In this episode of the Data Show, I speak with Peter Bailis, founder and CEO of Sisu, a startup that is using machine learning to improve operational analytics. Bailis is also an assistant professor of computer science at Stanford University, where he conducts research into data-intensive systems and where he is co-founder of the DAWN Lab.

We had a great conversation spanning many topics, including:

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In this episode of the Data Show, I speak with Arun Kejariwal of Facebook and Ira Cohen of Anodot (full disclosure: I’m an advisor to Anodot). This conversation stemmed from a recent online panel discussion we did, where we discussed time series data, and, specifically, anomaly detection and forecasting. Both Kejariwal (at Machine Zone, Twitter, and Facebook) and Cohen (at HP and Anodot) have extensive experience building analytic and machine learning solutions at large scale, and both have worked extensively with time-series data. The growing interest in AI and machine learning has not been confined to computer vision, speech technologies, or text. In the enterprise, there is strong interest in using similar automation tools for temporal data and time series.

We had a great conversation spanning many topics, including:

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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.

We had a great conversation spanning many topics, including:

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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.

We had a great conversation spanning many topics, including:

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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.

We had a great conversation spanning many topics, including:

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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:

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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.”

In recent years, researchers and practitioners have begun building tools focused on helping organizations acquire, build, and share high-quality data. Chen and his collaborators are doing some of the most interesting work in this space, and I recommend their new white paper and accompanying open source projects.

We had a great conversation spanning many topics, including:

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In this week’s episode of the Data Show, we’re featuring an interview Data Show host Ben Lorica participated in for the Software Engineering Daily Podcast, where he was interviewed by Jeff Meyerson. Their conversation mainly centered around data engineering, data architecture and infrastructure, and machine learning (ML).

Here are a few highlights:

A data catalog, at a high level, basically answers questions around the data that’s available and who is using it so an enterprise can understand access patterns. … The term “data catalog” is generally used when you’ve gotten to the point where you have a team of data scientists and you need a place where they can use libraries in a setting where they can collaborate, and where they can share not only models but maybe even data pipelines and features. The more advanced data science platforms will have automation tools built in. … The ideal scenario is the data science platform is not just for prototyping, but also for pushing things to production.

We have tools for software development, and now we’re beginning to hear about tools for machine learning development—there’s a company here at Strata called Comet.ml, and there’s another startup called Verta.ai. But what has really caught my attention is an open source project from Databricks called MLflow. When it first came out, I thought, ‘Oh, yeah, so we don’t have anything like this. Might have a decent chance of success.’ But I didn’t pay close attention until recently; fast forward to today, there are 80 contributors for 40 companies and 200+ companies using it.

What’s good about MLflow is that it has three components and you’re free to pick and choose—you can use one, two, or three. Based on their surveys, the most popular component is the one for tracking and managing machine learning experiments. It’s designed to be useful for individual data scientists, but it’s also designed to be used by teams of data scientists, so they have documented use-cases of MLflow where you have a company managing thousands of models and productions.

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Nick Pentreath, principal engineer at IBM. Pentreath was an early and avid user of Apache Spark, and he subsequently became a Spark committer and PMC member. Most recently his focus has been on machine learning, particularly deep learning, and he is part of a group within IBM focused on building open source tools that enable end-to-end machine learning pipelines.

We had a great conversation spanning many topics, including:

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In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Dhruba Borthakur (co-founder and CTO) and Shruti Bhat (SVP of Product) of Rockset, a startup focused on building solutions for interactive data science and live applications. Borthakur was the founding engineer of HDFS and creator of RocksDB, while Bhat is an experienced product and marketing executive focused on enterprise software and data products. Their new startup is focused on a few trends I’ve recently been thinking about, including the re-emergence of real-time analytics, and the hunger for simpler data architectures and tools.  Borthakur exemplifies the need for companies to continually evaluate new technologies: while he was the founding engineer for HDFS, these days he mostly works with object stores like S3.

We had a great conversation spanning many topics, including:

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