28. Emily Robinson - Building a Career in Data Science
Towards Data Science
04/07/20
•43m
About
Comments
Featured In
It’s easy to think of data science as a purely technical discipline: after all, it exists at the intersection of a number of genuinely technical topics, from statistics to programming to machine learning.
But there’s much more to data science and analytics than solving technical problems — and there’s much more to the data science job search than coding challenges and Kaggle competitions as well. Landing a job or a promotion as a data scientist calls on a ton of career skills and soft skills that many people don’t spend nearly enough time honing.
On this episode of the podcast, I spoke with Emily Robinson, an experienced data scientist and blogger with a pedigree that includes Etsy and DataCamp, about career-building strategies. Emily’s got a lot to say about the topic, particularly since she just finished authoring a book entitled “Build a Career in Data Science” with her co-author Jacqueline Nolis. The book explores a lot of great, practical strategies for moving data science careers forward, many of which we discussed during our conversation.
Previous Episode
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.
Next Episode
29. Cameron Davidson-Pillon - Data science at Shopify
April 15, 2020
•40m
If you want to know where data science is heading, it helps to know where it’s been. Very few people have that kind of historical perspective, and even fewer combine it with an understanding of cutting-edge tooling that hints at the direction the field might be taking in the future.
Luckily for us, one of them is Cameron Davidson-Pillon, the former Director of Data Science at Shopify. Cameron has been knee-deep in data science and estimation theory since 2012, when the space was still coming into its own. He’s got a great high-level perspective not only on technical issues but also on hiring and team-building, and he was kind enough to join us for today’s episode of the Towards Data Science podcast.
If you like this episode you’ll love
Promoted