Data Journeys

Laura Noren is a data science ethicist and researcher currently working in cybersecurity at Obsidian Security in Newport Beach. She holds undergraduate degrees from MIT, a PhD from NYU where she recently completed a postdoc in the Center for Data Science. Her work has been covered in The New York Times, Canada's Globe and Mail, American Public Media's Marketplace program, in numerous academic journals and international conferences. Dr. Norén is a champion of open source software and those who write it.

 

Enjoy the show!

 

Show Notes:

 

• [3:55] Laura explains how she produces the Data Science Community Newsletter, covering things like how the department of defense just got billions in funding to do AI research. How do you incorporate humor into such rigorous coverage?

• [10:22] How can you distinguish signal from noise in choosing a news source?
• [12:13] When and how to control your biases in your work when in the heat of the moment.
• [14:05] Laura’s interests in data science began as an undergraduate at MIT, surrounded by people who build.
• [16:10] Sociology in the context of people who build, since people are the *actual* most complicated systems.
• [18:00] What important things defines a profession?
• [19:30] What’s the difference between ethics and morals?
• [22:04] How ethics affects the field of data science, specifically.
• [25:35] The data science ethicist as person who is a creator, and not just there to put up stop signs.
• [31:40] How can companies strike a balance between hard stops in a product and more negotiated unique messaging for customers to address ethical employees?
• [38:53] How can smaller companies who can’t afford a Chief Ethics Officer monitor and address ethical issues?
• [48:30] Techniques that can be used by individuals and organizations to identify and address ethical issues in a company.
• [50:00] How data scientists can navigate non-black and white ethical issues in their own work.
• [55:15] Laura’s recommendations for ethics 101: Data and Society, AI Now Institute, and Open AI.
• [1:00:00] Laura ends off with a call-to-action to start conversations on ethics with your colleagues.

 

If you enjoyed this episode of Data Journeys, the best way to support the show is by leaving a review on iTunes and sharing on your social medias using the hashtag #datajourneys.

 

Laura’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/digitalflaneuse?lang=en

Wes McKinney is the creator and "Benevolent Dictator for Life" (BDFL) of the open-source pandas package for data analysis in Python, and has also authored two versions of the reference book Python for Data Analysis. Wes is also one of the co-creators of the Apache Arrow project, which is currently his main focus. Most recently, he is the founder Ursa Labs, a not-for-profit open source development group in partnership with RStudio.

 

He describes himself as a problem-solver, and is particularly interested in improving the usability of data tools for programmers, accelerating data access and in-memory data processing performance, and improving data system interoperability.

 

In my conversation with Wes today, we focused on getting to know Wes on a more personal level, discussing his background and interests to get some insight into the living legend of open source he has become.

 

• [3:48] How did coming from four generations of newspaperman impact Wes’s upbringing?
• [6:00] What kind of hobbies was he interested in growing up, and what is the origin of his interest in computers?
• [11:08] How did he come to run a Goldeneye 007 world record website, and update and maintain it by hand?
• [16:10] Wes’s high school career as a mathlete, and how an early interest in math contributed to his approach to programming.
• [18:15] How wes brings the rigor he learned in mathematics to software engineering.
• [19:50] How languages and math scratch the same itch for composition.
• [21:00] About learning enough German to complete a PhP programming internship in Munich.
• [23:00] How Wes’s experience using data in his first year working post-undergrad set him down the path to Pandas.
• [25:00] What went into his decision to take leave from grad school to build Pandas?
• [27:00] The legendary tweet where Wes expressed his sense of purpose and motivation in building Pandas.
• [29:52] Why Wes’s work is motivated by the desire to free up people’s time to realize their full potential.
• [30:51] Zero to One - Peter Thiel
• [31:40] Why is solving basic efficiency problems, like reading CSV files. so important?
• [34:12] How community management has played such a huge role in making Pandas so successful compared to other tools.
• [39:00] The importance of seeing peers in an open source project as people with good intentions and more than just a GitHub profile.
• [46:00] How do the incentives of an open source project influence prioritization in a project?
• [51:45] How Wes’s newest project, UrsaLabs, is tackling the problem of funding in open source software development.
• [56:20] Wes’s goals for UrsaLabs over the next five years.

 

AJ’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/ajgoldstein393

Wes’s Twitter:https://twitter.com/wesmckinn

Wes’s personal website: http://wesmckinney.com

Wes’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wesmckinn/

Mike Tamir is the Head of Data Science at Uber ATG. He is a leader in data science, specializing in deep learning and distributed scalable machine learning, and he’s also a faculty member at UC Berkeley.

 

Mike has led several teams of Data Scientists in the San Francisco Bay Area as Chief Data Scientist for InterTrust and Formation, Director of Data Sciences for MetaScale, and Chief Science Officer for Galvanize, where he oversaw all data science product development. He also created an MS degree program in Data Science in partnership with UNH.

 

Mike began his career in academia serving as a mathematics teaching fellow for Columbia University and graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh. His early research focused on developing the epsilon-anchor methodology for resolving both an inconsistency he highlighted in the dynamics of Einstein’s general relativity theory and the convergence of “large N” Monte Carlo simulations in Statistical Mechanics’ universality models of criticality phenomena.

 

The focus of today’s conversation was on his fake news detection AI project called Faker Fact.

