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Shaun Weston talks to Zac Sheffer from Elsen about data analysis, machine learning, engineering, financial services and the startup scene in Boston.

Zac Sheffer of Elsen on data analysis and Boston's thriving fintech scene

This episode of the Data Show marks our 100th episode. This podcast stemmed out of video interviews conducted at O’Reilly’s 2014 Foo Camp. We had a collection of friends who were key members of the data science and big data communities on hand and we decided to record short conversations with them. We originally conceived of using those initial conversations to be the basis of a regular series of video interviews. The logistics of studio interviews proved too complicated, but those Foo Camp conversations got us thinking about starting a podcast, and the Data Show was born.

To mark this milestone, my colleague Paco Nathan, co-chair of Jupytercon, turned the tables on me and asked me questions about previous Data Show episodes. In particular, we examined the evolution of key topics covered in this podcast: data science and machine learning, data engineering and architecture, AI, and the impact of each of these areas on businesses and companies. I’m proud of how this show has reached so many people across the world, and I’m looking forward to sharing more conversations in the future.

The Evolution of Data Science, Data Engineering, and AI

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Francesca Lazzeri, an AI and machine learning scientist at Microsoft, and her colleague Jaya Mathew, a senior data scientist at Microsoft. We conducted a couple of surveys this year—“How Companies Are Putting AI to Work Through Deep Learning” and “The State of Machine Learning Adoption in the Enterprise”—and we found that while many companies are still in the early stages of machine learning adoption, there’s considerable interest in moving forward with projects in the near future. Lazzeri and Mathew spend a considerable amount of time interacting with companies that are beginning to use machine learning and have experiences that span many different industries and applications. I wanted to learn some of the processes and tools they use when they assist companies in beginning their machine learning journeys.

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Jonathan Kelliher