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

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Dreaming big is harder than you'd think. 

#2 Is Podcasting the Future or the Past?

By John G. Cramer, University of Washington: https://faculty.washington.edu/jcramer/BBSound.html

Related story: http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/1857/11/a-brief-history-of-noise/422481/

Frequency Spectrum From the Big Bang (WMAP Satellite Data)

Moore's Law -- putting more and more transistors on a chip -- accelerated the computing industry by so many orders of magnitude, it has (and continues to) achieve seemingly impossible feats. However, we're now resorting to brute-force hacks to keep pushing it beyond its limits and are getting closer to the point of diminishing returns (especially given costly manufacturing infrastructure). Yet this very dynamic is leading to "a Cambrian explosion" in computing capabilities… just look at what's happening today with GPUs, FPGAs, and neuromorphic chips. Through such continuing performance improvements and parallelization, classic computing continues to reshape the modern world.

But we're so focused on making our computers do more that we're not talking enough about what classic computers can't do -- and that's to compute things the way nature does, which operates in quantum mechanics. So our smart machines are really quite dumb, argues Rigetti Computing founder and CEO Chad Rigetti; they're limited to human-made binary code vs. the natural reality of continuous variables. This in turn limits our ability to work on problems that classic computers can't solve, such as key applications in computational chemistry or large-scale optimization for machine learning and artificial intelligence. Which is where quantum computing comes in.

But what is quantum computing, really -- beyond the history and the hype? And where are we in reaching the promise of practical quantum computers? (Hint: it will take a hybrid approach to get there.) Who are the players -- companies, countries, types of people/skills -- working on it, and how can a startup compete in this space? Finally, what will it take to get "the flywheel" of application development and discovery going? Part of the answer comes full circle to the same economic engine that drove previous computing advances, argues Chris Dixon; Moore's Law, after all, is more of an economic principle that combined the forces of capitalism, a critical mass of ideas, and people moving things forward by sheer will. Quantum computing is finally getting pulled into the same economic forces as well.

a16z Podcast: Quantum Computing, Now and Next

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Andrew Feldman, founder and CEO of Cerebras Systems, a startup in the blossoming area of specialized hardware for machine learning. Since the release of AlexNet in 2012, we have seen an explosion in activity in machine learning, particularly in deep learning. A lot of the work to date happened primarily on general purpose hardware (CPU, GPU). But now that we’re six years into the resurgence in interest in machine learning and AI, these new workloads have attracted technologists and entrepreneurs who are building specialized hardware for both model training and inference, in the data center or on edge devices.

In fact, companies with enough volume have already begun building specialized processors for machine learning. But you have to either use specific cloud computing platforms or work at specific companies to have access to such hardware. A new wave of startups (including Cerebras) will make specialized hardware affordable and broadly available. Over the next 12-24 months architects and engineers will need to revisit their infrastructure and decide between general purpose or specialized hardware, and cloud or on-premise gear.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CONFERENCE

The Artificial Intelligence Conference in San Francisco, September 4-7, 2018
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In light of the training duration and cost they face using current (general purpose) hardware, some experiments might be hard to justify. Upcoming specialized hardware will enable data scientists to try out ideas that they previously would have hesitated to pursue. This will surely lead to more research papers and interesting products as data scientists are able to run many more experiments (on even bigger models) and iterate faster.

As founder of one of the most anticipated hardware startups in the deep learning space, I wanted get Feldman’s views on the challenges and opportunities faced by engineers and entrepreneurs building hardware for machine learning workloads.

Specialized Hardware for Deep Learning Will Unleash Innovation

A little ditty from the guts of our iPhone app

Cha-Ching!

In this episode of the O’Reilly Media Podcast, Rachel Roumeliotis, VP of content strategy at O’Reilly, sat down with Daniel Krook, IBM developer advocate. They discussed how developers across industries can participate in the Call for Code initiative, the benefits of the program, support from its charitable partners—United Nations Human Rights and the American Red Cross—and the positive impacts IBM hopes to achieve by investing in Call for Code.

Developers Worldwide Will Collaborate on Solutions to Save Lives in Call For Code

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Alan Nichol, co-founder and CTO of Rasa, a startup that builds open source tools to help developers and product teams build conversational applications. About 18 months ago, there was tremendous excitement and hype surrounding chatbots, and while things have quieted lately, companies and developers continue to refine and define tools for building conversational applications. We spoke about the current state of chatbots, specifically about the types of applications developers are building today and how he sees conversational applications evolving in the near future.

Using Machine Learning to Improve Dialog Flow in Conversational Applications

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Alon Kaufman, CEO and co-founder of Duality Technologies, a startup building tools that will allow companies to apply analytics and machine learning to encrypted data. In a recent talk, I described the importance of data, various methods for estimating the value of data, and emerging tools for incentivizing data sharing across organizations. As I noted, the main motivation for improving data liquidity is the growing importance of machine learning. We’re all familiar with the importance of data security and privacy, but probably not as many people are aware of the emerging set of tools at the intersection of machine learning and security. Kaufman and his stellar roster of co-founders are doing some of the most interesting work in this area.

Machine Learning on Encrypted Data

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 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.