Analytics for Commercial and Personal Success

I believe the easiest way to attain success — in personal or professional endeavors alike — is to rigorously track and analyze the right data. Konrad Kopczynski is a master on this topic and he joins me for this week's guest episode.

Whether you're developing machine learning models, maximizing your company's profitability, or tackling a full-length Ironman triathlon, if you're disciplined about data collection, tracking, and reflection, you can iterate, improve, and achieve your dream state. This is a central tenet of my life and much of my ideology on it has been influenced by my near-decade-long friendship with Konrad.

Konrad is the founder and managing partner of impakt Advisors, a consultancy that specializes in harnessing data for, well, impact. They structure the various data sources into thoughtfully constructed data warehouses and then layer on top analytics, data-science models, and visualizations to enable real-time reports, dashboards, and predictions across all the key areas of a business, including digital marketing, customer retention, behavioral segmentation, and profit margin.

Listen to or watch here.

Time-Series Analysis

Matt Dancho joins me on this week's SuperDataScience guest episode, which is dedicated to time-series analysis. We cover what it is (modeling financial data and other quantities that vary over time) as well as the state-of-the-art techniques and tools.

Matt is the founder and CEO of Business Science, an educational platform dedicated to commercial applications of data science. He's a heavy contributor to open-source projects, particularly the Modeltime ecosystem of R packages he devised. Modeltime makes working with (and modeling!) time-series data both tidy and easy.

Listen or watch here!

Landing Your Data Science Dream Job

This week, the inspiring Harpreet Sahota joins me on the SuperDataScience show to fill you in on how to land your data science dream job — whether it’s a more senior role or your first foray into the field.

Harpreet is an eminent contributor to the data science community. It's unbelievable how much he gives to world each week. He:

• Hosts the The Artists of Data Science podcast

• Is the principal mentor at Data Science Dream Job

• Hosts weekly office hours that anyone can drop in on

• With Kate Strachnyi, founded and hosts the inaugural (and forthcoming) Data Community Content Creator Awards

Despite all of the above, Harpreet's remarkably humble — and capital-S Stoic! Oh, and he has a day job too! He's the lead data scientist at Price Industries, a global industrial leader in HVAC manufacture, and in the episode he details for us data models he's built for them.

You can listen (or watch) here.

The Pomodoro Technique

I’ve experimented with a lot of productivity techniques and quantitatively track their effectiveness every day. One of my long-standing favorites is the Pomodoro Technique to eke creative, highly focused work out of minimal effort 🍅

You can listen to or watch today's Five-Minute-Friday episode on the Pomodoro Technique here.

In addition to Pomodoros, some other techniques I've covered on the podcast are mindfulness (here and here) and a number popularized by James Clear over the years (see here).

Legal Tech, Powered by Machine Learning

This week, Horace Wu fills us in on how to bootstrap an ML start-up — without outside capital while still earning an income! We also cover how AI can advance the legal sector and how to pivot your career from services to start-up founder.

Syntheia, the latest company Horace founded, augments human lawyers with the power of the (typically millions) of historical documents at their firm. Using a combination of NLP and machine vision (then surfaced in Microsoft Word using javascript), Syntheia provides lawyers with suggestions on tricky points in contracts and automates the generation of clauses.

Prior to founding Syntheia, Horace was an attorney at top firms in Australia and the US. At Syntheia, he works closely with his team of data scientists and developers to solve complex problems for the legal profession. Especially for a supposedly non-technical founder, he displays a stunning depth of knowledge of NLP models and full-stack model deployments.

You can listen and watch here: superdatascience.com/455

Big Global Problems Worth Solving with Machine Learning

In this week's episode, Stephen Welch joined me to discuss 10 big global problems worth trying to solve with data science and machine learning. Perhaps you'll be inspired to tackle one or two yourself!

2020 presented a lot of challenges to a lot of folks around the world. For Stephen, the challenging year was compounded by intense delivery targets for him and his team on a machine vision-enabled system that automatically detects defective industrial products. After delivering this fascinating edge-deployed software into production, Stephen was able to finally come up for air and he reflected on what's most important in one's life — culminating in his list of 10 global problems worth solving.

Stephen is VP of Data Science at Mariner, where he leads a team developing deep learning-based solutions to manufacturing problems. Prior to working with Mariner, Stephen was VP of Machine Learning at Autonomous Fusion, a firm specialized in self-driving cars. He’s also an adjunct professor at University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the creator of the gorgeous math-focused YouTube channel WelchLabs, which has over 200k subscribers and 10M views.

You can listen or watch here.

Translating PhD Research into ML Applications

Dan Shiebler has a pretty unambitious hobby: a full-time University of Oxford PhD 😂! Dan researches Category Theory, a math branch that categorizes items by their behavior. By day, he's Staff Machine Learning Engineer at Twitter.

In this week's SuperDataScience episode, Dan explains to me how relatively pure mathematical research translates to improving real-world ML applications.

We also discuss:
• How Twitter labels huge datasets
• How Revenue Science can boost ad performance
• What the responsibilities of a staff software engineer at a big tech company are
• What skills are sought after in data science hires at Twitter

Listening and viewing options here.

Fairness in A.I.

Machines increasingly decide on critical aspects of your life, including medical treatment, mortgages, and job applications. Disturbingly, many such algorithms reinforce historical biases against particular gender and ethnic groups.

This week, Ayodele Odubela joins me on SuperDataScience to discuss the importance of equitability, introspection, and transparency when modeling data (and even in hardware development!), plus a bit about Ayodele’s own personal journey as a data scientist.

Ayodele works at Comet (a machine learning company), is the founder of FullyConnected (a brilliantly-named platform for black and brown data scientists), and the author of Getting Started in Data Science as well as the forthcoming book Uncovering Bias in Machine Learning. I learned a lot from Ayodele; she knows a ton and conveys her knowledge beautifully.

Listening/viewing options, as well as full transcript, available here.