Today's experimental episode uses sound to describe some basic ideas from time series.

This episode includes lag, seasonality, trend, noise, heteroskedasticity, decomposition, smoothing, feature engineering, and deep learning.

AI has, is, and will continue to facilitate the automation of work done by humans. Sometimes this may be an entire role. Other times it may automate a particular part of their role, scaling their effectiveness. Unless progress in AI inexplicably halts, the tasks done by humans vs. machines will continue to evolve. Today’s episode is a speculative conversation about what the future may hold.

Co-Host of Squaring the Strange Podcast, Caricature Artist, and an Academic Editor, Celestia Ward joins us today! Kyle and Celestia discuss whether or not her jobs as a caricature artist or as an academic editor are under threat from AI automation.

Mentions

• https://squaringthestrange.wordpress.com/
• https://twitter.com/celestiaward
• The legendary Dr. Jorge Pérez and his work studying unicorns
• Supernormal stimulus
• International Society of Caricature Artists
• Two Heads Studios

Today on the show Derek Driggs, a PhD Student at the University of Cambridge. He comes on to discuss the work Common Pitfalls and Recommendations for Using Machine Learning to Detect and Prognosticate for COVID-19 Using Chest Radiographs and CT Scans.

Help us vote for the next theme of Data Skeptic!

Vote here: https://dataskeptic.com/vote

Given a document in English, how can you estimate the ease with which someone will find they can read it?  Does it require a college-level of reading comprehension or is it something a much younger student could read and understand?

While these questions are useful to ask, they don't admit a simple answer.  One option is to use one of the (essentially identical) two Flesch Kincaid Readability Tests.  These are simple calculations which provide you with a rough estimate of the reading ease.

In this episode, Kyle shares his thoughts on this tool and when it could be appropriate to use as part of your feature engineering pipeline towards a machine learning objective.

For empirical validation of these metrics, the plot below compares English language Wikipedia pages with "Simple English" Wikipedia pages.  The analysis Kyle describes in this episode yields the intuitively pleasing histogram below.  It summarizes the distribution of Flesch reading ease scores for 1000 pages examined from both Wikipedias.

Today on the show we have Shubhranshu Shekar, a Ph. D Student at Carnegie Mellon University, who joins us to talk about his work, FAIROD: Fairness-aware Outlier Detection.

Today on the show Dr. Anders Sandburg, Senior Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, comes on to share his work “The Timing of Evolutionary Transitions Suggest Intelligent Life is Rare.”

Works Mentioned:

Paper:
“The Timing of Evolutionary Transitions Suggest Intelligent Life is Rare.”by Andrew E Snyder-Beattie, Anders Sandberg, K Eric Drexler, Michael B Bonsall 

Twitter:
@anderssandburg

Mayank Kejriwal, Research Professor at the University of Southern California and Researcher at the Information Sciences Institute, joins us today to discuss his work and his new book Knowledge, Graphs, Fundamentals, Techniques and Applications by Mayank Kejriwal, Craig A. Knoblock, and Pedro Szekley.

Works Mentioned
“Knowledge, Graphs, Fundamentals, Techniques and Applications”by Mayank Kejriwal, Craig A. Knoblock, and Pedro Szekley

QAnon is a conspiracy theory born in the underbelly of the internet.  While easy to disprove, these cryptic ideas captured the minds of many people and (in part) paved the way to the 2021 storming of the US Capital.

This is a contemporary conspiracy which came into existence and grew in a very digital way.  This makes it possible for researchers to study this phenomenon in a way not accessible in previous conspiracy theories of similar popularity.

This episode is not so much a debunking of this debunked theory, but rather an exploration of the metadata and origins of this conspiracy.

This episode is also the first in our 2021 Pilot Season in which we are going to test out a few formats for Data Skeptic to see what our next season should be.  This is the first installment.  In a few weeks, we're going to ask everyone to vote for their favorite theme for our next season.

Karthick Shankar, Masters Student at Carnegie Mellon University, and Somali Chaterji, Assistant Professor at Purdue University, join us today to discuss the paper "JANUS: Benchmarking Commercial and Open-Source Cloud and Edge Platforms for Object and Anomaly Detection Workloads"

Works Mentioned:

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9284314
“JANUS: Benchmarking Commercial and Open-Source Cloud and Edge Platforms for Object and Anomaly Detection Workloads.”

by: Karthick Shankar, Pengcheng Wang, Ran Xu, Ashraf Mahgoub, Somali ChaterjiSocial Media

Karthick Shankar
https://twitter.com/karthick_sh

Somali Chaterji
https://twitter.com/somalichaterji?lang=en
https://schaterji.io/