data science

MACHINE LEARNING

The O'Reilly Data Show explores the opportunities and techniques driving big data and data science. Through interviews and analysis, we highlight the people putting data to work.

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In this episode, I tackle three often conflated terms - AI, machine learning, and deep learning - to shine some light on what exactly they are.

Additional materials: www.superdatascience.com/464

The SuperDataScience Podcast: Machine Learning | AI | Success

SDS 464: A.I. vs Machine Learning vs Deep Learning

Not surprisingly, Joseph Sirosh, has big ambitions for his product portfolio at Microsoft which includes Azure ML, HDInsight and other tools. Chief among them is making it easy for mere mortals to consume these data services from the applications they're familiar with. Take Excel for example.

If a financial analyst can, with a few clicks, send data to a forecast service in the cloud, then get the numbers back, visualized on the same spreadsheet, that's a pretty powerful story, said Sirosh who is corporate VP of machine learning for Microsoft.

But as valuable as those applications and services are, more and more of the value to be derived from computation over time will be the data itself, not all those tech underpinnings.  "In the future a huge part of the value generated from computing will come from the data as opposed to storage and operating systems and basic infrastructure," he noted on this week's podcast. WHich is why one topic under discussion at next month's Structure Data show will be who owns all the data flowing betwixt and betweeen various systems, the internet of things etc.

When it comes to getting corporations running these new systems Microsoft may have an ace in the hole because so many of them already use key Microsoft tools -- Active Directory, SQL Server, Excel. That gives them a pretty good on-ramp to Microsoft Azure and its resident services. Sirosh makes a compelling case and we'll talk to him more on stage at Structure Data next month in New York City.

In the first half of the show, Derrick Harris and I talk about the Hadoop world has returned to its feisty and oh so interesting roots. When Pivotal announced its plan to offload support of Hadoop to Hortonworks and work with that company along with IBM, GE on  the Open Data Platform the response from Cloudera CEO Mike Olsen in a blog post with his take. 

Also on the docket, @WalmartLabs massive OpenStack production private cloud implementation.

Microsoft's machine learning guru on why data matters sooooo much

Peter Gasston (https://twitter.com/stopsatgreen) is a front-end developer and web technologist that works for +rehabstudio (https://www.rehabstudio.com) in London.

Read the blog post about this interview: https://blog.feryn.eu/peter-gasston-commoditization-of-artificial-intelligence. The video is up on Youtube: https://youtu.be/_qremcORl9A

This interview was recorded in Rome at Codemotion 2016 (http://www.codemotionworld.com) where Peter presented his "OK Computer" presentation (https://speakerdeck.com/stopsatgreen/ok-computer-codemotion-rome) about the Commoditization of Artificial Intelligence.

We talk about how improved algorithms and the availability of massive computing power due to maturity of Cloud Computing has boosted Artificial Intelligence in a very profound way.

Both major players (Facebook, Google, Microsoft, IBM) and smaller startups can leverage the Cloud for machine learning and offer added value through easy-to-use customer-facing APIs.

Most implementations focus on natural language understanding and computer vision. Here's a list of tools, services and APIs that were mentioned in the interview and/or Peter's presentation.

https://wit.ai
https://cloud.google.com/vision/
http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/what-is-watson.html
https://cognitoys.com
http://clarif.ai
https://www.metamind.io
http://www.skymind.io
https://www.projectoxford.ai

Thanks to machine learning and massive data processing, artificial intelligence is now a commodity: recognizing objects, locations and people on pictures. Or even understanding the meaning of a conversation. 

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Peter Gasston - Commoditization of Artificial Intelligence

In this episode of the O’Reilly Data Show, I spoke with Mikio Braun, delivery lead and data scientist at Zalando. After spending previous years in academia, Braun recently made the decision to switch to industry. He shared some observations about building large-scale systems, particularly deploying data applications in production systems. Given his longstanding background as a machine learning researcher and practitioner, I wanted to get his take on topics like deep learning, hybrid systems, feature engineering, and AI applications.

