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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

O’Reilly’s Mac Slocum talks with Edd Dumbbell, VP of strategy at Silicon Valley Data Science, about the data lake, the opportunities the model presents, and the driving forces behind the concept. In the second segment, O’Reilly’s big data guru Ben Lorica chats with Rajiv Maheswaran, CEO of SecondSpectrum, about spatial-temporal pattern recognition — what Maheswaran calls “the science of moving dots.”

The data lake model is a powerhouse for invention

O’Reilly’s Roger Magoulas chats with Tricia Wang, a global tech ethnographer and co-founder of PL Data, about how qualitative and quantitative data need to work together, reframing "data-driven decision making," and how to build the ideal team.

An alternate perspective on data-driven decision making

O'Reilly's Jenn Webb chats with John Carnahan, executive vice president of data science at Ticketmaster, about Ticketmaster's evolving approach to data analysis, the avenues of user engagement they're investigating, and how his genetics background is informing his work in the big data space. Also, Three Questions with Michael Abbott, a general partner at VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Bridging the gap in big data silos

O'Reilly's Ben Lorica chats with Gary Kazantsev, who runs the R&D Machine Learning group at Bloomberg LP, about how big data and data science are making a difference in finance.

Data Science Makes an Impact on Wall Street

O'Reilly's Mike Hendrickson chats with database pioneer and 2014 Turing Award recipient Michael Stonebraker about winning the award, the future of data science, and the importance — and difficulty — of data curation.

The Future of Data at Scale

Paco Nathan and Jesse Anderson on the evolution of the data training landscape.

O’Reilly’s Ben Lorica chats with Paco Nathan, director of O’Reilly Learning, and Jesse Anderson, technical trainer and creative engineer at Confluent, about the training landscape in the big data ecosystem, their teaching techniques and particular content they choose, and a look at some expected future trends.

Training in the Big Data Ecosystem

Evangelos Simoudis on data mining, investing in data startups, and corporate innovation.

Turning Big Data Into Actionable Insights

Emil Eifrem, CEO and co-founder of Neo Technology, on the early days of NoSQL, applications of graph databases, cloud computing, and company culture in the U.S. and Sweden.

Graph Databases are Powering Mission-Critical Applications

O'Reilly's Ben Lorica chats with Eric Colson, chief algorithms officer at Stitch Fix, and former VP of data science and engineering at Netflix. They talk about building and deploying mission-critical, human-in-the-loop systems for consumer Internet companies. 

Building a Business That Combines Human Experts and Data Science

David Beyer, co-founder and CEO of Chart.io, principal at Amplify Partners, and part of the founding team at Patients Know Best, chats with Risto Miikkulainen, professor of computer science and neuroscience at the University of Texas at Austin. They chat about evolutionary computation, its applications in deep learning, and how it’s inspired by biology.

Risto Miikkulainen on Evolutionary Computation and Making Robots Think For Themselves

In this episode of the O’Reilly Data Show, I spoke with Fang Yu, co-founder and CTO of DataVisor. We discussed her days as a researcher at Microsoft, the application of data science and distributed computing to security, and hiring and training data scientists and engineers for the security domain.

Using Apache Spark to Predict Attack Vectors Among Billions of Users and Trillions of Events

In this episode of the O’Reilly Data Show, I spoke with M.C. Srivas, co-founder of MapR and currently chief architect for data at Uber. We discussed his long career in data management and his experience building a variety of distributed systems. In the course of his career, Srivas has architected key components that now comprise many data platforms (distributed file system, database, query engine, messaging system, etc.).

Stream Processing and Messaging Systems for the IoT Age

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.

Turning Big Data Into Actionable Insights

O'Reilly Radar