Data Science Weekly - Issue 175
Issue #175 March 30 2017
Editor Picks
Explaining the East/West Asymmetry of Jet Lag
The exquisitely hairy math behind jet lag...
I Took The AI Class Facebookers Are Literally Sprinting To Get Into
Facebook isn’t just trying to beef its central AI lab. It’s hoping to spread these skills across the company. Deep learning isn’t a niche pursuit. It’s a general technology that can potentially change any part of Facebook, from Messenger to the company’s central advertising engine...
Nvidia’s Deep-Learning Chips May Give Medicine a Shot in the Arm
The chip maker Nvidia is riding the current artificial-intelligence boom with hardware designed to power cutting-edge learning algorithms. And the company sees health care and medicine as the next big market for its technology...
A Message from this week's Sponsor:
Harness the business power of big data
How far could you go with the right experience and education? Find out. At Capitol Technology University. Earn your PhD Management & Decision Sciences — in as little as three years — in convenient online classes. Banking, healthcare, energy and business all rely on insightful analysis. And business analytics spending will grow to $89.6 billion in 2018. This is a tremendous opportunity — and Capitol’s PhD program will prepare you for it. Learn more now.
Data Science Articles & Videos
Data Science Case Study: Turo's Dynamic Pricing and Recommender Engine
Much like AirBNB revolutionized the hotel industry, Turo is transforming the car rental industry, one adventure at a time. Early on, the Turo team recognized the importance of data, and began capturing and storing information on how users navigated the site to lend and borrow vehicles in a central Amazon Redshift cluster...
Deep Learning with Emojis (not Math)
Sorting shopping lists with deep learning using Keras and Tensorflow [at Instacart] ...
DeepMind Will Use AI to Streamline Targeted Cancer Treatment
Machine learning could cut the time it takes to plan a patient’s radiotherapy treatment by hours...
OK Computer, Write Me a Song
Google says its AI software could make creative suggestions to help musicians, architects, and visual artists...
Gartner Looks At Data Science Platforms
Gartner recently released its 2017 Magic Quadrant for Data Science Platforms...
In Defense of Simplicity, A Data Visualization Journey
The last 8–9 years of my career have been focused on Data Visualization, which has given me plenty of time to develop a philosophy or two about my approach to this field. I say two, but I really mean about half a dozen of semi-distraught career-crisis generating moments (that lasted weeks or months) questioning what it is I want out of this field, whether what I am doing is the “right thing” and whether I should be doing something else...
Evolution Strategies as a Scalable Alternative to Reinforcement Learning
We’ve discovered that evolution strategies (ES), an optimization technique that’s been known for decades, rivals the performance of standard reinforcement learning (RL) techniques on modern RL benchmarks (e.g. Atari/MuJoCo), while overcoming many of RL’s inconveniences...
game2vec - games embeddings
Applied word2vec on Steam Video Games dataset from Kaggle...
Jobs
Senior Data Analyst - VSCO - Oakland, CA VSCO is a leading creative platform with a monthly audience of over 45 million and growing.
We are looking for a Senior Data Analyst to build data at VSCO from the ground up. You will design our data model for user behavior and content impression, and will mine the data to find insights that will influence the product roadmap. Expect to get your hands dirty with Redshift, Spark, and data visualization tools under the guidance of our Director of Data Science...
Training & Resources
Pandas & Seaborn - A guide to handle & visualize data elegantly
Up next you’ll find an overview of Pandas, a Python library which is old but gold and a must-know if you’re attempting to do any work with data while living in the Python world, and a glance of Seaborn, a Python library for making statistical visualizations. From our experience, they complement each other really well, and are worth learning together. We hope this post serves as a first guide for diving into them and kickstart your data handling & visualization journey...
Machine Learning in Python
Use this free curriculum to build a strong foundation in Machine Learning, with concise yet rigorous and hands-on Python tutorials...
Making Dynamic Scales and Axes
Intermediate level D3.js tutorial covering how to make scales and axis dynamic using Dynamic Data and the Update Data Function...
Books
Linear Algebra and Its Applications "One of the best college textbooks ever! If I needed to miss a lecture, the book taught me everything I needed to know. I had no linear algebra background beforehand, and the book was very clear and easy to understand. Awesome for independent study."...
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