Practical Machine Learning Techniques for Building Intelligent Applications

In this episode of the O’Reilly Data Show, I spoke with Danny Bickson, co-founder and VP at Dato, and the principal organizer of the Data Science Summit (full disclosure: I’m a member of the conference organizing committee). Among machine learning students and practitioners, recommender systems have become somewhat of a canonical use case and application. One of the early and popular building blocks was GraphLab’s collaborative filtering toolkit, a library originally written and maintained by Bickson. He has continued to keep tabs on the latest developments in recommenders and continues to help organize workshops on related topics throughout the world.

Building and Deploying Large-Scale Machine Learning Applications

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Parvez Ahammad, who leads the data science and machine learning efforts at Instart Logic. He has applied machine learning in a variety of domains, most recently to computational neuroscience and security. Along the way, he has assembled and managed teams of data scientists and has had to grapple with issues like explainability and interpretability, ethics, insufficient amount of labeled data, and adversaries who target machine learning models. As more companies deploy machine learning models into products, it’s important to remember there are many other factors that come into play aside from raw performance metrics.

Building Machine Learning Solutions That Can Withstand Adversarial Attacks

In this episode of the SuperDataScience Podcast, I chat with the Deep Learning Expert Hadelin de Ponteves. You will be able to have a look at the 6 supervised and unsupervised deep learning models, learn the idea to the question: why deep learning instead of machine learning, and discover TensorFlow and PyTorch as the two major tools in Deep Learning.

If you enjoyed this episode, check out show notes, resources, and more at https://www.superdatascience.com/47

The Super Data Science Podcast: Big Data | Analytics Careers | Mentors | Success

SDS 047: An Expert Overview of the Deep Learning Models, Supervised and Unsupervised

Fraud attacks have become much more sophisticated. Account takeovers are happening more often. Many security attacks involve multiple methods and unexpected attacks can devastate businesses in just a few days, as we saw with Neiman Marcus and Target. False promotion and abuse is seen not only on social media sites but is also targeted at business. To combat these risks, fraud solutions need to be smarter to keep pace with fraudsters to prevent attacks and react quickly when they do happen. This requires a fast-learning solution with the ability to continually evolve. In this episode we talk to Kevin Lee from Sift Science and examine the shifts in the info security landscape over the past ten or fifteen year. Lee also highlights what new kinds of fraud are now possible and what machine learning solutions are available. See more episodes at: www.TechEmergence.com &nbsp;

Machine Learning for Fraud Detection - Modern Applications and Risks

This week, AI in Industry features Jeremy Barnes, Chief Architect at Element AI. Jeremy talks about the common mistakes some businesses might make while adopting AI to solve broad business problems. He also sheds light on the problem areas that could raise the market value of businesses through AI adoption, hiring the right talent with the right combination of subject matter expertise and business experience, and the business and technical aspects executives should consider before contemplating the adoption of AI. For more insights on the B2B applications of AI, go to techemergence.com

Avoiding Common Mistakes in Applying AI to Business Problems - with Jeremy Barnes of Element AI

Sales forecasting is big business. If you can better predict how much of a certain product or service you will sell in a given day, you can better stock inventory, better staff your facilities, and ultimately keep more margin in your business's accounts. This week on AI in Industry we interview Dr. John-Paul B Clarke, professor at Georgia Tech and co-founder / Chief Scientist at Pace (previously called "Prix"). Dr. Clarke shares details about how sales predictions are done today, and what AI advancements may allow for in helping businesses sell everything from groceries to hotel rooms. Read the full interview article online at:&nbsp; techemergence.com/ai-sales-forecasting-works-matters

AI for Sales Forecasting - How it Works and Where it Matters

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Andrew Burt, chief privacy officer at Immuta, and Steven Touw, co-founder and CTO of Immuta. Burt recently co-authored an upcoming white paper on managing risk in machine learning models, and I wanted to sit down with them to discuss some of the proposals they put forward to organizations that are deploying machine learning.

Some high-profile examples of models gone awry have raised awareness among companies for the need for better risk management tools and processes. There is now a growing interest in ethics among data scientists, specifically in tools for monitoring bias in machine learning models. In a previous post, I listed some of the key considerations organization should keep in mind as they move models to production, but the upcoming report co-authored by Burt goes far beyond and recommends lines of defense, including a description of key roles that are needed.

