Towards Data Science

Machine learning isn’t rocket science, unless you’re doing it at NASA. And if you happen to be doing data science at NASA, you have something in common with David Meza, my guest for today’s episode of the podcast. David has spent his NASA career focused on optimizing the flow of information through NASA’s many databases, and ensuring that that data is harnessed with machine learning and analytics. His current focus is on people analytics, which involves tracking the skills and competencies of employees across NASA, to detect people who have abilities that could be used in new or unexpected ways to meet needs that the organization has or might develop. 

Nick Pogrebnyakov is a Senior Data Scientist at Thomson Reuters, an Associate Professor at Copenhagen Business School, and the founder of Leverness, a marketplace where experienced machine learning developers can find contract work with companies. He’s a busy man, but he agreed to sit down with me for today’s TDS podcast episode, to talk about his day job ar Reuters, as well as the machine learning and data science job landscape. 

One Thursday afternoon in 2015, I got a spontaneous notification on my phone telling me how long it would take to drive to my favourite restaurant under current traffic conditions. This was alarming, not only because it implied that my phone had figured out what my favourite restaurant was without ever asking explicitly, but also because it suggested that my phone knew enough about my eating habits to realize that I liked to go out to dinner on Thursdays specifically. As our phones, our laptops and our Amazon Echos collect increasing amounts of data about us — and impute even more — data privacy is becoming a greater and greater concern for research as well as government and industry applications. That’s why I wanted to speak to Harvard PhD student and frequent Towards Data Science contributor Matthew Stewart about to get an introduction to some of the key principles behind data privacy. Matthew is a prolific blogger, and his research work at Harvard is focused on applications of machine learning to environmental sciences, a topic we also discuss during this episode.

There’s been a lot of talk in data science circles about techniques like AutoML, which are dramatically reducing the time it takes for data scientists to train and tune models, and create reliable experiments. But that trend towards increased automation, greater robustness and reliability doesn’t end with machine learning: increasingly, companies are focusing their attention on automating earlier parts of the data lifecycle, including the critical task of data engineering. Today, many data engineers are unicorns: they not only have to understand the needs of their customers, but also how to work with data, and what software engineering tools and best practices to use to set up and monitor their pipelines. Pipeline monitoring in particular is time-consuming, and just as important, isn’t a particularly fun thing to do. Luckily, people like Sean Knapp — a former Googler turned founder of data engineering startup Ascend.io — are leading the charge to make automated data pipeline monitoring a reality. We had Sean on this latest episode of the Towards Data Science podcast to talk about data engineering: where it’s at, where it’s going, and what data scientists should really know about it to be prepared for the future.

For the last decade, advances in machine learning have come from two things: improved compute power and better algorithms. These two areas have become somewhat siloed in most people’s thinking: we tend to imagine that there are people who build hardware, and people who make algorithms, and that there isn’t much overlap between the two. But this picture is wrong. Hardware constraints can and do inform algorithm design, and algorithms can be used to optimize hardware. Increasingly, compute and modelling are being optimized together, by people with expertise in both areas. My guest today is one of the world’s leading experts on hardware/software integration for machine learning applications. Max Welling is a former physicist and currently works as VP Technologies at Qualcomm, a world-leading chip manufacturer, in addition to which he’s also a machine learning researcher with affiliations at UC Irvine, CIFAR and the University of Amsterdam.

Coronavirus quarantines fundamentally change the dynamics of learning, and the dynamics of the job search. Just a few months ago, in-person bootcamps and college programs, live networking events where people exchanged handshakes and business cards were the way the world worked, but now, no longer. With that in mind, many aspiring techies are asking themselves how they should be adjusting their gameplan to keep up with learning or land that next job, given the constraints of an ongoing pandemic and impending economic downturn. That’s why I wanted to talk to Rubén Harris, CEO and co-founder of Career Karma, a startup that helps aspiring developers find the best coding bootcamp for them. He’s got a great perspective to share on the special psychological and practical challenges of navigating self-learning and the job search, and he was kind enough to make the time to chat with me for this latest episode of the Towards Data Science podcast.

One great way to get ahead in your career is to make good bets on what technologies are going to become important in the future, and to invest time in learning them. If that sounds like something you want to do, then you should definitely be paying attention to graph databases. Graph databases aren’t exactly new, but they’ve become increasingly important as graph data (data that describe interconnected networks of things) has become more widely available than ever. Social media, supply chains, mobile device tracking, economics and many more fields are generating more graph data than ever before, and buried in these datasets are potential solutions for many of our biggest problems. That’s why I was so excited to speak with Denise Gosnell and Matthias Broecheler, respectively the Chief Data Officer and Chief Technologist at DataStax, a company specialized in solving data engineering problems for enterprises. Apart from their extensive experience working with graph databases at DataStax, and Denise and Matthias have also recently written a book called The Practitioner’s Guide to Graph Data, and were kind enough to make the time for a discussion about the basics of data engineering and graph data for this episode of the Towards Data Science Podcast. 

One of the most interesting recent trends in machine learning has been the combination of different types of data in order to be able to unlock new use cases for deep learning. If the 2010s were the decade of computer vision and voice recognition, the 2020s may very well be the decade we finally figure out how to make machines that can see and hear the world around them, making them that much more context-aware and potentially even humanlike. The push towards integrating diverse data sources has received a lot of attention, from academics as well as companies. And one of those companies is Twenty Billion Neurons, and its founder Roland Memisevic, is our guest for this latest episode of the Towards Data Science podcast. Roland is a former academic who’s been knee-deep in deep learning since well before the hype that was sparked by AlexNet in 2012. His company has been working on deep learning-powered developer tools, as well as an automated fitness coach that combines video and audio data to keep users engaged throughout their workout routines.

If I were to ask you to explain why you’re reading this blog post, you could answer in many different ways. For example, you could tell me “it’s because I felt like it”, or “because my neurons fired in a specific way that led me to click on the link that was advertised to me”. Or you might go even deeper and relate your answer to the fundamental laws of quantum physics. The point is, explanations need to be targeted to a certain level of abstraction in order to be effective. That’s true in life, but it’s also true in machine learning, where explainable AI is getting more and more attention as a way to ensure that models are working properly, in a way that makes sense to us. Understanding explainability and how to leverage it is becoming increasingly important, and that’s why I wanted to speak with Bahador Khaleghi, a data scientist at H20.ai whose technical focus is on explainability and interpretability in machine learning.

Most of us want to change our identities. And we usually have an idealized version of ourselves that we aspire to become — one who’s fitter, smarter, healthier, more famous, wealthier, more centered, or whatever. But you can’t change your identity in a fundamental way without also changing what you do in your day-to-day life. You don’t get fitter without working out regularly. You don’t get smarter without studying regularly. To change yourself, you must first change your habits. But how do you do that? Recently, books like Atomic Habits and Deep Work have focused on answering that question in general terms, and they’re definitely worth reading. But habit formation in the context of data science, analytics, machine learning, and startups comes with a unique set of challenges, and deserves attention in its own right. And that’s why I wanted to sit down with today’s guest, Russell Pollari. Russell may now be the CTO of the world’s largest marketplace for income share mentorships (and the very same company I work at every day!) but he was once — and not too long ago — a physics PhD student with next to no coding ability and a classic case of the grad school blues. To get to where he is today, he’s had to learn a lot, and in his quest to optimize that process, he’s focused a lot of his attention on habit formation and self-improvement in the context of tech, data science and startups.