In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Anima Anandkumar, a leading machine learning researcher, and currently a principal research scientist at Amazon. I took the opportunity to get an update on the latest developments on the use of tensors in machine learning. Most of our conversation centered around MXNet—an open source, efficient, scalable deep learning framework. I’ve been a fan of MXNet dating back to when it was a research project out of CMU and UW, and I wanted to hear Anandkumar’s perspective on its recent progress as a framework for enterprises and practicing data scientists.

Deep Learning That's Easy to Implement and Easy to Scale

O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators. At O’Reilly, a big part of our business is paying attention to what’s new and interesting in the world of technology. We have a pretty good record at having anticipated some of the big technology developments in recent history. For instance, we launched the first commercial Web site, GNN, in 1993; we organized the meeting at which the term “open source” was first adopted; we were early investors in Blogger, which helped launch the blogging revolution; and more recently, our Web 2.0 conference launched a world-wide meme. We call this predictive sense the “O’Reilly Radar.” And while we’re certainly not always right, we are, at least, good at making interesting guesses.

Our methodology is simple: we draw from the wisdom of the alpha geeks in our midst, paying attention to what’s interesting to them, amplifying these weak signals, and seeing where they fit into the innovation ecology. Add to that the original research conducted by our Research team, and you start to get a good picture of what the technology world is thinking about.

Deep Learning That's Easy to Implement and Easy to Scale

O'Reilly Radar