Data Science Weekly - Issue 114
Issue #114 January 28 2016
Editor Picks
How One Intelligent Machine Learned to Recognize Human Emotions
Nobody knew how to identify people’s emotional states by looking at their brain waves. Then a machine learning algorithm stepped in...
Owen Zhang - "How I Became a Data Scientist"
Owen Zhang is ranked #1 on the Kaggle leaderboard out of a community of 200,000 data scientists. This talk describes how he transitioned from a software developer in a corporate IT to a data scientist in a startup, with a focus on the practical lessons learned...
License to (Not) Drive
An exclusive look behind the scenes at Google’s autonomous car testing center...
A Message from this week's Sponsor:
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Data Science Articles & Videos
How an AI Algorithm Learned to Write Political Speeches
Political speeches are often written for politicians by trusted aides and confidantes. Could an AI algorithm do as well?...
Eli Pariser on the Ethics of Algorithmic Filtering
In 2011, Eli Pariser, CEO of Upworthy, wrote the first monograph about the risks algorithmic filtering poses to citizenship and society. We (FastForwardLabs) recently interviewed Pariser to see how his thinking has evolved in light of recent algorithmic progress...
Machine Learning vs. Quants: Advantages of Machine Learning in Finance
As quantitative finance has matured and the importance of computation has exploded, it's time to use machine learning to harvest the new low hanging fruit...
The Rise of the Artificaially Intelligent Hedge Fund
Last week, Ben Goertzel and his company, Aidyia, turned on a hedge fund that makes all stock trades using artificial intelligence—no human intervention required. “If we all die,” says Goertzel, a longtime AI guru and the company’s chief scientist, “it would keep trading.”...
Robot Control with Distributed Deep Reinforcement Learning
Nice visualization/env of 2D top down self-driving cars...
Google’s AI Masters the Game of Go a Decade Earlier Than Expected
Google achieves one of the long-standing “grand challenges” of AI by building a computer that can beat expert players at the board game Go...
Pixel Recurrent Neural Networks
Modeling the distribution of natural images is a landmark problem in unsupervised learning. This task requires an image model that is at once expressive, tractable and scalable. We present a deep neural network that sequentially predicts the pixels in an image along the two spatial dimensions...
Behind the Scenes at Dataiku - Interview with Data Scientist Matthieu Scordia
We (DSW) recently interviewed Matthieu Scordia, a Data Scientist at Dataiku about his background, work at Dataiku and the role they're currently hiring for...
Analyzing 50k fonts using deep neural networks
For some reason I decided one night I wanted to get a bunch of fonts. A lot of them. An hour later I had a bunch of scrapy scripts pulling down fonts and a few days later I had more than 50k fonts on my computer ... Now, let’s train a neural network that generates characters!...
5 Reasons Kaggle Projects Won't Help Your Data Science Resume
If you're starting out building your Data Science credentials you've probably often heard the advice "do a Kaggle project". And, those folks are right, its a great way to start to get your hands dirty, playing with data and different techniques. However, when it comes to what to put on your resume to showcase your project work, don't rely on Kaggle as evidence of your commitment or credentials. Here's why...
Jobs
Data Analyst - Patreon - San Francisco Patreon is the best way for creators to receive recurring funding directly from their fans. Everyone in the Patreon family is deeply invested in the mission of paying creators and empowering the emerging creative class. As a member of our growing Data Science team, you will analyze key metrics to answer big questions about our users and usage, inform product strategy and overall company strategy with data-driven research, and help us build a culture of data-driven decision making at Patreon...
Learn more about the role and get some advice for your Data Science resume, in our interview with the Hiring Manager, Carlos Cabrera...
Training & Resources
Free Data Science Curriculum
Curated set of links to create a 12 week curriculum...
Topic Models Learning and R Resources
A repository of learning & R resources related to topic models...
Understanding Convolutional Neural Networks for NLP
In this post I’ll try to summarize what CNNs are, and how they’re used in NLP. The intuitions behind CNNs are somewhat easier to understand for the Computer Vision use case, so I’ll start there, and then slowly move towards NLP...
Books
How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of "Intangibles" in Business Explanation of how to measure those things in your own business that, until now, you may have considered "immeasurable"
"An excellent read. It could be summed up as a "basic statistics for business" book, although it definitely goes beyond that in many aspects...."
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