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The Data Analytics Practice Committee (DAPC), the Young Data Analytics Working Group (YDAWG), and the Actuaries Institute are pleased to bring the latest in the world of data analytics to your inbox and to share some of our recent work with you.
In this issue of the Data Analytics Newsletter, we have news on AI regulation by the European Union, Google’s DeepFake ban, a $2 billion emoji, and how to use your favourite R or Python packages in the other language.
Regulations
EU’s 'AI Act' aims at regulating the entire sector
Despite increasing awareness of ethical issues, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) is not as regulated as other traditional sectors. The European Union (EU) thinks it has a solution - a hugely ambitious proposal for AI legislation called the 'AI Act'.
It is the first law that aims to curb these harms by regulating the whole sector and could set a new global standard for AI oversight. The scope includes banning uses of AI that are deemed 'unacceptable' and restricting the use of facial recognition in public places.
There are extra checks and balances for 'high risk' uses of AI, which may require explainability for some financial services including banking credit decisions.
Google has banned the training of DeepFakes in Colab
Google has quietly changed the terms of service for its Google Colaboratory (Colab) users, adding a stipulation that Colab services may no longer be used to train DeepFakes.
Colab is a popular implementation of Jupyter notebook environments. It allows for remote training of machine learning projects on far more powerful Graphic Processing Units (GPU) projects than many users can afford.
The ban on Colab training seems likely to reduce the pool of DeepFakers able to train higher-resolution models, where the input and output images are larger, more suited to high-resolution results, and capable of extracting and reproducing greater facial detail.
Development
‘Data Science for Actuaries’ survey shapes future objectives
The Singapore Actuarial Society’s Data Analytics Committee (DAC) and the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries’ GI Asia International Working Party (IFoA GI Asia WP) conducted a joint ‘Data Science for Actuaries’ survey in late-2021.
Lessons from deploying deep learning to production
Peter Gao, co-founder and CEO of Aquarium, has penned an in-depth article detailing his journey and learnings of deploying and improving ML models in production.
Peter highlighted the importance of establishing a model pipeline that can ship out improved models on a regular cadence, setting up a solid feedback loop from the model outputs back to the development process, and automating tasks in the pipeline that are particularly burdensome.
Calling R from Python - rpy2
R or Python? Why not both! The Python package 'rpy2' provides a way for Python's users to call R packages within Python. This article goes through several examples of how to do this using three powerful R packages - 'stats', 'lme4' and 'ggplot2'.
Those wishing to go the other way and call python from R can consider reticulate. These interfaces mean that functionality is available to users of either language should they need it.
Industry News
🤗 Reaches $2b valuation
🤗, also known as 'Hugging Face', has been featured in this newsletter a few times - their transformers model library is well known amongst Natural Language Processing and deep learning practitioners, and their platform hosts many interesting user-created models.
This includes the DALL-E mini mode used in the recent YDAWG Analytica Twitter Analysis on the Federal Election. Despite the downturn in equity markets, they have recently raised capital at a $2 billion valuation. Quite impressive!
Upcoming Events
Developing guidance for actuaries
AI and anti-discrimination in insurance.
Join Human Rights Commissioner Lorraine Finlay and Senior Lawyer Llewellyn Spink of the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) for an hour long discussion on artificial intelligence (AI) and how it impacts Commonwealth anti-discrimination legislation.
The pair will dive into their current project with the Actuaries Institute in developing new guidance material for actuaries to help them comply with Commonwealth anti-discrimination legislation when using AI in insurance pricing and underwriting decisions.
When: Wednesday 22 June, 12:30pm - 1:30pm AEST
Cost: Complimentary
Location: Virtual
Editor's Note
We hope you enjoyed this month's Data Analytics Newsletter. The YDAWG is always eager to recruit new members, and no prior data analytics experience is necessary! Please get in touch.
Check out Actuaries Digital for more data-related material and the DAPC microsite for great learning resources and past editions of the Data Analytics Newsletter.
Jacky Poon, Henry Ma, Grant Lian and Dan Wang
Editors, Data Analytics Newsletter
Disclaimer: The Institute wishes it to be understood that any opinions put forward in this publication are not necessarily those of the Institute.
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