Data Science Weekly - Issue 54
Issue #54 Dec 4 2014
Editor Picks
"The Things I Wish I Knew"
Lessons Learned from Making Data Products - DJ Patil, Greylock Partners...
A Data Analyst's Blog Is Transforming How New Yorkers See Their City
His mission for the blog is simple: to change government policy by using open data. And he's becoming a force to be reckoned with as he publicizes all of the things the city's agencies are doing wrong...
Deep learning for… chess
I’ve been meaning to learn Theano for a while and I’ve also wanted to build a chess AI at some point. So why not combine the two?...
Data Science Articles & Videos
The next big frontier is the mind and brain - Full WIRED2014 talk
Interesting interview of DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis, Ben Medlock, CTO of Swiftkey, and Blaise Aguera y Arcas - a Google Machine Learning expert - on AI and general learning...
Project Adam: Building an Efficient & Scalable Deep Learning Training System
Large deep neural network models have recently demonstrated state-of-the-art accuracy on hard visual recognition tasks. Unfortunately such models are extremely time consuming to train and require large amount of compute cycles. We describe the design and implementation of a distributed system called Adam comprised of commodity server machines to train such models that exhibits world-class performance, scaling and task accuracy on visual recognition tasks...
Linguistic Mapping Reveals How Word Meanings Can Change Overnight
Data mining the way we use words is revealing the linguistic earthquakes that constantly change our language...
Can an algorithm tell us who influenced an artist?
Computer scientists at Rutgers University are developing an algorithm that picks up similarities between images of paintings, based on visual elements such as composition color...
Data Science Through the Lens of Social Science - Drew Conway
In this talk, Drew will examine data science through the lens of the social scientist. He will discuss how the various skills and disciplines combine into data science. Drew will also present a motivating example directly from his work as a senior advisor to NYC's Mayor's Office of Analytics...
Google is funding “an artificial intelligence for data science”
Google is funding a project called Automatic Statistician that bills itself as “an artificial intelligence for data science,”. The project, which comes out of the University of Cambridge and is still in its early stages, aims to automate the selection, building and explanation of machine learning models...
10 big data projects that could help save the planet
Conservationists have been gathering big data for years, and new technology is allowing them to better analyze it. Here are 10 awesome projects happening around the world...
NeuralTalk: Multimodal Recurrent Neural Networks
I open sourced some Python/numpy CNN+LSTM/RNN code for training Recurrent Nets that describe images with sentences...
NYC RatMap
Visualization of NYC rat hotspots...
Jobs
Data Scientist - Tesco, UK As a Data Scientist, you will be joining a growing, highly analytical team of Data Scientists focused on delivering a better understanding of the business based on big data. Our core work involves integrating and analysing Tesco and external data sources, building models that learn from these data, and providing tools that allow the business to make decisions from these models. For example we have worked on developing demand forecasting systems, optimising online prices, developing new picking algorithms, and linking web and mobile browsing data with store purchases to better understand the customer journey across all touch points...
Training & Resources
Introduction to Deep Learning with Python
Alec Radford, Head of Research at indico Data Solutions, speaking on deep learning with Python and the Theano library. The emphasis of the talk is on high performance computing, natural language processing using recurrent neural nets, and large scale learning with GPUs...
Hadoop Tutorial 1 - What is Hadoop?
This video gives a brief overview on Hadoop...
NIPS 2014 papers
In a user-friendly format (thanks Andrej Karpathy!)...
Books
Scikit-Learn Cookbook Over 50 recipes to incorporate scikit-learn into every step of the data science pipeline, from feature extraction to model building and model evaluation...
"If you're a data scientist already familiar with Python but not Scikit-Learn, or are familiar with other programming languages like R and want to take the plunge with the gold standard of Python machine learning libraries, then this is the book for you..."
For a detailed list of books covering Data Science, Machine Learning, AI and associated programming languages check out our resources page.
P.S. Enjoyed the newsletter? Please forward it to friends and peers - we'd love to have them onboard too :-) - All the best, Hannah & Sebastian