Upcoming Events

Predictive Analytics and Neighborhood Health - September 21st
After the 2008 recession, Kansas City, MO, experienced waves of unemployment and foreclosures that led many properties to fall into disrepair. Faced with this growing issue during a period of decreased funding, the city’s code enforcement officials were unable to keep up with the workload, creating an enormous backlog and doubling the workload for each inspector. Together with the JHU Center for Government Excellence (GovEx), the city developed an algorithm to predict how long a given violation will take to resolve based on internal and public data that will help inspectors proactively schedule follow-up inspections and connect more serious cases to community programs earlier.
For more information or to register click here.
 

Effective Cybersecurity Analytics with Quantum Computing - October 29
Effective cybersecurity analysis requires frequent exploration of graphs of many types and sizes, the computational cost of which can be overwhelming if not carefully chosen. After briefly introducing the D-Wave quantum computing system, we describe an analytic for finding “lateral movement” in an enterprise network, i.e., an intruder or insider threat hopping from system to system to gain access to more information. This analytic depends on maximum independent set, an NP-hard graph kernel whose computational cost grows exponentially with the size of the graph and so has not been widely used in cyber analysis. The growing strength of D-Wave’s quantum computers on such NP-hard problems will enable new analytics. We discuss practicalities of the current implementation and implications of this approach.
For more information or to register click here.

Announcements

Join the new Data Works MD Slack Channel — Come chat with fellow Data Works MD members!
To join click here. 

Opportunities 

UMBC: Professor of the Practice/ Lecturer/ Graduate Program Director for Data Science
The Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) invites applications for a full-time, non-tenure track position at its Catonsville, MD main campus. 
To apply, click here. 

George Washington University: Guest Lecturer
Are you interested in giving a guest lecture for a Data Science course within GWU's Data Analytics program held in GW's Tompkins Hall of Engineering during Fall 2018 on September 20th, October 11th, October 25th, or November 1st?
Please send an email for more information.

Interested in a New Career?
Are you a cleared software or system engineer, data scientist, analytic developer, or cyber security expert interested in learning about new opportunities? Are you a data scientists searching for the right fit?
Please send an email for more information.

Data News

Pentagon’s artificial intelligence programs get huge boost in the NDAA — President Trump signed the the $717 billion annual National Defense Authorization Act, which was easily passed by Congress in weeks prior. The bill cements artificial intelligence programs in the Defense Department and lays the groundwork for a new national-level policy and strategy in the form of an artificial intelligence commission. For more, click here.

The feds just gave Booz Allen a $1 billion contract to fortify cyber defense for several federal agencies — Consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton will take on a $1.03 billion contract to build up cybersecurity capabilities over the next six years at several federal agencies, according to the company.
For more, click here. 

FBI faces ‘recruiting challenge’ in plan to hire data scientists at all field offices— As the FBI looks to move to the cloud and share data more easily, the agency says it has the funding it needs to hire data experts across all 56 of its field offices.
For more, click here. 

Funding Roundup: D.C.-Area Startups Raised $70M in August — August was a relatively quiet month for capital raising in the D.C. area, with more than a dozen deals that totaled about $70 million in investments. Ryft Systems, Bandura, and Datasembly make the list as data and analytics based startups. 
For more, click here.

Baltimore software developer calls for more inclusive data in machine learning that helps treat skin diseases— As dermatologists look to use tech to better diagnose skin diseases, they’re beginning to turn to machine learning to help testing moles for cancer.
For more, click here. 

Check out Google's research tool Colaboratory— Colaboratory is a research tool for machine learning education and research. It’s a Jupyter notebook environment that requires no setup to use and is free. Thank you Data Works MD member Kachi Odoemene for the tip!
For more, click here.