Podcast

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

Virtual reality (VR) -- and augmented reality (AR) -- seem to be everywhere these days, showing up in demos and offerings from the world's biggest gadget makers to the Hollywood, gaming, and media crowds. But what's the difference between VR and AR? Is one better suited for work vs. play? What happens when you are building experiences -- and an entirely new visual grammar -- from scratch ... will we actually need standards next? a16z's Chris Dixon and Wired Entertainment's Peter Rubin discuss all this and more on this episode of the a16z Podcast.

---

The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation.
 
This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments and certain publicly traded cryptocurrencies/ digital assets for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/.

Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information.

a16z Podcast: Virtual Reality v Augmented Reality, and What's Next

O'Reilly's Ben Lorica chats with Poppy Crum, neuroscientist and researcher at Dolby Labs, about AI and virtual reality systems, and about building a team of researchers from diverse disciplines.

Understanding Neural Function and Virtual Reality

Laura Klein and Kate Rutter chat about what is wrong with personas and how we can make some important tweaks in order make them more useful for design and communication.

This podcast is a cross-post from the User’s Know podcast (http://www.usersknow.com/podcast), and is republished here with permission. The podcast also is available on iTunes (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/what-is-wrong-ux-users-know/id980133198).

Tweaking Personas: Mastering the Hunt for the Ideal User

O'Reilly's Rachel Roumeliotis chats with Joost Visser, head of research at Software Improvement Group (SIG), about how a focus on quality helps to achieve the fastest possible schedules and lowest possible cost of development and maintenance.

Better Code is Cheaper

O'Reilly's Mary Treseler chats with designer Gretchen Anderson about using design as a force to improve our lives and about approaching design as an inclusive discipline.

Design for the Greater Good

Derek Belch, co-founder and CEO of STRIVR Labs, a startup that uses virtual reality to train athletes, describes the passion necessary for entrepreneurship and the features that give his business a competitive edge in a rising-tide industry. The former Stanford football player is candid about the personal sacrifices entailed in putting your all into your venture.

Derek Belch - Immersed in Virtual Reality

Rachel Roumeliotis talks to Intel's Chuck Freedman and Iman Saleh about the data analytics applications of the Trusted Analytics Platform (TAP).

The advantages of open source in analytics

Immersive Virtual Reality &amp; Suicide Prevention, Part 1 My guests today on The Not Old Better Show are Dusty Wright, and he’s joined in his home studio via Skype, with colleagues, Director, Stephanie Riggs and Producer, Serena Belsby. Please note the&nbsp;links to everyone’s details, but it is an august group. Talented and respected.&nbsp; Join us for a great show, tour de force, but, I must tell you, right at the outset, while this project is a powerful, brilliant application of VR, it is also the result of a tragic suicide.&nbsp; One the one hand, a thoughtful, inspired, and intelligent deployment of the virtual reality technology. And, on the other hand, a brutal, difficult subject which galvanized this team and their solution.&nbsp; This is a personal subject for me and my family, as well as many others.&nbsp; It’s important to discuss this, as hard as it may be. As reminder, please check out The Not Old Better&nbsp;web site&nbsp;where you’ll find links to where you can go check out all the material, and how best to contribute and get involved. You can easily go directly to Sunchaser Entertainment sunchaserent.com&nbsp;and click “Donate.”&nbsp; Donations are tax deductible.&nbsp; Please check out part 2 of the interview with Dusty, Stephanie and Serena… Please donate to our tax decutible "Fly" VR music video fund for suicide prevention &amp; fighting depression!

Immersive Virtual Reality & Suicide Prevention, Part 1

Immersive Virtual Reality &amp; Suicide Prevention, Part 2 This is Part 2 of our show about immersive virtual reality and suicide prevention. My guests today on&nbsp;The Not Old Better Show&nbsp;are&nbsp;Dusty Wright, and he’s joined in his home studio via Skype, with colleagues, Director,&nbsp;Stephanie Riggs&nbsp;and Producer,&nbsp;Serena Belsby.&nbsp;Please note the&nbsp;links to everyone’s details, but it is an august group. Talented and respected.&nbsp; Join us for a great show, tour de force, but, I must tell you, right at the outset, while this project is a powerful, brilliant application of VR, it is also the result of a tragic suicide.&nbsp; One the one hand, a thoughtful, inspired, and intelligent deployment of the virtual reality technology. And, on the other hand, a brutal, difficult subject which galvanized this team and their solution.&nbsp; This is a personal subject for me and my family, as well as many others.&nbsp; It’s important to discuss this, as hard as it may be. As reminder, please check out&nbsp;The Not Old Better&nbsp;web site&nbsp;where you’ll find links to where you can go check out all the material, and how best to contribute and get involved. You can easily go directly to&nbsp;Sunchaser Entertainment&nbsp;sunchaserent.com&nbsp;and click “Donate.”&nbsp; Donations are tax deductible.&nbsp; Please check out part 2 of the interview with Dusty, Stephanie and Serena… Please donate to our tax decutible "Fly" VR music video fund for suicide prevention &amp; fighting depression!

Immersive Virtual Reality & Suicide Prevention Pt. 2

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

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.