Yoga Nidra

Episode 500 of the SuperDataScience podcast is live today! For this special occasion, world-class yogi Jes Allen guides us through a full, deep session of Yoga Nidra — a centering and transformative meditation-like experience.

I'm so excited to share this practice with you and can't wait to hear what you think of it! Thank you to all of you listeners — as well as of course SuperDataScience founder / 400-plus-episode-host Kirill Eremenko — for bringing this podcast to where it is today. And none of this would be possible without the hundreds of inspiring guests we've had over the years, the indefatigable show manager Ivana, and the awesome production team: Mario, Jaime, and JP.

I am honored and grateful to be able to serve all of you and walk alongside you in your data-science career journey. Keep on rockin'! 🎸

You can listen to or watch the episode here.

Data Meshes and Data Reliability

The fun and brilliant Barr Moses joins me this week to detail for us what organization-transforming Data Meshes are, as well as how to track and improve the "Data Uptime" (reliability) of your production systems.

Barr is co-founder and CEO of Monte Carlo, a venture capital-backed start-up that has grown in head count by a remarkable 10x in the past year. Monte Carlo specializes in data reliability, making sure that the data pipelines used for decision-making or production models are available 24/7 and that the data are high quality.

In this SuperDataScience episode, Barr covers:
• What data reliability is, including how we can monitor for the "good pipelines, bad data" problem
• How reliable data enables the creation of a Data Mesh that empowers data-driven decision-makers across all of the departments of a company to independently create and analyze data
• How to build a data science team
• How to get a data-focused start-up off the ground, generating revenue and rapidly scaled up

In addition, Barr took time to answer questions from listeners, including those from Svetlana, Bernard, and A Ramesh. Thanks to Scott Hirleman for suggesting Barr as a guest on the show and thanks to Molly Vorwerck for ensuring everything ran perfectly.

Listen or watch here.

How Only Beginners Know Everything

For Five-Minute Friday, I review a paradoxical pattern I've noticed in myself and in many early-career data scientists: We think we know everything. That is, until we advance past being novices and discover we're not so great.

Listen or watch here.

AI Recruitment Technology & Deep Learning - Guest Appearance on the Engineered-Mind Podcast

Thanks to Jousef Murad for having me on the popular Engineered-Mind podcast.! Jousef had deeply insightful questions and I enjoyed the experience immensely :)

I spoke with Jousef back in April 2021, where we discussed:

- untapt and how AI powered recruiting works
- My background in neuroscience
- Where to get started when learning ML
- Tips for becoming a deep learning specialist
- What is I’m most excited about in terms of AI
- How I come up with the idea of writing a book

You can listen to the podcast anywhere podcasts are available including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Anchor.fm. You can also check out the video directly on YouTube here.

Maximizing the Global Impact of Your Career

This week, expert Benjamin Todd details how you can find purpose in your work and maximize the global impact of your career. In particular, he emphasizes how data scientists can exert a massive positive influence.

In this mind-expanding and exceptionally inspiring episode, Ben details:
• An effective process for evaluating next steps in your career
• A data-driven guide to the most valuable skills for you to obtain regardless of profession
• Specific impact-maximizing career options that are available to data scientists and related professionals, such as ML engineers and software developers.

Ben has invested the past decade researching how people can have the most meaningful and impactful careers. This research is applied to great effect via his charity 80,000 Hours, which is named after the typical number of hours worked in a human lifetime. The Y Combinator-backed charity has reached over eight million people via its richly detailed, exceptionally thoughtful, and 100% free content and coaching.

Listen or watch here.

A Brain-Computer Interface Story

For Five-Minute Friday this week, I tried something different: I wrote a short sci-fi story! Let me know if you liked it or hated it and, based on your feedback, I'll either do more of it or consider never doing it again :)

Watch or listen here.

Successful AI Projects and AI Startups

This week, the rockstar Greg Coquillo fills us in on how to get a return on investment in A.I. projects and A.I. start-ups. He also introduces Quantum Machine Learning.

In addition, through responding to audience questions, Greg details:
• Element AI's maturity framework for A.I. businesses
• How A.I. startup success comes from understanding your long-term business strategy while iterating tactically
• How machines typically are much faster than people but tend to be less accurate

(Thanks to Bernard, Serg, Kenneth, Nikolay, and Yousef for the questions!)

Greg is LinkedIn's current "Top Voice for A.I. and Data Science". When he's not sharing succinct summaries of both technically-oriented and commercially-oriented A.I. developments with his LinkedIn followers, Greg's a technology manager at Amazon's global HQ in Seattle. Originally from Haiti, Greg obtained his degrees in industrial engineering and engineering management from the University of Florida before settling into a series of management-level process-engineering roles.

Listen or watch here.

A4N Episode 5: We're on Pause for Now!

In this episode of A4N, I have a special announcement! While the A4N podcast will be going on indefinite hiatus, it is because I am now hosting the SuperDataScience Podcast. If you enjoyed A4N then you're sure to enjoy the SuperDataScience podcast, which publishes twice every week on Tuesdays and Fridays!

You can check it out here.

Bringing Data to the People

This week's guest is super-cool Anjali Shrivastava. Anjali makes data accessible and broadly appealing by analyzing pop culture — from TikTok mansions to Star Wars timelines — in her fun and creative YouTube videos.

