Data Science Weekly - Issue 187
Issue #187 June 22 2017
Editor Picks
If Taxi Trips were Fireflies: 1.3 Billion NYC Taxi Trips Plotted
I downloaded the data files from TLC website, and (very painfully) using Python, Dask, and Spark, have produced a cleaned dataset in Parquet format, which I make this available for AWS users at the end of this post. So I was curious, where do taxis pick up passengers, or more precisely, what does the distribution of taxi pickup locations look like?...
Artificial intelligence can now predict suicide with remarkable accuracy
Colin Walsh, data scientist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, hopes his work in predicting suicide risk will give people the opportunity to ask “what can I do?” while there’s still a chance to intervene...
One Model To Learn Them All
Deep learning yields great results across many fields, from speech recognition, image classification, to translation. But for each problem, getting a deep model to work well involves research into the architecture and a long period of tuning. We present a single model that yields good results on a number of problems spanning multiple domains...
A Message from this week's Sponsor:
Quick Question For You: Do you want a Data Science job?
"No": Scroll on down to the regular newsletter!
"Yes": Great news!
After helping hundred of readers like you get Data Science jobs, we've distilled all the real-world-tested advice into a self-directed course that guides you in constructing your own highly personalized plan for what you need to learn and what you can safely ignore - saving you time, effort, and worry.
The course is broken down into three guides:
Data Science Getting Started Guide. This guide shows you how to figure out the knowledge gaps that MUST be closed in order for you to become a data scientist quickly and effectively (as well as the ones you can ignore)
Data Science Project Portfolio Guide. This guide teaches you how to start, structure, and develop your data science portfolio with the right goals and direction so that you are a hiring manager's dream candidate
Data Science Resume Guide. This guide shows how to make your resume promote your best parts, what to leave out, how to tailor it to each job you want, as well as how to make your cover letter so good it can't be ignored! For more details about each specific guide, and to see if it can help you as much as it's helped others, click here to learn more.
Cheers, Hannah & Sebastian.
Data Science Articles & Videos
Data-Mining 100 Million Instagram Photos Reveals Global Clothing Patterns
The millions of photos uploaded to social media are a massive untapped resource for studying humanity. But machine learning is beginning to tap this mother lode...
Musical Novelty Search: Evolutionary Algorithms + Ableton Live
This experiment investigates how to use evolutionary algorithm and novelty search to help musicians find musical inspiration in Ableton Live...
ReveRse engineering BoardGameGeek
As a board game enthusiast I was happy to find a dataset exported from BoardGameGeek.com, a board game review site. The set contains average ratings of boardgames. It also contains some boardgame metadata such as category and year of publication...
Part II: One set of data, many stories
Or, why a dual y-axis chart is not a normalized delta chart...
Google launches its AI-powered jobs search engine
Looking for a new job is getting easier. Google today launched a new jobs search feature right on its search result pages that lets you search for jobs across virtually all of the major online job boards like LinkedIn, Monster, WayUp, DirectEmployers, CareerBuilder and Facebook and others. Google will also include job listings its finds on a company’s homepage...
Five Boroughs for the 21st Century
In this article we explore what happens when we abandon the century-old five borough partitioning of New York City and remap the city to reflect the realities of 2017...
Using Google’s BigQuery to Better Understand the Python Ecosystem
In my case, I've recently been using Python more for data analysis, and found myself wondering what packages were most frequently used by other data scientists. I could, of course, just Google "best Python packages for data science," but in the spirit of statistics, I wanted to make a data-driven decision as opposed to relying on anecdote...
Matching a job description with a candidate’s experience is not an easy task, even for humans.
An HR professional’s workload includes lots of data-heavy tasks (like sifting through tons of candidate experiences), which can be very time-consuming. With the great AI awakening, can we expect machines to help HR with these repetitive and complex tasks?...
Jobs
Data Scientist - Foreign and Commenwealth Office - London, UK The FCO promotes the UK interests overseas, supporting our citizens and businesses around the globe.
Joining the new data science team, you will pioneer and promote better use of data. You will advise stakeholders on use of data, ensuring that data science is integrated into wider Whitehall and overseas.
A self-starter, you are also an experienced data science professional with a strong focus on delivery. You must be able to produce clear and persuasive communications reaching targeted audiences. As a data science specialist, you will enjoy maintaining and expanding your knowledge base...
Training & Resources
Google’s Tensor2Tensor makes it easier to conduct deep learning experiments
Google’s brain team is open sourcing Tensor2Tensor, a new deep learning library designed to help researchers replicate results from recent papers in the field and push the boundaries of what’s possible by trying new combinations of models, datasets and other parameters...
Model Deployment Powered by Kubernetes
In this article we explain how we’re using Kubernetes to enable data scientists to deploy predictive models as production-grade APIs...
Variational Inference and Deep Learning: An Intuitive Introduction
A lecture introducing Variational Inference and Deep Learning. Adapted from a lecture I gave for Aaron Courville's Deep Learning course (IFT 6266)...
Books
How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed "very interesting book that presents the pattern recognition theory of mind (PRTM), which describes the basic algorithm of the neocortex (the region of the brain responsible for perception, memory, and critical thinking)"...
For a detailed list of books covering Data Science, Machine Learning, AI and associated programming languages check out our resources page.
P.S. Looking to hire a Data Scientist? Find an awesome one among our readers! Email us for details on how to post your job :) - All the best, Hannah & Sebastian