Data Science Weekly - Issue 212
Issue #212 Dec 14 2017
Editor Picks
Neural Networks Are Learning What to Remember and What to Forget
Memory is a precious resource, so humans have evolved to remember important skills and forget irrelevant ones. Now machines are being designed to do the same...
What the SATs Taught Us about Finding the Perfect Fit
On the Stitch Fix Algorithms team, we’ve always been in awe of what professional stylists are able to do, especially when it comes to knowing a customer’s size on sight. It’s a magical experience to walk into a suit shop, have the professional shopping assistant look you over and without taking a measurement say, “you’re probably a 38, let’s try this one,” and pull out a perfect-fitting jacket. While this sort of experience has been impossible with traditional eCommerce, at Stitch Fix we’re making it a reality...
Can AI Win the War Against Fake News?
Developers are working on tools that can help spot suspect stories and call them out, but it may be the beginning of an automated arms race...
A Message from this week's Sponsor:
Quick Question For You: Do you want a Data Science job?
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.
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!
Data Science Articles & Videos
AIVA: AI Generated Music
Did you like that orchestra performing AI-composed music at our NIPS2017 party last night? The AI is called AIVA, and her story is quite unique. AIVA taps into powerful AI technologies to create compositions for everything from advertisements to feature films with amazing originality and emotion...
Alpha Zero’s “Alien” Chess Shows the Power, and the Peculiarity, of AI
The latest advance from DeepMind behaves in a very surprising way. Expect other AI systems to be just as odd...
Multivariate Map Collection
Here is my attempt to collect examples of multivariate maps I’ve found and organize them into a loose categorization. Follow along, or dive into the references, to spur on your own investigations and inspirations!...
Learning from users faster using machine learning
Consider this blog post a bit of a wacky experiment — I think the outcome is super interesting, and worth thinking more about..My idea is: create a model that predicts whether someone is going to purchase a widget given a lot of additional data. And instead of using the actual target metric (what fraction of people bought widgets) we use the predicted metric, using our machine learning model...
Deep Learning for NLP, advancements and trends in 2017
In this article I will go through some advancements for NLP in 2017 that rely on DL techniques. I do not pretend to be exhaustive: it would simply be impossible given the vast amount of scientific papers, frameworks and tools available. I just want to share with you some of the works that I liked the most this year...
Who to follow in NIPS2017
Interesting visualization of how much Twitter-based influence/mindshare people/organizations have on the field of AI right now...
Visual Domain Decathlon
This taster challenge tests the ability of visual recognition algorithms to cope with (or take advantage of) many different visual domains...
Fairness: notation, definitions, data, legality
Comparison of mathematical notions of fairness with unified notation, giving context for each...
Jobs
Data Scientist - Farfetch - NYC As a fast-growing fashion e-commerce business and one of the world’s most valuable startups, harnessing the value of the data generated by our operations is critical to Farfetch’s future success and the Data Science teams are at the forefront of this effort.
All of our work in Data Science is directed at building software solutions that enhance the marketing activity of the company by using Machine Learning and advanced statistical methods. This means understanding the customer, figuring out who they are, what they want and how to get their attention. Critically, we build systems that do this autonomously...
Training & Resources
Initialize TensorFlow Variables That Depend On Other TensorFlow Variables
Short video tutorial with full transcript on how to initialize TensorFlow variables that depend on other TensorFlow variables by using the TensorFlow initialized_value functionality...
Deep Learning: Practice and Trends (NIPS 2017 Tutorial, parts I & II)
2hr tutorial giving basic intro to classic building blocks, autoregressive models, domain alignment, learning to learn, graph nets & program induction...
TFGAN: A Lightweight Library for Generative Adversarial Networks
In order to make GANs easier to experiment with, we’ve open sourced TFGAN, a lightweight library designed to make it easy to train and evaluate GANs. It provides the infrastructure to easily train a GAN, provides well-tested loss and evaluation metrics, and gives easy-to-use examples that highlight the expressiveness and flexibility of TFGAN...
Books
Python Crash Course An insightful, revealing history of how mathematics transformed our world...
Thorough introduction to programming with Python...
"I have read multiple beginner guides to Python. I am currently up to chapter 11 in Python Crash Course. So far this is far and away my favorite Python programming book..."
For a detailed list of books covering Data Science, Machine Learning, AI and associated programming languages check out our resources page.
P.S., Want to reach our audience / fellow readers? Consider sponsoring. We just opened up booking for 2018 - grab a spot now; first come first served! Email us for more details - All the best, Hannah & Sebastian