Data Science Weekly - Issue 234
Issue #234 May 17 2018
Editor Picks
To Build Truly Intelligent Machines, Teach Them Cause and Effect
Judea Pearl, a pioneering figure in artificial intelligence, argues that AI has been stuck in a decades-long rut. His prescription for progress? Teach machines to understand the question why...
Playing Google's T-rex game with TensorFlow
The goal of this project is to play Google’s offline T-rex Dino game using Reinforcement Learning (RL). The RL algorithm is based on the Deep Q-Learning algorithm [1] and is implemented in TensorFlow (TF), hence the name TF-rex ;)...
MIT built a self-driving car that can navigate unmapped country roads
Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have developed a new system that allows self-driving cars to drive on roads they’ve never been on before without 3D maps. Called MapLite, the system combines simple GPS data that you’d find on Google Maps with a series of sensors that observe the road conditions...
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
Google Duplex:
An AI System for Accomplishing Real-World Tasks Over the Phone
Today we announce Google Duplex, a new technology for conducting natural conversations to carry out “real world” tasks over the phone...
GluonCV — Deep Learning Toolkit for Computer Vision
Someone once asked me what was the hardest thing to do when developing MXNet. I would not hesitate to say that replicating experimental results from papers is the most difficult part. Using state-of-the-art computer vision models has never been easier! Try out our new Gluon CV toolkit!...
AI and Compute
We’re releasing an analysis showing that since 2012, the amount of compute used in the largest AI training runs has been increasing exponentially with a 3.5 month-doubling time (by comparison, Moore’s Law had an 18-month doubling period)...
Smart Compose: Using Neural Networks to Help Write Emails
Learn more about the research behind Smart Compose, a new feature in Gmail that uses machine learning to interactively offer sentence completion suggestions as you type, allowing you to draft emails faster...
Neural text generation:
How to generate text using conditional language models
Here is a toy project: build a Twitter bot that generates dialog in the style of Simpsons characters...
Introduction to Recommender Systems in 2018
In this blog post, we’ll describe the broad types of the most popular recommender systems and give insights into how they work, going through a few examples...
Two-sample t-test and robustness
A two-sample t-test is intended to determine whether there’s evidence that two samples have come from distributions with different means. The test assumes that both samples come from normal distributions...
Seven Strategies for Optimizing Numerical Code
Python provides a powerful platform for working with data, but often the most straightforward data analysis can be painfully slow. When used effectively, though, Python can be as fast as even compiled languages like C. This talk presents an overview of how to effectively approach optimization of numerical code in Python, touching on tools like numpy, pandas, scipy, cython, numba, and more...
Jobs
Director of Data Science - Fair Trade Certified - Oakland, CA
Fair Trade USA's newly formed Data Team works with departments across the organization to collect, manage, analyze and share data about Fair Trade USA’s business and the impact of our work. The organization is committed to being excellent stewards of our data while working quickly to create meaningful data insights that can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of our programs and deliver supply chain insights to our partners. The Director of Data Science will lead a team of 7 data practitioners at Fair Trade USA...
Training & Resources
Add A New Dimension To The Beginning Of A Tensor In PyTorch
Learn how to add a new dimension to the beginning of a PyTorch tensor by using None-style indexing, via a screencast video and full tutorial transcript...
Figure Eight Datasets
These datasets were curated on the Figure Eight platform. They are free to download for the entire data science community...
altair-tutorial
Notebooks for the Altair tutorial, given at PyCon 2018...
Books
The Theory That Would Not Die:
How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy An enjoyable account of the history of Bayesian statistics from Thomas Bayes's first idea to the ultimate (near-)triumph of Bayesian methods in modern statistics...
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 - grab a spot now; first come first served! All the best, Hannah & Sebastian