Data Chatter

Everyone wants to do “data science”. Companies want to introduce “machine learning” in their products. Most fund raises by startups nowadays are accompanied by a statement of intent to invest in data, and data science.

Back in 2006, mathematician Clive Humby, who was working for Tesco, made the statement that “data is the new oil” (to give context, we were in the middle of a massive bull run in oil prices then). And so companies are investing in data.

However, just investing in data capture and hiring data scientists is not enough for a company to get value. It is important to structure the relationship between data and business, and how the data team is managed, in the right way for the data team to be effective.

Today’s guest is Anuj Krishna. Over the last 14 years, Anuj has worked with multiple enterprises on both, the translation side as well as the execution side of analytics. He has helped create standard processes for analytical problem solving that are in use in multiple enterprises.

Anuj was an early employee of MuSigma, and then went on to co-found TheMathCompany. In his current role, Anuj is Head of Assets at TheMathCompany, and is also responsible for operations related to TheMathCompany.

Show Notes:

00:03:00: How business and data science currrently interact

00:06:30: Translating from analytics to business

00:13:00: Structuring a data science team

00:22:00: Data science versus business intelligence

00:29:00: How can a business person get best value out of a data team?

00:32:00: Why data science projects fail

00:38:30: Evolution of the data science industry over the last decade

Links:

Anuj Krishna

TheMathCompany (LinkedIn)

Data Chatter is a podcast on all things data. It is a series of conversations with experts and industry leaders in data, and each week we aim to unpack a different compartment of the "data suitcase".

There is an ongoing debate on when children should be taught to code. There is one group of people which insists that computer programming is a lifelong skill, and is best taught early. The opposing argument is that coding is possibly a fad, and that children will learn it when they have to.

But what about data science? The field itself is less than 15 years old. Does it make sense to introduce it to children at an early age?

According to Rahul Raghavan, the guest on this episode, the answer is an overwhelming “yes”.

Rahul is a Montessori educator and founder of pep School v2, a Montessori school in Bangalore. Before getting into education, he was in the corporate world, working in impact investing (with VentureEast) and then with Amazon.

You can follow him on Twitter at @rahulrg

Show Notes:

00:02:55 - Introduction to the Montessori method

Links:

Rahul on Twitter

Commentary on the viral video on “why should I learn maths?”

Florence Nightingale’s chart on causes of death in the Crimean War

Geometric intuition on how sqrt(2) + sqrt(3) is approximately equal to pi

Edward Tufte's books

Data Chatter is a podcast on all things data. It is a series of conversations with experts and industry leaders in data, and each week we aim to unpack a different compartment of the "data suitcase".

One of the first industries to extensively use advanced maths to do better was financial services. Ever since Fischer Black and Myron Scholes published their seminal paper on option pricing in 1973, Wall Street firms hired mathematicians and scientists by the droves, getting them to model asset prices in order to get an edge in the market. Even today, top hedge funds such as Renaissance, Citadel and Two Sigma prefer to hire scientists rather than finance professionals to manage their portfolios.

However, in the last decade or so, as Data Science and Artificial Intelligence have taken over the rest of the world, Wall Street has not maintained its leadership position in the use of maths to make money. How and why did this happen?

In order to understand this, we talk to Hari Balaji, co-founder of Romulus, an award winning unstructured data automation platform for Financial Services firms.

Prior to founding Romulus, Hari spent a decade in quant & data roles at Goldman Sachs across Hong Kong and Singapore. Hari is an alumnus of IIT Madras & IIM Ahmedabad.

Show Notes

00:03:15 - What is data science and what is artificial intelligence?

00:10:40 - What Hari’s company does

00:14:00 - Toolbox versus hammer-nail approaches

00:15:00 - This history of math in the financial services industry

00:28:45 - Wall Street is never a first mover but a great follower

00:33:30 - How Wall Street uses data science nowadays

00:41:00 - Why most innovations have happened at smaller firms

00:44:00 - Why the financial industry doesn’t behave like the Tech world

Romulus on Twitter

Romulus on LinkedIn

Data Chatter is a podcast on all things data. It is a series of conversations with experts and industry leaders in data, and each week we aim to unpack a different compartment of the "data suitcase".

