Laura Noren is a data science ethicist and researcher currently working in cybersecurity at Obsidian Security in Newport Beach. She holds undergraduate degrees from MIT, a PhD from NYU where she recently completed a postdoc in the Center for Data Science. Her work has been covered in The New York Times, Canada's Globe and Mail, American Public Media's Marketplace program, in numerous academic journals and international conferences. Dr. Norén is a champion of open source software and those who write it. Enjoy the show! Show Notes: [3:55] Laura explains how she produces the Data Science Community Newsletter, covering things like how the department of defense just got billions in funding to do AI research. How do you incorporate humor into such rigorous coverage? [10:22] How can you distinguish signal from noise in choosing a news source? [12:13] When and how to control your biases in your work when in the heat of the moment. [14:05] Laura’s interests in data science began as an unde...
Dr. Brian McFee develops machine learning tools to analyze multimedia data. This includes recommender systems, image and audio analysis, similarity learning, cross-modal feature integration, and automatic annotation. As of Fall, 2014, he is a data science fellow at the Center for Data Science at New York University. Previously, he was a postdoctoral research scholar in the Center for Jazz Studies and LabROSA at Columbia University. My conversation with Brian today was focused on discussing his research in music informatics and its many facets and applications. He tells about some of the methods he used during his dissertation, and I ask him for insight on how to get a recommender system to recommend stuff that you actually like. Here are some of the highlights of the show: [3:17] What came first for Brian, the data science or the music? [5:19] Of all the things he could have chose to study, why did Brian choose music? [7:35] What is it like to be in a branch of data science that has...
Wes McKinney is the creator and "Benevolent Dictator for Life" (BDFL) of the open-source pandas package for data analysis in Python, and has also authored two versions of the reference book Python for Data Analysis. Wes is also one of the co-creators of the Apache Arrow project, which is currently his main focus. Most recently, he is the founder Ursa Labs, a not-for-profit open source development group in partnership with RStudio. He describes himself as a problem-solver, and is particularly interested in improving the usability of data tools for programmers, accelerating data access and in-memory data processing performance, and improving data system interoperability. In my conversation with Wes today, we focused on getting to know Wes on a more personal level, discussing his background and interests to get some insight into the living legend of open source he has become. [3:48] How did coming from four generations of newspaperman impact Wes’s upbringing? [6:00] What kind of hobbi...
Mike Tamir is the Head of Data Science at Uber ATG. He is a leader in data science, specializing in deep learning and distributed scalable machine learning, and he’s also a faculty member at UC Berkeley. Mike has led several teams of Data Scientists in the San Francisco Bay Area as Chief Data Scientist for InterTrust and Formation, Director of Data Sciences for MetaScale, and Chief Science Officer for Galvanize, where he oversaw all data science product development. He also created an MS degree program in Data Science in partnership with UNH. Mike began his career in academia serving as a mathematics teaching fellow for Columbia University and graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh. His early research focused on developing the epsilon-anchor methodology for resolving both an inconsistency he highlighted in the dynamics of Einstein’s general relativity theory and the convergence of “large N” Monte Carlo simulations in Statistical Mechanics’ universality models of criti...
Frank Diana is a recognized futurist, thought leader and frequent keynote speaker. He has served in various executive roles throughout his career and has over 30 years of leadership experience. He is focused on leadership dialog in the context of our emerging future and its implications. He blends a futurist perspective with a pragmatic, actionable approach, leveraging horizon scanning and storytelling to see possible futures and drive foresight into leadership deliberation.
Kyle Polich is the co-host of the incredibly popular Data Skeptic podcast. His general interests range from areas like statistics, machine learning, data viz, and optimization to data provenance, data governance, econometrics, and metrology. In this episode of the Data Journeys Podcast, I pick Kyle’s brain for patterns noticed and lessons learned through interviewing and teaching his way through nearly 400 episodes of the Data Skeptic Podcast.
Emily Glassberg Sands is the Head of Data Science at Coursera -the largest online learning platform for higher education with 30M learners from around the world.Her team leads the quantitative measurement, experimentation,and inference that informs Coursera’s product and business direction. We covered topics like: How she uses analytics to identify ways to improve the learning experience and provide high quality education worldwide. The behaviours of successful learners and how to change your habits.
Dan Hammer is an environmental economist and winner of the 2017 Pritzker Prize for the Environment. Currently he serves as a National Geographic Fellow and the co-founder of Earthrise Media, and throughout 2016, he was the Senior Policy Advisor to the U.S. Chief Technology Officer, Megan Smith, as part of the Obama Administration. Does not take himself too seriously // played in the academic/private/public sectors // has stayed so true to a single mission across 17+ positions over 10 years.
In this episode of the Data Journeys podcast, we have not one, but two guests! Sivan Aldor-Noiman and Erik Andrejko join me from Wellio: an intelligent platform that uses machine learning and behavioral science to help people plan, shop, prepare and enjoy healthy meals at home. In this conversation, we dive deep into Wellio’s artificial intelligence for eating. Enjoy the show!
Jim Guszcza is the US Chief Data Scientist at Deloitte Consulting. Deloitte is the largest professional services network in the world in terms of revenue, with over 263,900 professionals globally. In this interview, we explore how philosophy and nudge theory can be applied to change human behavior using data science. Enjoy!