26. Jeremy Howard - Coronavirus: the data behind the disease
Towards Data Science
03/20/20
•43m
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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.
Previous Episode
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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27. Alayna Kennedy - AI safety, AI ethics and the AGI debate
March 30, 2020
•45m
Most of us believe that decisions that affect us should be made rationally: they should be reached by following a reasoning process that combines data we trust with a logic that we find acceptable.
As long as human beings are making these decisions, we can probe at that reasoning to find out whether we agree with it. We can ask why we were denied that bank loan, or why a judge handed down a particular sentence, for example.
Today however, machine learning is automating away more and more of these important decisions, and as a result, our lives are increasingly governed by decision-making processes that we can’t interrogate or understand. Worse, machine learning algorithms can exhibit bias or make serious mistakes, so a black-box-ocracy risks becoming more like a dystopia than even the most imperfect human-designed systems we have today.
That’s why AI ethics and AI safety have drawn so much attention in recent years, and why I was so excited to talk to Alayna Kennedy, a data scientist at IBM whose work is focused on the ethics of machine learning, and the risks associated with ML-based decision-making. Alayna has consulted with key players in the US government’s AI effort, and has expertise applying machine learning in industry as well, through previous work on neural network modelling and fraud detection.
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