I've recently completed Athabasca University's PowerED course, Using Machine Learning for Competitive Advantage. Marcin Mizianty, VP Datascience at AltaML and one of the course subject matter experts, joins me to explain how machine learning can be applied to a variety of industries to solve real-world business problems. 

We talk about...

• How Marcin chose to focus his PhD on AI and became a data scientist before it became such a hot area.
• Hollywood depictions of artificial intelligence and why those are NOT what AI is about! AI is all around us playing useful functions - from fraud detection to spam filters.
• How AltaML has partnered with Dynalife to use computer vision to help them reduce testing time and costs for healthcare testing.
• The steps of a machine learning project, why Marcin feels that defining the business problem is the most important step and who should be involved in this process.
• Marcin's favourite question to help companies find an ML project in their company
• What it means to train a model in non-technical terms (and making sure it works beyond the training data). How to make sure you don't build a model that states the obvious. 
• What Katrina learned about data from taking this course and what characteristics within data you should look for in your data  
• How to locate, assess and prepare your data to make it "machine learning ready"
• What's it REALLY like to be a data scientist and why data science is actually a team sport.
• The role of communication in ensuring a successful machine learning project and helping customers better understand the ROI for their business. 
• The importance of ethics in AI and ML and the role of governance and oversight. 

Learn more about Athabasca University and their PowerEd offerings and don't forget to use offer code INGRAM20 if you sign up. We're proudly affiliated with the Alberta Podcast Network - home to fantastic local podcasts.