Data Skeptic

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/

Hal Ashton, a PhD student from the University College of London, joins us today to discuss a recent work Causal Campbell-Goodhart’s law and Reinforcement Learning. "Only buy honey from a local producer." - Hal Ashton   Works Mentioned: “Causal Campbell-Goodhart’s law and Reinforcement Learning”by Hal AshtonBook  “The Book of Why”by Judea PearlPaper Thanks to our sponsor!  When your business is ready to make that next hire, find the right person with LinkedIn Jobs. Just visit LinkedIn.com/DATASKEPTIC to post a job for free! Terms and conditions apply

Yuqi Ouyang, in his second year of PhD study at the University of Warwick in England, joins us today to discuss his work “Video Anomaly Detection by Estimating Likelihood of Representations.”Works Mentioned: Video Anomaly Detection by Estimating Likelihood of Representations https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.01468 by: Yuqi Ouyang, Victor Sanchez

Nirupam Gupta, a Computer Science Post Doctoral Researcher at EDFL University in Switzerland, joins us today to discuss his work “Byzantine Fault-Tolerance in Peer-to-Peer Distributed Gradient-Descent.”   Works Mentioned:  https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.12316 Byzantine Fault-Tolerance in Peer-to-Peer Distributed Gradient-Descent by Nirupam Gupta and Nitin H. Vaidya   Conference Details: https://georgetown.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0sc-2grDwjEtfnLI0zPnN-GwkDvJdaOxXF

Mikko Lauri, Post Doctoral researcher at the University of Hamburg, Germany, comes on the show today to discuss the work Information Gathering in Decentralized POMDPs by Policy Graph Improvements. Follow Mikko: @mikko_lauri Github https://laurimi.github.io/

Balaji Arun, a PhD Student in the Systems of Software Research Group at Virginia Tech, joins us today to discuss his research of distributed systems through the paper “Taming the Contention in Consensus-based Distributed Systems.”  Works Mentioned “Taming the Contention in Consensus-based Distributed Systems”  by Balaji Arun, Sebastiano Peluso, Roberto Palmieri, Giuliano Losa, and Binoy Ravindranhttps://www.ssrg.ece.vt.edu/papers/tdsc20-author-version.pdf “Fast Paxos” by Leslie Lamport  https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00446-006-0005-x