ISSUE 257 · October 29, 2019

Insight

The Killer App for Machine Learning: In Conversation with Pedro Domingos

In this Fireside Chat, Pedro Domingos and Matt Turck cover a variety of topics, including Domingos' book, The Master Algorithm, scary things about AI, and why finance is a killer app for machine learning. This post on Matt's blog includes a video and notes of the conversation.
Matt Turck's Blog

Tools and Techniques

Open-sourcing Polynote: an IDE-inspired polyglot notebook

Polynote is a newly released notebook environment from Netflix that offers big improvements for data science workflows. Polynote provides first-class Scala support, Apache Spark integration, multi-language interoperability, IDE-like editing, native data visualization, kernel visibility, and reproducibility is baked into the design. This announcement walks-through the details and it’s definitely compelling.
Netflix Techblog

How Randomness Can Arise From Determinism

Nice stats puzzle: drop marbles into a modified Galton board and watch them collect in the bins below. What does the distribution of marbles say about whether nature (or coin flips) is truly random?
Quanta Magazine

Introduction to Adversarial Machine Learning

This tutorial on the FloydHub Blog is a great introduction to current approaches for training and defending against adversarial attacks.
FloydHub

Data scientists are in demand on Vettery

Vettery is an online hiring marketplace that's changing the way people hire and get hired. Ready for a bold career move? Make a free profile, name your salary, and connect with hiring managers from top employers today.
// sponsored

Resources

The State of Open Data

This year's edition of Figshare's State of Open Data report summarizes the survey results from over 8500 researchers about topics like data sharing and funding. Surprisingly, many researchers still consider papers to be more important than data but there's a lot of pressure to change that. The report includes the full survey results, alongside a collection of articles from industry experts around the world.
Digital Science

Mastering Apache Spark with R

This new book is intended to be a useful resource for a wide range of users from beginners that are interested in learning Apache Spark, to experienced readers that are seeking to understand why and how to use Apache Spark from R. It's free to read online or if you prefer print, order here on Amazon.
The R in Spark

Career

Interview Question: What ML Metric to Use

After having candidates work with some data and build a simple model, Alex Gude asks them to come up with a business case for the model. And then the key question: ”How would you measure the success of this model in production?" In this post, Alex offers great insights for thinking through an answer.
Alex Gude's Blog

Glue Work

"Glue work" is work that needs to be done but doesn't necessarily help anyone move along a career path. It's important work but taking on too many glue tasks can limit your career options. It's especially important to be aware of in Analytics roles because in many places, analytics is glue work. This post is a good starting point for understanding these types of tasks, including ways to make sure that valuable work is properly valued.
Locally Optimistic

Job Board

Recent Listings:

Postdoctoral Fellowships - Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society - Stanford, CA
Manager, Advanced Analytics at MIB Group - Braintree, MA
Senior Data Scientist at smava GmbH - Berlin, Germany
Data Analyst at Zalando SE - Berlin, Germany

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Data Viz

How to choose the right visualization for your data

In his summary of the paper, "Task-Based Effectiveness of Basic Visualizations," Adrian Colyer breaks down how to choose the right visualization type for your data. Ten basic analysis tasks are considered for a variety of common chart types. The paper includes an extensive decision table and, for certain tasks, even pie-charts made the cut.
The Morning Paper

Conferences and Events

Scale by the Bay - Learn from top Data Engineers from Netflix, Spotify, Twitter, DataStax, Databricks how to build an end to end data pipeline and seamlessly integrate deep neural networks with traditional software development. November 13-15. Data Elixir readers save 15% with this code: DATAELIXIR15
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