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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.

The O'Reilly Data Show Podcast

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 Ira Cohen, co-founder and chief data scientist at Anodot (full disclosure: I’m an advisor to Anodot). Since my days in quantitative finance, I’ve had a longstanding interest in time-series analysis. Back then, I used statistical (and data mining) techniques on relatively small volumes of financial time series. Today’s applications and use cases involve data volumes and speeds that require a new set of tools for data management, collection, and simple analysis.

On the analytics side, applications are also beginning to require online machine learning algorithms that are able to scale, are adaptive, and free of a rigid dependence on labeled data. I talked with Cohen about the challenges in building an advanced analytics system for intelligent applications at extremely large scale.

Semi-Supervised, Unsupervised, and Adaptive Algorithms for Large-Scale Time Series

Collaboration tools in the open-source Trusted Analytics Platform (TAP) address the human side of data analytics. O'Reilly's Rachel Roumeliotis speaks with Chuck Freedman, Chief Developer Advocate for TAP. 

Making data analytics easier for data scientists, developers, and DevOps

With the release of Spark version 2.0, streaming starts becoming much more accessible to users. By adopting a continuous processing model (on an infinite table), the developers of Spark have enabled users of its SQL or DataFrame APIs to extend their analytic capabilities to unbounded streams.

Within the Spark community, Databricks Engineer, Michael Armbrust is well-known for having led the long-term project to move Spark’s interactive analytics engine from Shark to Spark SQL. (Full disclosure: I’m an advisor to Databricks.) Most recently he has turned his efforts to helping introduce a much simpler stream processing model to Spark Streaming (“structured streaming”).

Structured Streaming Comes to Apache Spark 2.0

This week, O'Reilly's Mac Slocum chats with Ben Lorica, O'Reilly's chief data scientist and host of the O'Reilly Data Show Podcast. Lorica talks about emerging themes in the data space, from machine learning to deep learning to artificial intelligence, and how those technologies relate to one another and how they're fueling real-time data applications. Lorica also talks about how the concept of a data center is evolving, the importance of open source big data components, and the rise in interest of big data ethics.

Ben Lorica on the Emergence of Intelligent Real-Time Data Applications

In this episode of the O’Reilly Data Show, I spoke with Rajat Monga, who serves as a director of engineering at Google and manages the TensorFlow engineering team. We talked about how he ended up working on deep learning, the current state of TensorFlow, and the applications of deep learning to products at Google and other companies.

Building Intelligent Applications with Deep Learning and TensorFlow

I recently talked to Sean Suchter, co-founder and CEO of Pepperdata, about why Spark has become so popular and where it still presents challenges. Spark represents the evolution of how the computer field understands and is addressing the challenge of handling big data (a term I will casually use without trying to define—any definition you care to plug in will be relevant for this discussion).

Sean Suchter on the promise and challenges of Spark

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Jason Dai, CTO of big data technologies at Intel, and co-chair of Strata + Hadoop World Beijing. Dai and his team are prolific and longstanding contributors to the Apache Spark project. Their early contributions to Spark tended to be on the systems side and included Netty-based shuffle, a fair-scheduler, and the “yarn-client” mode. Recently, they have been contributing tools for advanced analytics. In partnership with major cloud providers in China, they’ve written implementations of algorithmic building blocks and machine learning models that let Apache Spark users scale to extremely high-dimensional models and large data sets. They achieve scalability by taking advantage of things like data sparsity and Intel’s MKL software. Along the way, they’ve gained valuable experience and insight into how companies deploy machine learning models in real-world applications.

Deep Learning for Apache Spark

Thanks to freeways, cities became something to get through instead of something to get to. Now, as the next transportation revolution -- from rivers to trains to cars to autonomous cars -- promises to change the face of our cities, what happens to car culture, infrastructure, and more?

Who owns what, who pays? And what about the design -- and product management -- challenges, whether it's designing for user trust, city adoption, or an ever-moving target thanks to constantly evolving tech?

This episode of the podcast (in conversation with Sonal) covers all this and more, featuring: a16z's Frank Chen, who recently shared 16 questions about autonomous cars; Taggart Matthiesen, director of product at Lyft who covers the core platform as well as development/strategy for autonomous vehicles; and Carl Pope, former executive director and chairman of the Sierra Club -- and author (with former NYC mayor Mike Bloomberg) of the upcoming book Climate of Hope: How Cities Businesses and Citizens Can Save the Planet. Will curb space be the new shelf space? When we value the "iPhone-ness" over the "carness" of cars, what changes? And... will we all drive less, walk more?

a16z Podcast: Cars and Cities, the Autonomy Edition

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Aurélien Géron, a serial entrepreneur, data scientist, and author of a popular, new book entitled "Hands-on Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow." Géron’s book is aimed at software engineers who want to learn machine learning and start deploying machine learning models in real-world products.

Becoming a Machine Learning Engineer

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Reza Zadeh, adjunct professor at Stanford University, co-organizer of ScaledML, and co-founder of Matroid, a startup focused on commercial applications of deep learning and computer vision. Zadeh also is the co-author of the forthcoming book TensorFlow for Deep Learning (now in early release). Our conversation took place on the eve of the recent ScaledML conference, and much of our conversation was focused on practical and real-world strategies for scaling machine learning. In particular, we spoke about the rise of deep learning, hardware/software interfaces for machine learning, and the many commercial applications of computer vision.

Scaling Machine Learning

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with David Ferrucci, founder of Elemental Cognition and senior technologist at Bridgewater Associates. Ferrucci served as principal investigator of IBM’s DeepQA project and led the Watson team that became champion of the Jeopardy! quiz show. Elemental Cognition (EC) is a research group focused on building an AI system that will be equipped with state-of-the-art natural language understanding technologies. Ferrucci envisions that EC will ship with foundational knowledge in many subject areas, but will be able to very quickly acquire knowledge in other (specialized) domains with the help of “human mentors.”

Having built and deployed several prominent AI systems through the years, I also wanted to get Ferrucci’s perspective on the evolution of AI technologies, and how enterprises can take advantage of all the exciting recent developments.

Language Understanding Remains One of AI's Grand Challenges

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

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.

Semi-Supervised, Unsupervised, and Adaptive Algorithms for Large-Scale Time Series

O'Reilly Radar