Data Science Weekly - Issue 83
Issue #83 June 25 2015
Editor Picks
A Neural Conversational Model
Google team build chatbot with recurrent nets...
Data Mining Reveals the Surprising Factors Behind Successful Movies
The secret to making profitable movies will amaze you. (Spoiler: it’s not hiring top box office stars.)...
A Sea Change in Treating Heart Attacks
The death rate from coronary heart disease has dropped 38 percent in a decade. One reason is that hospitals rich and poor have streamlined emergency treatment...
Data Science Articles & Videos
Suddenly, a leopard print sofa appears
Deep convolutional network are long-time ImageNet champions. No wonder; they are designed to process images, after all...
The Data Science Debate: Domain Expertise or Machine Learning?
This past Tuesday evening at Strata I moderated an Oxford-Style debate between six of the top data scientists in Silicon Valley and beyond...
Computational Aesthetics Algorithm Spots Beauty That Humans Overlook
Beautiful images are not always popular ones, which is where the CrowdBeauty algorithm can help, say computer scientists...
We have stumbled into the era of machine psychology
Of course, neural networks are commonly described as “black boxes” (often not quite deservedly). And historically, parts of psychology had its flirtations with cybernetics. But it is only recently that the we see a curious methodological convergence between these two fields – machine learning adopting methods of psychology...
Getting Smarter
Geoffrey Hinton has a news bulletin for you: You’re not conscious...
Building Analytics at 500px
A look at building analytics from the ground up at a mid-sized start-up and some of the challenges faced along the way...
Emacs for Data Science
If you want an editor that works with R, python, SAS, Stata, SQL and almost any other data science language. If you want an editor with IDE-like features. If you want an editor that works on any platform and as well as on the terminal. If you're a fan of literate programming. If you want an editor that is highly customizable and will be around after most editors have come and gone, then you'd be hard pressed to find anything better than emacs....
Algorithmic Trading of Futures via Machine Learning
Algorithmic trading of securities has become a staple of modern approaches to financial investment. In this project, I attempt to obtain an effective strategy for trading a collection of 27 financial futures based sole y on their past trading data...
Spark Is Too Big to Fail
Reacting to growing interest in Apache Spark, there is a developing contrarian meme...
Jobs
Machine Learning Specialist - Uber - Pittsburgh, PA The Uber Advanced Technology Center is the Pittsburgh division of the elite Uber Engineering Team; a high-performance culture marked by fearlessness and hyper-productivity. We focus on the development of key long-term technologies that advance Uber’s mission of bringing safe, reliable transportation to everyone, everywhere. Our research is primarily in the areas of mapping, vehicle safety, and autonomy. Our team is comprised of world-renowned researchers with decades of experience and we’re looking for superstar engineers who can work harder, faster, and smarter without sacrificing technical excellence...
Training & Resources
Reinforcement Learning Lecture Series
Reinforcement Learning Lectures by DeepMind's David Silver...
General Sequence Learning using Recurrent Neural Networks
Good introductory talk...
Smarter Parameter Sweeps (or Why Grid Search Is Plain Stupid)
This amazing paper by Bergstra et al. claims that a random search of the parameter space is guaranteed to be more effective than grid search...
Books
Machine Learning in Python: Essential Techniques for Predictive Analysis Simplifies machine learning for a broader audience and wider application by focusing on two algorithm families...
"I'm somewhat new to the field, working on a new venture involving predictive analytics. Of the resources I'm using, I keep coming back to this book - the background, problem setup, explanation of tradeoffs, and code examples have been really good..."
For a detailed list of books covering Data Science, Machine Learning, AI and associated programming languages check out our resources page.
P.S. Interested in reaching fellow readers of this newsletter? Consider sponsoring! Email us for details :) - All the best, Hannah & Sebastian