46. Ihab Ilyas - Data cleaning is finally being automated
Towards Data Science
08/12/20
•39m
About
Comments
Featured In
It’s cliché to say that data cleaning accounts for 80% of a data scientist’s job, but it’s directionally true.
That’s too bad, because fun things like data exploration, visualization and modelling are the reason most people get into data science. So it’s a good thing that there’s a major push underway in industry to automate data cleaning as much as possible.
One of the leaders of that effort is Ihab Ilyas, a professor at the University of Waterloo and founder of two companies, Tamr and Inductiv, both of which are focused on the early stages of the data science lifecycle: data cleaning and data integration. Ihab knows an awful lot about data cleaning and data engineering, and has some really great insights to share about the future direction of the space — including what work is left for data scientists, once you automate away data cleaning.
Previous Episode
45. Kenny Ning - Is data science merging with data engineering?
August 5, 2020
•51m
There’s been a lot of talk about the future direction of data science, and for good reason. The space is finally coming into its own, and as the Wild West phase of the mid-2010s well and truly comes to an end, there’s keen interest among data professionals to stay ahead of the curve, and understand what their jobs are likely to look like 2, 5 and 10 years down the road.
And amid all the noise, one trend is clearly emerging, and has already materialized to a significant degree: as more and more of the data science lifecycle is automated or abstracted away, data professionals can afford to spend more time adding value to companies in more strategic ways. One way to do this is to invest your time deepening your subject matter expertise, and mastering the business side of the equation. Another is to double down on technical skills, and focus on owning more and more of the data stack —particularly including productionization and deployment stages.
My guest for today’s episode of the Towards Data Science podcast has been down both of these paths, first as a business-focused data scientist at Spotify, where he spent his time defining business metrics and evaluating products, and second as a data engineer at Better.com, where his focus has shifted towards productionization and engineering. During our chat, Kenny shared his insights about the relative merits of each approach, and the future of the field.
Next Episode
47. Goku Mohandas - Industry research and how to show off your projects
August 19, 2020
•50m
Project-building is the single most important activity that you can get up to if you’re trying to keep your machine learning skills sharp or break into data science. But a project won’t do you much good unless you can show it off effectively and get feedback to iterate on it — and until recently, there weren’t many places you could turn to to do that.
A recent open-source initiative called MadeWithML is trying to change that, by creating an easily shareable repository of crowdsourced data science and machine learning projects, and its founder, former Apple ML researcher and startup founder Goku Mohandas, sat down with me for this episode of the TDS podcast to discuss data science projects, his experiences doing research in industry, and the MadeWithML project.
If you like this episode you’ll love
Promoted