Managing Risk in Machine Learning Models

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Chang Liu, applied research scientist at Georgian Partners. In a previous post, I highlighted early tools for privacy-preserving analytics, both for improving decision-making (business intelligence and analytics) and for enabling automation (machine learning). One of the tools I mentioned is an open source project for SQL-based analysis that adheres to state-of-the-art differential privacy (a formal guarantee that provides robust privacy assurances).  Since business intelligence typically relies on SQL databases, this open source project is something many companies can already benefit from today.

What about machine learning? While I didn’t have space to point this out in my previous post, differential privacy has been an area of interest to many machine learning researchers. Most practicing data scientists aren’t aware of the research results, and popular data science tools haven’t incorporated differential privacy in meaningful ways (if at all). But things will change over the next months. For example, Liu wants to make  ideas from differential privacy accessible to industrial data scientists, and she is part of a team building tools to make this happen.

How Privacy-Preserving Techniques Can Lead to More Robust Machine Learning Models

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Eric Jonas, a postdoc in the new Berkeley Center for Computational Imaging. Jonas is also affiliated with UC Berkeley’s RISE Lab. It was at a RISE Lab event that he first announced Pywren, a framework that lets data enthusiasts proficient with Python run existing code at massive scale on Amazon Web Services. Jonas and his collaborators are working on a related project, NumPyWren, a system for linear algebra built on a serverless architecture. Their hope is that by lowering the barrier to large-scale (scientific) computation, we will see many more experiments and research projects from communities that have been unable to easily marshal massive compute resources. We talked about Bayesian machine learning, scientific computation, reinforcement learning, and his stint as an entrepreneur in the enterprise software space.

Building Accessible Tools for Large-Scale Computation and Machine Learning

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.

Lessons Learned While Helping Enterprises Adopt Machine Learning

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Vitaly Gordon, VP of data science and engineering at Salesforce. As the use of machine learning becomes more widespread, we need tools that will allow data scientists to scale so they can tackle many more problems and help many more people. We need automation tools for the many stages involved in data science, including data preparation, feature engineering, model selection and hyperparameter tuning, as well as monitoring.

I wanted the perspective of someone who is already faced with having to support many models in production. The proliferation of models is still a theoretical consideration for many data science teams, but Gordon and his colleagues at Salesforce already support hundreds of thousands of customers who need custom models built on custom data. They recently took their learnings public and open sourced TransmogrifAI, a library for automated machine learning for structured data, which sits on top of Apache Spark.

Building Tools for Enterprise Data Science

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Alex Wong, associate professor at the University of Waterloo, and co-founder of DarwinAI, a startup that uses AI to address foundational challenges with deep learning in the enterprise. As the use of machine learning and analytics become more widespread, we’re beginning to see tools that enable data scientists and data engineers to scale and tackle many more problems and maintain more systems. This includes automation tools for the many stages involved in data science, including data preparation, feature engineering, model selection, and hyperparameter tuning, as well as tools for data engineering and data operations.

Wong and his collaborators are building solutions for enterprises, including tools for generating efficient neural networks and for the performance analysis of networks deployed to edge devices.

Tools for Generating Deep Neural Networks With Efficient Network Architectures

For the end-of-year holiday episode of the Data Show, I turned the tables on Data Show host Ben Lorica to talk about trends in big data, machine learning, and AI, and what to look for in 2019. Lorica also showcased some highlights from our upcoming Strata Data and Artificial Intelligence conferences.

Trends in Data, Machine Learning, and AI

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Haoyuan Li, CEO and founder of Alluxio, a startup commercializing the open source project with the same name (full disclosure: I’m an advisor to Alluxio). Our discussion focuses on the state of Alluxio (the open source project that has roots in UC Berkeley’s AMPLab), specifically emerging use cases here and in China. Given the large-scale use in China, I also wanted to get Li’s take on the state of data and AI technologies in Beijing and other parts of China.

In the Age of AI, Fundamental Value Resides in Data

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Andrew Burt, chief privacy officer and legal engineer at Immuta, a company building data management tools tuned for data science. Burt and cybersecurity pioneer Daniel Geer recently released a must-read white paper (“Flat Light”) that provides a great framework for how to think about information security in the age of big data and AI. They list important changes to the information landscape and offer suggestions on how to alleviate some of the new risks introduced by the rise of machine learning and AI.

We discussed their new white paper, cybersecurity (Burt was previously a special advisor at the FBI), and an exciting new Strata Data tutorial that Burt will be co-teaching in March.

