasting time on that debate, shall we for once use the strengths of both disciplines (theoretical basis in stats, computing power in ML) to do what really matters - solving real problems?

10/1/09 update — well, it’s been nearly a year, and I should say not everything in this rant is totally true, and I certainly believe much less of it now. Current take: Statistics, not machine learning, is the real deal, but unfortunately suffers from bad marketing. On the other hand, to the extent ...

08/29/2012

DevIntel just co-hosted the inaugural meetup in this group with MIT Media Lab this evening.

Are you interested in data science but also passionate about international development? Then this is the meetup for you! Let's get together to explore how the rapidly growing areas of data science and

08/25/2012

These tools will exponentially reduce the time and effort that goes into understanding a dataset, allowing us to put more and more time into advanced data analytics. Exciting stuff!

Stephen Wolfram gives insight into the automation behind uploading your raw data into Wolfram|Alpha Pro to start getting meaningful insights from it.

08/24/2012

An excerpt from Weber & Toyama - "Remembering the Past for Meaningful AI-D":

We describe the history and challenges of both AI and
ICT4D research, and present three broad suggestions for Artificial Intelligence for development researchers: (1) that they spend as much time as possible with the kind of site or the organization
they are hoping to impact; (2) that they be ambitious but
humble in their goals and expectations; and (3) that they put
AI in the service of existing, well-intended, competent
development organizations.

Sounds familiar?

08/18/2012

Fellow former MPA/ID and newly faculty at Columbia Chris Blattman predicts conflict in Liberia with his new paper, and even uses random forests and neural nets. Has to be one of the first few economists to do so. Really interesting stuff!

International development, politics, economics, and policy