For a lot of people, their first introduction to data and analytics happens through sport. Fans have tracked batting and bowling averages for many decades now. In the 1990s, with the coming of satellite TV in India, cricket fans had their first brush with bar graphs and line graphs, with “manhattans” and “worms” respectively.

In the last two decades, following the publication of Michael Lewis’s Moneyball, the field of sports analytics hsa exploded. A couple of months before this podcast was released, it was revealed that footballer Kevin De Bruyne had hired a sports analytics firm in order to better negotiate his contract with Manchester City. And along the way, analytics has entered smaller sports such as kabaddi and volleyball.

Today’s conversation is a double header, featuring the husband-wife duo of Arvind Sivdas and Dhanya P, who are also founders of KabaddiAdda, a Kabaddi platform. They have worked in analytics in cricket, badminton, volleyball and kabaddi, among other sports. We talk about the evolution of sports analytics, how to quantify “continuous sports”, the role of fantasy sport and several other things.

Show Notes

00:02:50 - How they got into sports analytics

00:13:00 -  The popularity of “matchups” in sports nowadays

00:20:00 - How Roger Federer used analytics to transform his game

00:25:00 - Why performance analytics has limited impact in (association) football

00:30:30 - The importance of buy-in from the management, and evaluating success

00:32:45 - How Kabaddi has evolved in the last few years

00:37:15 - The parallels between Kabaddi and Basketball

00:46:00 - Analytics in Kabaddi

00:47:00 - Data collection for sports like Kabaddi

00:49:40 - Biomechanics studies in Kabaddi

00:51:30 - How to fund analytics in smaller sports?

00:55:10 - The role of betting and fantasy in developing analytics

00:59:20 - “Moneyball” - where is it being underused, where is it being overused etc.

01:01:00 - Convincing CSK that cricketers peak in their 30s

Pradeep Narwal's 8 point raid

On how CSK won IPL 2018 with "dad's army"

Data Chatter is a podcast on all things data. It is a series of conversations with experts and industry leaders in data, and each week we aim to unpack a different compartment of the "data suitcase".

In business schools in India, there is a misconception that marketing is not quantitative, and that it is for the more “creative” people. However, if you look at its history, marketing has always been a highly quantitative subject.

To know more about data and quant in marketing, we talk to Prithwiraj Mukherjee, an assistant professor of marketing at IIM Bangalore.

Prithwiraj teaches marketing management and marketing research at the MBA and doctoral levels. His MOOC titled Quantitative Marketing Research is available on EdX and Swayam. He research interests include behavioral decision making where he models biases, and digital marketing where he investigates influencer fraud and clickbait.

Prithwiraj has a PhD in marketing from ESSEC in Paris, and degrees in chemical engineering from NITK Surathkal and IISc

He can be found on twitter at @peeleraja

Show Notes:

00:03:40 - Introduction on numbers in marketing

Data Chatter is a podcast on all things data. It is a series of conversations with experts and industry leaders in data, and each week we aim to unpack a different compartment of the "data suitcase".

Analytics and Data Science have become mainstream career choices for graduating students in India nowadays. Analytics companies are nowadays among the largest recruiters at engineering colleges.

How did we get here? How did data and analytics become so big, and so mainstream in India? In order to understand this, we need to understand the full history of analytics in India, and this is a story that goes back over a hundred years.

Today’s guest is N Dayasindhu, co-founder and CEO of itihaasa Research and Digital. For the past two decades, he has been working on R&D and innovation management especially focused on IT. He is working on the evolution of business and technology focused on IT and related domains in the Indian context. In an earlier avatar, he was a consultant advising MNCs setting up high-performance R&D and IT organizations in India.

He was also a researcher in the R&D arm at Infosys and holds a couple of US patents. His research is published in Technology Forecasting and Social Change, Technovation, ACM SIGMIS, etc. He occasionally writes in The Indian Express, The Hindu,The Economic Times, The Hindu Business Line, Founding Fuel, etc. He has guest lectured in the IIMs, the Wharton School at UPenn, NUS Singapore, etc.

He has an FPM (PhD) from IIM Bangalore, M.Sc. in Physics from IIT Madras and a B.Sc. in Physics from Loyola College, Chennai.

