Good morning!
Welcome to the eighth ever issue of Monday Morning Data Science from the Fred Hutch Data Science Laboratory. We are excited to show you what we have been working on (Fresh from the Lab), plus links that we think you would be interested in (Our Weekly Bookmarks Bar). Part of the purpose of this newsletter is to start conversations, so if you have a question or there is something you would like to share with us please let us know by responding directly to this email.
Fresh from the Lab
[Event: R User Group] Tuesday 12/20 at 1pm the monthly R User group will be meeting only virtually (no in-person meeting this week) here on Teams. If you would like to talk about an R subject that you are interested please let Sean know so that the data science lab can support you!
[Event: Data House Calls] Wednesday 12/21 at 10am we’ll have our weekly Data House Calls drop in hour but this week it will only be remote, on Teams. Drop by to talk about needed support for data challenges, coding challenges, computing questions, data management, etc. If the DaSL team can’t help you, they will be able to ping several other folks with different skill sets (including SciComp, the DaSL training group, the Hutch Data Core, etc) and get the right connections for you.
Our Weekly Bookmarks Bar
[A New History of the USB Stick] Some call it a thumb drive, memory stick or flash drive, and it completely replaced floppy disks and gained widespread popularity due to its high capacity, low cost, and durability. In 2021, global sales of thumb drives surpassed $7 billion and are expected to reach $10 billion by 2028. This new IEEE article explores where the USB stick came from, who invented it, and the controversy surrounding the origins of the device.
[ChatGPT Deep Dive] The conversation about large language models has gone from a niche group of researchers to headline news just in the last month. We are trying to strike a balance between reading more in depth than what big news outlets are reporting without diving into the supplementary materials of published academic papers on the subject. In light of that sentiment, we really liked this outline of the recent evolution of large language models by PhD student Yao Fu.
As always you can contact us by replying directly to this email, you can email Jeff Leek, Amy Paguirigan, and Sean Kross at data@fredhutch.org, or you are welcome to join us on the Fred Hutch Data Slack Workspace. For more information about the Fred Hutch Data Science Lab, visit our website: https://hutchdatascience.org/. See you next week!
- The Fred Hutch Data Science Laboratory