Data Science

There is no known learning algorithm that is more flexible and powerful than the human brain. That's quite inspirational, if you think about it--to level up machine learning, maybe we should be going back to biology and letting millions of year of evolution guide the structure of our algorithms. 

This is the idea behind neural nets, which mock up the structure of the brain and are some of the most studied and powerful algorithms out there. In this episode, we’ll lay out the building blocks of the neural net (called neurons, naturally) and the networks that are built out of them. 

We’ll also explore the results that neural nets get when used to do object recognition in photographs.

Neural Nets (Part 1)

O'Reilly's Ben Lorica chats with Anima Anandkumar about tensor decomposition techniques for machine learning.

The Tensor Renaissance In Data Science

In the last episode, we zipped through neural nets and got a quick idea of how they work and why they can be so powerful. Here’s the real payoff of that work:

In this episode, we’ll talk about a brand-new pair of results, one from Stanford and one from Google, that use neural nets to perform automated picture captioning. One neural net does the object and relationship recognition of the image, a second neural net handles the natural language processing required to express that in an English sentence, and when you put them together you get an automated captioning tool. Two heads are better than one indeed...

Neural Nets (Part 2)

Let’s talk money. As a “hot” career right now, data science can pay pretty well. But for an individual person matched with a specific job or industry, how much should someone expect to make? 

Since Katie was on the job market lately, this was something she’s been researching, and it turns out that data science itself (in particular linear regressions) has some answers. 

In this episode, we go through a survey of hundreds of data scientists, who report on their job duties, industry, skills, education, location, etc. along with their salaries, and then talk about how this data was fed into a linear regression so that you (yes, you!) can use the patterns in the data to know what kind of salary any particular kind of data scientist might expect.

Careers in Data Science

O'Reilly's Jenn Webb chats with Cait O’Riordan, VP of product, music and platforms at Shazam, about the current state of predictive analytics and how Shazam is able to predict the success of a song, and how the Internet of Things affects Shazam’s product life cycles as well as the behaviors of their users. Jenn also chats with Francine Bennett, CEO and cofounder of Mastodon C, about unintentional uses of data for evil and how data scientists can ensure their work stays on the data for good side of that line.

Data Science

Flavio Regis de Arruda