January 3, 2021

Dear friends,
Welcome to the first Sunday Briefing of 2021. Our sincerest wishes that the new year brings everything you hope for.

Over the coming weeks we’ll be working on a few updates to the format of the newsletter and have some new projects in the pipeline. The list of blog posts is starting to take up too much space, so we’re removing it and keeping just a small blurb of the most recent posts of each of the series, Causality and Epidemic Modeling.

We’re also creating a new ‘Data Science Book ’ section where we’ll highlight a new book along with a small review. We’re officially starting this series next week but in the meantime, we have a blog post highlighting 10 books we found particularly interesting in 2020.

We continue our hiatus from blogging about Causality and Epidemic Modeling (with exciting news coming down the pipeline in coming weeks). In the meantime, you can catch up on the Causality Series with our more recent post detailing Inverse Probability Weighing as a technique to facilitate the calculation of the effects of interventions. As usual don’t forget to checkout Causality GitHub repository. You can also get up to date wiht the Epidemiology series our recent post ‘CoVID-19: Forecasting the death toll’ and the code in the Epidemiology GitHub.

This week, we take a detailed look at State Machines, and Message Queues. We also include an in-depth Introduction to Reinforcement Learning by Deep Mind, and The Pile - An 800GB Dataset of Diverse Text for Language Modeling.

On the academic front, we consider Fairness in Machine Learning, Graph Convolutional Networks for traffic anomaly and a review on Non-pharmaceutical interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic. We introduce an algorithm for network community structure determination by surprise and how true scale-free networks can be hidden by finite size effects.

Finally, in the video of the week we have a History of Artificial Intelligence by the good folks over at Futurology.

Data shows that the best way for a newsletter to grow is by word of mouth, so if you think one of your friends or colleagues would enjoy this newsletter, just go ahead and forward this email to them. This will help us spread the word!

Semper discentes,

The D4S Team