How Machine Learning Impacts Information Security

Three generals are voting on whether to attack or retreat from their siege of a castle. One of the generals is corrupt and two of them are not. What happens when the corrupted general sends different answers to the other two generals?

A Byzantine fault is "a condition of a computer system, particularly distributed computing systems, where components may fail and there is imperfect information on whether a component has failed. The term takes its name from an allegory, the "Byzantine Generals' Problem", developed to describe this condition, where actors must agree on a concerted strategy to avoid catastrophic system failure, but some of the actors are unreliable."

The Byzantine Generals' Problem and associated issues in maintaining reliable distributed computing networks is illuminating for both AI alignment and modern networks we interact with like Youtube, Facebook, or Google. By exploring this space, we are shown the limits of reliable distributed computing, the safety concerns and threats in this space, and the tradeoffs we will have to make for varying degrees of efficiency or safety.

The Byzantine Generals' Problem, Poisoning, and Distributed Machine Learning with El Mahdi El Mahmdi is the ninth podcast in the AI Alignment Podcast series, hosted by Lucas Perry. El Mahdi pioneered Byzantine resilient machine learning devising a series of provably safe algorithms he recently presented at NeurIPS and ICML. Interested in theoretical biology, his work also includes the analysis of error propagation and networks applied to both neural and biomolecular networks. This particular episode was recorded at the Beneficial AGI 2019 conference in Puerto Rico. We hope that you will join in the conversations by following us or subscribing to our podcasts on Youtube, SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast site/application. You can find all the AI Alignment Podcasts here.

If you're interested in exploring the interdisciplinary nature of AI alignment, we suggest you take a look here at a preliminary landscape which begins to map this space.

Topics discussed in this episode include:

The Byzantine Generals' Problem
What this has to do with artificial intelligence and machine learning
Everyday situations where this is important
How systems and models are to update in the context of asynchrony
Why it's hard to do Byzantine resilient distributed ML.
Why this is important for long-term AI alignment
An overview of Adversarial Machine Learning and where Byzantine-resilient Machine Learning stands on the map is available in this (9min) video . A specific focus on Byzantine Fault Tolerant Machine Learning is available here (~7min)

In particular, El Mahdi argues in the first interview (and in the podcast) that technical AI safety is not only relevant for long term concerns, but is crucial in current pressing issues such as social media poisoning of public debates and misinformation propagation, both of which fall into Poisoning-resilience. Another example he likes to use is social media addiction, that could be seen as a case of (non) Safely Interruptible learning. This value misalignment is already an issue with the primitive forms of AIs that optimize our world today as they maximize our watch-time all over the internet.

The latter (Safe Interruptibility) is another technical AI safety question El Mahdi works on, in the context of Reinforcement Learning. This line of research was initially dismissed as "science fiction", in this interview (5min), El Mahdi explains why it is a realistic question that arises naturally in reinforcement learning

El Mahdi's work on Byzantine-resilient Machine Learning and other relevant topics is available on
his Google scholar profile.

The Byzantine Generals' Problem, Poisoning, and Distributed Machine Learning with El Mahdi El Mhamdi

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Roger Chen, co-founder and CEO of Computable Labs, a startup focused on building tools for the creation of data networks and data exchanges. Chen has also served as co-chair of O'Reilly's Artificial Intelligence Conference since its inception in 2016. This conversation took place the day after Chen and his collaborators released an interesting new white paper, "Fair value and decentralized governance of data." Current-generation AI and machine learning technologies rely on large amounts of data, and to the extent they can use their large user bases to create “data silos,” large companies in large countries (like the U.S. and China) enjoy a competitive advantage. With that said, we are awash in articles about the dangers posed by these data silos. Privacy and security, disinformation, bias, and a lack of transparency and control are just some of the issues that have plagued the perceived owners of “data monopolies.”

Acquiring and Sharing High-Quality Data

In this episode of the Data Show, I speak with Cassie Kozyrkov, technical director and chief decision scientist at Google Cloud. She describes "decision intelligence" as an interdisciplinary field concerned with all aspects of decision-making, and which combines data science with the behavioral sciences. Most recently she has been focused on developing best practices that can help practitioners make safe, effective use of AI and data. Kozyrkov uses her platform to help data scientists develop skills that will enable them to connect data and AI with their organizations' core businesses.

