25. Chris Parmer - Plotly founder on what data science is, and where it's going
Towards Data Science
03/18/20
•41m
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It’s easy to think of data scientists as “people who explore and model data”. Bur in reality, the job description is much more flexible: your job as a data scientist is to solve problems that people actually have with data.
You’ll notice that I wrote “problems that people actually have” rather than “build models”. It’s relatively rare that the problems people have actually need to be solved using a predictive model. Instead, a good visualization or interactive chart is almost always the first step of the problem-solving process, and can often be the last as well.
And you know who understands visualization strategy really, really well? Plotly, that’s who. Plotly is a company that builds a ton of great open-source visualization, exploration and data infrastructure tools (and some proprietary commercial ones, too). Today, their tooling is being used by over 50 million people worldwide, and they’ve developed a number of tools and libraries that are now industry standard. So you can imagine how excited I was to speak with Plotly co-founder and Chief Product Officer Chris Parmer.
Chris had some great insights to share about data science and analytics tooling, including the future direction he sees the space moving in. But as his job title suggests, he’s also focused on another key characteristic that all great data scientists develop early on: product instinct (AKA: “knowing what to build next”).
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Most machine learning models are used in roughly the same way: they take a complex, high-dimensional input (like a data table, an image, or a body of text) and return something very simple (a classification or regression output, or a set of cluster centroids). That makes machine learning ideal for automating repetitive tasks that might historically have been carried out only by humans.
But this strategy may not be the most exciting application of machine learning in the future: increasingly, researchers and even industry players are experimenting with generative models, that produce much more complex outputs like images and text from scratch. These models are effectively carrying out a creative process — and mastering that process hugely widens the scope of what can be accomplished by machines.
My guest today is Xander Steenbrugge, and his focus is on the creative side of machine learning. In addition to consulting with large companies to help them put state-of-the-art machine learning models into production, he’s focused a lot of his work on more philosophical and interdisciplinary questions — including the interaction between art and machine learning. For that reason, our conversation went in an unusually philosophical direction, covering everything from the structure of language, to what makes natural language comprehension more challenging than computer vision, to the emergence of artificial general intelligence, and how all these things connect to the current state of the art in machine learning.
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26. Jeremy Howard - Coronavirus: the data behind the disease
March 20, 2020
•43m
In mid-January, China launched an official investigation into a string of unusual pneumonia cases in Hubei province. Within two months, that cluster of cases would snowball into a full-blown pandemic, with hundreds of thousands — perhaps even millions — of infections worldwide, with the potential to unleash a wave of economic damage not seen since the 1918 Spanish influenza or the Great Depression.
The exponential growth that led us from a few isolated infections to where we are today is profoundly counterintuitive. And it poses many challenges for the epidemiologists who need to pin down the transmission characteristics of the coronavirus, and for the policy makers who must act on their recommendations, and convince a generally complacent public to implement life-saving social distancing measures.
With the coronas in full bloom, I thought now would be a great time to reach out to Jeremy Howard, co-founder of the incredibly popular Fast.ai machine learning education site. Along with his co-founder Rachel Thomas, Jeremy authored a now-viral report outlining a data-driven case for concern regarding the coronavirus.
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