 

Show notes:

 

• 0:00 First, a life update from AJ. Read about his new opportunity in Portland here on his blog.
• 5:28 What is the evolutionary explanation for why a human’s capacity for careful, rational thought often takes a back seat to emotion? Explained in a comic on the project website.
• 6:17 Emotions often win over rational though, but as a result, it can be difficult to think clearly on issues we’re passionate about.
• 7:05 Why people should be aware of their emotional biases, even though it’s not our fault that we have them.
• 7:50 Why Facebook deleted over a billion fake accounts recently, and why fake accounts, clickbait, blatantly false content, and other forms of fake news are everywhere on social media.
• 9:10 What mechanisms can we put in place to counterbalance the parts of our nature that compel us to create and engage with content on an emotional level?
• 9:51 Since a majority of our information is second-hand, how do we distingush what’s really true?
• 11:44 How did Mike become motivated to pursue this problem, on top of his full time job at Uber ATG?
• 12:45 How can we tackle “fake news” without censorship?
• 16:40 Post-Walter Cronkite era, how do we create a sense of credibility and neutrality in our information?
• 21:00 Why would it be a mistake if the algorithm learned to only classify right or left wing content as fake news?
• 22:19 The algorithm only looks at the title and words on a page, not the url.
• 23:15 How Walt (the FakerFact AI) classifies different types of content. Satire, journalism, etc.
• 26:46 How do you strike the balance of entertainment and informativeness in content?
• 31:10 What features and characteristics defines each different category of content that Walt identifies?
• 36:16 What is Walt’s ideal use case?
• 36:55 You can use the FakerFact Chrome extension to view the “nutrition facts” of the page you’re reading.
• 37:42 How does research on run-on sentences and other grammatical choices help Walt understand and score an article?
• 40:34 What techniques were used to train the Walt AI?
• 42:41 A discussion on the use of wisdom of the crowds in algorithms.
• 45:30 What makes it difficult to use the wisdom of the crowds when answers are too closely correlated (because of political affiliations or the news cycle?)
• 46:47 Visit Humanetech.com for tips on regulating your daily notifications and escaping the “24-hour news cycle” to prevent media from controlling your emotions.
• 50:15 Rapid fire questions!
• 52:27 Mike’s advice to his 20 year old self.
• 52:40 What was his best investment in himself?
• 53:18 The Deep Learning Book a starting point for basic literacy in data science.
• 53:20 Mike, like lots of guests on this show, makes a distinction between things he believes but couldn’t prove right now, and believing things for no good reason.

Show Notes: https://ajgoldstein.com/podcast/ep22

AJ’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/ajgoldstein393/

Mike’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/miketamir/

Mike’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/MikeTamir

Frank Diana is a recognized futurist, thought leader and frequent keynote speaker. He has served in various executive roles throughout his career and has over 30 years of leadership experience. He is focused on leadership dialog in the context of our emerging future and its implications. He blends a futurist perspective with a pragmatic, actionable approach, leveraging horizon scanning and storytelling to see possible futures and drive foresight into leadership deliberation.

Kyle Polich is the co-host of the incredibly popular Data Skeptic podcast. His general interests range from areas like statistics, machine learning, data viz, and optimization to data provenance, data governance, econometrics, and metrology.

In this episode of the Data Journeys Podcast, I pick Kyle’s brain for patterns noticed and lessons learned through interviewing and teaching his way through nearly 400 episodes of the Data Skeptic Podcast.

Emily Glassberg Sands is the Head of Data Science at Coursera -the largest online learning platform for higher education with 30M learners from around the world.Her team leads the quantitative measurement, experimentation,and inference that informs Coursera’s product and business direction.

We covered topics like:

How she uses analytics to identify ways to improve the learning experience and provide high quality education worldwide.

The behaviours of successful learners and how to change your habits.

Dan Hammer is an environmental economist and winner of the 2017 Pritzker Prize for the Environment. Currently he serves as a National Geographic Fellow and the co-founder of Earthrise Media, and throughout 2016, he was the Senior Policy Advisor to the U.S. Chief Technology Officer, Megan Smith, as part of the Obama Administration.

Does not take himself too seriously // played in the academic/private/public sectors // has stayed so true to a single mission across 17+ positions over 10 years.

In this episode of the Data Journeys podcast, we have not one, but two guests!

Sivan Aldor-Noiman and Erik Andrejko join me from Wellio: an intelligent platform that uses machine learning and behavioral science to help people plan, shop, prepare and enjoy healthy meals at home.

In this conversation, we dive deep into Wellio’s artificial intelligence for eating.

Enjoy the show!

Jim Guszcza is the US Chief Data Scientist at Deloitte Consulting. Deloitte is the largest professional services network in the world in terms of revenue, with over 263,900 professionals globally.

In this interview, we explore how philosophy and nudge theory can be applied to change human behavior using data science.

Enjoy!

Travis Oliphant is the Founder & CEO of Quansight: a company that bridges open-source communities and innovative companies by growing talent, building technology, and discovering new products.

For years Travis has been an indispensable contributor toward data science’s open-source movement through so many different outlets:

-Founder, Director, & Former CEO @ Anaconda, Inc

-Founder, Chairman of the Board @ NumFOCUS Foundation

-President @ Enthought

-Creator of NumPy, SciPy, Numba, & XND