We had a great conversation spanning many topics, including:

How data science can be more useful

The importance of the human side of data

The leadership talent shortage in data science

Is data science a bubble?

Make Data Science More Useful

In this episode of the Data Show, I speak with Alex Ratner, project lead for Stanford’s Snorkel open source project; Ratner also recently garnered a faculty position at the University of Washington and is currently working on a company supporting and extending the Snorkel project. Snorkel is a framework for building and managing training data. Based on our survey from earlier this year, labeled data remains a key bottleneck for organizations building machine learning applications and services.

Ratner was a guest on the podcast a little over two years ago when Snorkel was a relatively new project. Since then, Snorkel has added more features, expanded into computer vision use cases, and now boasts many users, including Google, Intel, IBM, and other organizations. Along with his thesis advisor professor Chris Ré of Stanford, Ratner and his collaborators have long championed the importance of building tools aimed squarely at helping teams build and manage training data. With today’s release of Snorkel version 0.9, we are a step closer to having a framework that enables the programmatic creation of training data sets.

Labeling, Transforming, and Structuring Training Data Sets for Machine Learning

In this episode of the Data Show, I speak with Kesha Williams, technical instructor at A Cloud Guru, a training company focused on cloud computing. As a full stack web developer, Williams became intrigued by machine learning and started teaching herself the ML tools on Amazon Web Services. Fast forward to today, Williams has built some well-regarded Alexa skills, mastered ML services on AWS, and has now firmly added machine learning to her developer toolkit.

Becoming a Machine Learning Practitioner

In this episode of the Data Show, I speak with Michael Mahoney, a member of RISELab, the International Computer Science Institute, and the Department of Statistics at UC Berkeley. A physicist by training, Mahoney has been at the forefront of many important problems in large-scale data analysis. On the theoretical side, his works spans algorithmic and statistical methods for matrices, graphs, regression, optimization, and related problems. On the applications side, he has contributed to systems used for internet and social media analysis, social network analysis, as well as for a host of applications in the physical and life sciences. Most recently, he has been working on deep neural networks, specifically developing theoretical methods and practical diagnostic tools that should be helpful to practitioners who use deep learning.

Understanding Deep Neural Networks

Jon Bruner and Mike Loukides talk about the classical music publishing industry and how it's being disrupted by projects like the Petrucci Music Library (http://imslp.org/) that make public-domain scores available online.

The future of classical music

Jim Stogdill, Edd Dumbill and Roger Magoulas have a conversation about in-memory databases and the impact on real time analysis. Leave questions and comments for us at http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/05/talking-about-in-memory.html

Talking about in-memory

Jon Bruner, Mike Loukides and Jim Stogdill from O'Reilly Radar muse on the return of software to the physical world.

Software and the physical world

Jon Bruner, Jim Stogdill, and Roger Magoulas talk about anthropology in big data, advances in JavaScript, searching for ancient civilizations, the importance of context, and good sites for checking the weather.

Related blog post: http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/06/radar-podcast-anthropology-big-data-and-the-importance-of-context.html

Anthropology, big data, and the importance of context

Jon Bruner, Jim Stogdill, and Roger Magoulas talk about what's been on their minds this week: the NSA's surveillance programs, what defense contractors will do with their technology as defense budgets dry up, and a Californian who isn't doing what you think he's doing with hydroponics.

For more on these topics, and links to the things we talked about, see http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/06/radar-podcast-the-internet-of-things-prism-and-defense-technology-that-goes-civilian.html.

The Internet of Things, PRISM, and defense technology that goes civilian

Deblina Bhattacharjee joins us to talk about her amazing work in computer vision and give advice for getting into and excelling in the field.

In this episode you will learn:
• Deblina’s master’s program work [4:03]
• Deblina’s computer vision research and Ph.D. [11:46]
• Deblina’s drumming hobby [20:18]
• The daily work [24:40]
• What key skills do you need as a data scientist? [33:21]
• How can a data scientist prepare for the future? [37:03]
• How does Deblina tackle time management? [40:24]

Additional materials: www.superdatascience.com/439

SDS 439: Deep Learning for Machine Vision

This week I answer your questions about machine learning and how to educate yourself further in the field.

Additional materials: www.superdatascience.com/446

SDS 446: Getting Started in Machine Learning

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.