Creating Synthetic Languages

Why is “unbreakable” such a special word for linguists? Unbeknownst to the general public, the word is actually composed of three smaller units that linguists call morphemes. Referring to the smallest meaningful grammatical unit of a language, the three morphemes in ‘unbreakable’ are ‘un’ , ‘break’, and ‘able’. Studying the underlying morpheme structures within a … Continue reading Creating Synthetic Languages

Using AI To Generate Images

There currently exist two main approaches to generating images using artificial intelligence: Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) and Variational Autoencoding (VAE). GAN pits two neural networks against one another in order to improve their generation of photorealistic images. In GAN, there is a generator which produces fake images, and a discriminator, which differentiates the fake images … Continue reading Using AI To Generate Images

Say Hello to Nematus, A New Toolkit for Neural Machine Translation

Just last week, CDS Professor Kyunghyun Cho and an international group of his colleagues* released Nematus, an exciting toolkit for Neural Machine Translation (NMT). Funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, Nematus performs neural machine translation using an encoder-decoder model, an approach that replaces traditional ‘phrase based’ translation and has become … Continue reading Say Hello to Nematus, A New Toolkit for Neural Machine Translation

How Can We Use Data to Make Self-Driving Cars Safer?

As the data surrounding Automated Vehicles grows, safety improves but privacy concerns also arise. The majority of human-operated vehicle accidents occur due to human errors like drunk driving or road rage. Presumably, AVs will lead to a safer driving environment by reducing, and one day, removing, the human factor from the road. Big data is … Continue reading How Can We Use Data to Make Self-Driving Cars Safer?

Future State: How Can We Use Big Data To Develop Better Governance?

While we know that data science is rapidly becoming a vital strategy in several academic fields, what role does it play in running our government? Last Wednesday, the CDS Lunch Research Seminar heard from Dr. Jaime Anne Earnest, a program analyst and data scientist from the US Department of Defense. Surprisingly, until former President Barack … Continue reading Future State: How Can We Use Big Data To Develop Better Governance?

Math& Data Seminar: Optimal Approximation with Sparse Deep Neural Networks

A group of professors and researchers at the Technical University of Berlin, the University of Vienna, and ETH Zurich have recently been working on understanding deep neural networks (computer systems that are modelled after the human brain) in “a mathematically sound way”, as Dr. Phillip Petersen refers to it. Although the official paper for this … Continue reading Math& Data Seminar: Optimal Approximation with Sparse Deep Neural Networks

Saving Climate Change Data

Last month, New York University hosted a #DataRescue event as part of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative’s (EDGI) effort to preserve environmental evidence. EDGI, which formed directly following the 2016 presidential election, began with a team of 40 researchers and social scientists. In only a few months, the network has grown to include computer … Continue reading Saving Climate Change Data

Using Population Models for…Astrophysics?

Galaxies are gorgeous structures containing billions of stars. But they come at a formidable price: a super massive black hole. Invisible, mighty, and mysterious, black holes are space regions where nothing—not even planets, stars, or light itself—can escape from inside it once its powerful gravitational pull has swallowed them up. How can astrophysicists track these … Continue reading Using Population Models for…Astrophysics?

Student Research: How Can Data Science Improve National Security?

After the CDS Academy Awards last week, we caught up with some of our student winners to find out more about their work. Scooping up the prize for the project with the greatest social impact was Yiqiu Shen, Zemin Yu, and Xinsheng Zhang’s fascinating research on how data science can be used to combat terrorism. … Continue reading Student Research: How Can Data Science Improve National Security?