Anjali is an expert in data-science visualization. She has used this skill set to engineer visualizations of data in production systems in a number of roles and recently took up a data science role at the lab technology giant Thermo Fisher Scientific.

We dig into her technical expertise, including her favorite software tools and applications for viz. We also discuss Anjali's mission to bring a face to data, which she accomplishes through journalism as well as through her brilliant and fun "Vastava" YouTube channel.

Anjali holds dual degrees from the prestigious University of California, Berkeley in data science, as well as in industrial engineering and operations research. A recent graduate, she fill us in on what a data science degree curriculum is like at a top university like Berkeley, as well as how anyone can access their world class data science lectures online.

Listen or watch here.

The World is Awful (and it’s Never Been Better)

Feel like the world is kinda poopy? Well, it is! BUT, covid pandemic not withstanding, it's also WAY better than ever before. I articulate this idea with data and charts for this week's Five-Minute Friday episode.

Thanks to Benjamin Todd for pointing me in the direction of a blog post by Max Roser (founder of Our World in Data) that formed the basis of this podcast episode.

Watch or listen here.

R in Production

Dutch national-podium-level powerlifter Veerle van Leemput joins me this week to detail how R is not only an option for production, but may in fact be the *best* production option if data models are central to your application.

Over the course of the episode, Veerle runs down for us her favorite R tools for:
• Data gathering
• Model development
• Deployment into production systems

Veerle has held a number of data-science leadership roles at Dutch companies. She now serves as Managing Director and Head of Data Science at Analytic Health, a London-based firm that builds data-centric software for the healthcare industry. And she was silver medalist in the 57kg class of the 2021 Dutch national powerlifting championships with a total of 335kg (~739 pounds) across the back squat, bench press, and deadlift.

Listen or watch here.

Say No to Pie Charts

Public Service Announcement for this week's Five-Minute Friday: Don't use pie charts! (Nor, in almost all circumstances, ANY circular chart!)

Listen or watch here.

Monetizing Machine Learning

This week's guest is the legendary Vin Vashishta! Vin details his A.I. commercialization strategy, which allows data science teams and machine learning companies alike to be profitable and successful long-term.

Vin is founder of and chief data scientist at V Squared, his own consulting practice that specializes in monetizing machine learning by helping Fortune 100 companies with A.I. strategy. He's also the creator of several platforms (including The ML Rebellion) for learning about critical skill gaps related to artificial intelligence such as commercial strategy, data science leadership, and model explainability.

In addition to the episode's focus on A.I. strategy, Vin answers questions from SuperDataScience listeners (thanks, Serg, Joe, Daniel, Nikhil, and Michael!), including on:
• Efficiency gains from no-code or low-code machine learning tools
• The biggest skills gaps that data scientists have
• The most disturbing data sets
• Investing in socially beneficial models
• The most challenging problem with commercializing AI

Listen or watch here.

(With thanks to Harpreet Sahota for another stellar guest suggestion!)

The Price of Your Attention

Time is money. Every second of your life is yours to use and one of the options you have is to generate income. You can do this hourly, or, as a data scientist, invest time in a digitally-sharable product with a huge potential ROI.

Listen or watch here.

Fixing Dirty Data

My guest this week is the fixer of dirty data herself, the one and only Susan Walsh. We have a lot of laughs in this episode as we discuss how organizations can save substantial sums by tidying up their data.

Susan has worked for a decade as a data-quality specialist for a wide range of firms across the private and public sectors. For the past four years, she's been doing this work as the founder and managing director of her own company, The Classification Guru Ltd. She's also the author of the forthcoming book, "Between the Spreadsheets", and she hosts her own video interview show called "Live from the Data Den".

Listen or watch here.

The History of Calculus

Y'all seem to love these "History of..." episodes, so for Five-Minute Friday this week, here's another one. It's on the History of Calculus! Enjoy 😄

(Leibniz and Newton, who independently devised modern calculus around the same time, are pictured.)

Listen or watch here.

Financial Data Engineering

This week's guest is Doug Eisenstein, an exceptionally clear and content-rich communicator. He fills us in on the complexity of engineering a coherent source of truth for financial models, integrating hundreds of data sources.

Topics covered in the episode include:
• A breakdown of the primary financial sectors and departments
• Why data source integration for finance is wildly complicated
• Specific data engineering approaches that resolve these issues including entity resolution, knowledge graph mapping and tri-temporality.

20 years ago, Doug founded the consulting firm, Advanti and they have since become a critical provider of solutions to complex data engineering problems faced by some of the world's largest banks and asset managers including Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citibank and State Street.

Listen or watch here.

Setting Yourself Apart in Data Science Interviews

For this week's guest episode, I interrogated Andrew Jones on his data science interview secrets. If you want to improve your interview performance — especially if you're in a data-related career — this episode's for you.

Andrew has held a number of senior data roles over the past decade, including at the tech giant Amazon. In those roles, Andrew interviewed hundreds upon hundreds of data scientists, leading him to create his Data Science Infinity educational program, a curriculum that provides you with the hard and soft skills you need to set yourself apart from other data scientists during the interview process.

Listen or watch here.