Data Science Weekly - Issue 270
Issue #270 Jan 24 2019
Editor Picks
Let Curiosity Drive: Fostering Innovation in Data Science
The real value of data science lies not in making existing processes incrementally more efficient but rather in the creation of new algorithmic capabilities that enable step-function changes in value. However, such capabilities are rarely asked for in a top-down fashion. Instead, they are discovered and revealed through curiosity-driven tinkering by data scientists. For companies ready to jump on the data science bandwagon I offer this advice: think less about how data science will support and execute your plans and think more about how to create an environment to empower your data scientists to come up with ideas you’ve never dreamed of...
Non-Euclidean Worlds Engine
Here's a demo of a rendering engine I've been working on that allows for non-euclidean geometry...
This AI teaches robots to walk—by creating custom obstacle courses
Before you run hurdles, you have to learn to crawl, and before you read William Shakespeare, you need to know the alphabet. Any educator knows the importance of a step-by-step lesson plan for mastering a task. Now, researchers at Uber AI Labs have designed an algorithm that comes up with its own curriculum for teaching simulated robots to cross difficult terrain, without falling flat on their faceless bodies. The algorithm might one day even help autonomous vehicles react in emergency situations...
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
Obtaining Insights From Data: Optimizing an NBA Career
Since the publication of Moneyball, people have started examining sports with more statistical scrutiny, so being a statistics-motivated sports fan, I wanted to solve an atypical basketball problem: How can we optimize a typical basketball player’s career in the NBA? The question itself seems open-ended, so in order to better scope this endeavor, I’m going to measure success by dollars earned...
AI is sending people to jail—and getting it wrong
Using historical data to train risk assessment tools could mean that machines are copying the mistakes of the past...
Why chatbots haven’t (yet) lived up to their hype
Chatbots haven't (yet) lived up to their hype. But, I still believe we’re at the very beginning of explosive, long-term growth. Let's look at what's preventing high-growth adoption of chatbots — the same analysis can be applied to any new or emerging tech...
Stabilizing any YouTube video meanwhile you are running on a jogging machine
Today I did a stabilizer using TensorFlow to watch YouTube videos on a jogging machine. Quite alpha yet, but at least it works...
Street art, not street art
The project trains a model that detects whether an image is or is not street art. The model is trained on a image set gathered from hashtagged images for #streetart...
rstudio::conf 2019 takeaways
As an attendee I found that three themes were showing up over and over throughout the event, which sheds some light on where the R community may be heading. A write-up seemed like a good way to not forget them, and if you were unable to attend hopefully this helps with the FOMO!...
Deep Reinforcement Learning: Playing CartPole through Asynchronous Advantage Actor Critic (A3C) with tf.keras and eager execution
In this tutorial we will learn how to train a model that is able to win at the simple game CartPole using deep reinforcement learning. We’ll use tf.keras and OpenAI’s gym to train an agent using a technique known as Asynchronous Advantage Actor Critic (A3C)...
Data Science in Visual Studio Code using Neuron, a new VS Code extension
In this post, I’ll give a short explanation of neuron, a Visual Studio Code extension that aims to be a one-stop-shop for data scientists. It’s an extension I developed as part of a team of students at Imperial College London, in collaboration with Microsoft, in the summer of 2018...
Jobs
Data Scientist - Uber for Business - NYC
Uber for Business is on a path to revolutionize the way businesses manage their ground transportation needs. We need creative, quantitative thinkers with the ability to clearly synthesize and communicate insights from product data to accelerate us down this path. As a Data Scientist on Uber for Business you will work hand in hand with the Product, Marketing, Design, Sales and Engineering teams to keep product development data driven and informed. Candidates are expected to act with high levels of autonomy to guide their team’s roadmaps and build their data products....
Training & Resources
tf.ones: Create A TensorFlow Tensor Full of Ones
Learn how to create a TensorFlow Constant Tensor full of ones so that each element is a one using the TensorFlow Ones operation, via a screencast video and full tutorial transcript...
Deep Multi-Task Learning (MTL) – 3 Lessons Learned
There are already quite a few posts about implementing MTL in a DL model. In this post I will share some specific points to consider when implementing MTL in a Neural Network (NN). I will also present simple TensorFlow solutions to overcome the discussed issues...
A Primer on A/B Testing Part 1: The Central Limit Theorem
I thought I would write up a quick primer on A/B Testing to help aspiring data scientists understand the basics...
Books
Math for Machine Learning:
Open Doors to Data Science and Artificial Intelligence
From self-driving cars and recommender systems to speech and face recognition, machine learning is the way of the future. Would you like to learn the mathematics behind machine learning to enter the exciting fields of data science and artificial intelligence? There aren't many resources out there that give simple detailed examples and that walk you through the topics step by step.
This book not only explains what kind of math is involved and the confusing notation, it also introduces you directly to the foundational topics in machine learning. This book will get you started in machine learning in a smooth and natural way, preparing you for more advanced topics and dispelling the belief that machine learning is complicated, difficult, and intimidating.
Praise from students
"Your book is by far the best I’ve found for understanding the derivations of machine learning algorithms. I love that you don’t skip steps and that you provide clear examples."--Robert H"
Link to preview of first 2 chapters and table of contents available here
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