Show Notes:

00:03:20 - PC Mahalanobis returns to India (1910s)

00:12:30 - Using analytics for engineering problems at IISc (1950s) https://ece.iisc.ac.in/index.php/about-us/history

00:23:00 - Analytics in the industry in India (1960s)

00:33:00 - Big tech coming into India (1980s)

00:35:30 - GE sets up captive in India (1990s)

00:39:45 - Analytics services startups; IT firms get into analytics (ealrly 2000s)

00:49:30 - Analytics training institutes in India (2010s)

00:52:00 - How to characterise analytics professionals in India

Links

Dayasindhu on Twitter

Dayasindhu’s interview with L^2, the alumni magazine of IIM Bangalore

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Data Chatter is a podcast on all things data. It is a series of conversations with experts and industry leaders in data, and each week we aim to unpack a different compartment of the "data suitcase".

“Business intelligence” has become a rather unfashionable term in the world of data and analytics. From generating buisness insights from intelligent use of data, it has largely devolved to become a software engineering function - to connect databases to front end tools.

However, there is far more to business intelligence than just writing queries. In this episode, Karthik talks to another BI professional - Balaji Kuppuswamy, director of BI products at Youtube. They talk about what BI really is, the skills involved in BI, where it sits in an organisation, and how it can truly add value.

Show Notes:

00:03:30 -  What is the definition of Business Intelligence?

00:07:20 - BI’s marketing and branding problem

00:12:50 - The role of science in BI

00:15:20 - Interactive dashboards

00:19:00 - What’s it like being a data scientist in BI?

00:27:30 - How Balaji got into BI

00:32:00 - Using BI tools

00:36:00 - Integrating intelligence into BI tools

00:39:00 - Building up a BI team.

00:48:00 - Agile in BI

Links:

Kaiser Fung’s article on BI and data science

Avinash Kaushik on “datapukes"

Data Chatter is a podcast on all things data. It is a series of conversations with experts and industry leaders in data, and each week we aim to unpack a different compartment of the "data suitcase".

Around a decade ago, “big data” became fashionable. There were lots of jokes and memes created around “big data”. Everyone wanted to do big data.

Now, in 2021, the hype around big data may have died down, but how to roganise and store data remains an important problem for organistions to solve.

Today’s guest is Rangarajan Vasudevan, founder and CEO of TheDataTeam, which builds AI solutions for customer intelligence. We talk about the history of big data, what companies look for when they want to organise their data, technolgies and all such.

Show Notes:

00:03:00 -  What is Big Data?

Ranga on Twitter

TheDataTeam 

Data Chatter is a podcast on all things data. It is a series of conversations with experts and industry leaders in data, and each week we aim to unpack a different compartment of the "data suitcase".

When we read or talk about “data science”, most of the talk is around modelling - the maths behind it, the “cool” modelling techniques, what kind of CPUs or GPUs are required, and all that. What we normally talk less about is how data science interacts with business.

In this inaugural episode of Data Chatter, I talk to S Anand, co-founder and CEO of Gramener, about this so-called “interaction layer”. Our conversation is almost completely focussed on two such interfaces - Microsoft Excel, and data visualisation. We talk about various aspects of what it takes to communicate data to business, and pros and cons of different tools.

Anand is a co-founder of Gramener, a data science company. He leads a team that automates insights from data and narrates these as visual data stories. He is recognized as one of India's top 10 data scientists, and is a regular TEDx speaker.

Show Notes:

00:03:40 -  On how Anand was “always a data guy”

Links:

Gramener: https://gramener.com

Data Chatter is a podcast on all things data. It is a series of conversations with experts and industry leaders in data, and each week we aim to unpack a different compartment of the "data suitcase".

This is the trailer of "data chatter", a new podcast on all things data. 

Data Chatter is a series of conversations with experts and industry leaders in data, and each week we aim to unpack a different compartment of the "data suitcase".

The podcast is hosted by Karthik Shashidhar. He is a blogger, newspaper columnist, book author and a former data and strategy consultant. Karthik currently heads Analytics and Business Intelligence for Delhivery, one of India’s largest logistics companies. 

You can follow him on twitter at @karthiks