Data Science Imposters Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Interview with Kenneth Reitz Apr 22, 2019

Show notes

Our agenda with Kenneth was to have an honest, unscripted conversation and we succeeded.

If you’ve never heard of Kenneth, you may have heard of the several Python tools that he has helped to authored requests and pipenv. (According to https://pypi.org/project/requests/2.9.1/, Requests gets 43 million downloads per month.) Or you’ve read his book Hitch Hiker’s Guide to Python. Or you’ve listened to his song – don’t worry, we have a sample of one of his tracks – ‘Push and Pull’ – at the end of the episode.

Listen to the episode then check out his site: kennethreitz.org

Containers & Japan with Brian de Heus Apr 15, 2019

Show notes

Brian de Heus is the Chief Technology Officer at Adgorithmics in Tokyo, Japan. We leveraged social media to reach out to him and ask him to join our show remotely. The first challenge was getting over the 14 hour time difference. The second hurdle was making sure that we stayed on topic since Antonio has always wanted to visit Japan and here was Brian telling him how great it was.

Brian explains to us what his company does, the problem that existed for his company, and how he solved it with containers. That’s really how you should approach technology. You have a problem, you look for a solution – new or old technology, and you apply it. Don’t find a technology and then look for a problem – we’ve said it before and now we’re writing it down.

Listen to this episode to learn more about Container technology, Brian, Adgorithmics, and living in Japan. We hope you enjoy and please send us a note, give us a review, or send us a tweet. Until next time …

Economists do Data Science Differently w/ Dr. Peter Lorentzen Apr 08, 2019

Show notes

If all you know about economics is ‘supply and demand’, you may be in for a good awakening with our next interviewee. Dr. Peter Lorentzen is professor in the Economics Department at the University of San Francisco and he is starting a new graduate program in Applied Economics.

With the recent teams of Economists that firms like Uber, Apple, and other Silicon Valley employees are hiring, we wanted to get more details. After listening to Peter talk to us about the vision for his program, we fully understand the motivation by these companies. These companies are not the first to hire economists; Bell Labs has done this previously. According to Peter, the requirements to obtain an economics degree have not changed on the way in and USF is trying to change the skill sets economists get on the way out.

If you’re interested in reading more, you should also read these articles:

1.Why Tech Companies Hire So Many Economists – 2019
https://hbr.org/2019/02/why-tech-companies-hire-so-many-economists

2. Amazon gets an edge with its secret squad of PhD economists
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/03/13/tech/amazon-economists/index.html

3. Goodbye, Ivory Tower. Hello, Silicon Valley Candy Store.

4.Should your tech firm have an economist? by Jed Kolko, Chief Economist at Indeed.

Software Bugs will eat the world Apr 01, 2019

Show notes

In 2011, Marc Andreessen wrote a fantastic article Why Software Is Eating The World. This motivated our title for this podcast. In this podcast we talk about software bugs that have fatal consequences, major financial, and explore why these bugs happen so frequently.

Which software are you worried about in your life? Your car? Your plane? Your money stored in digital form? Were you worried about Y2K or thinking about the Epoch Bug?

Public Service Announcement: If you haven’t read Marc’s article, please do.

GDPR, huh, what is it good for? Absolutely something? Mar 25, 2019

Show notes

If you’re outside of the EU, you may not know about GDPR. In this episode, we invite our friend Maria to discuss the General Data Protection Regulation. We discuss the What? Who? When? Where? We also talk about the business impact of these rules, what it means to implement them, and what is still to come. If you’re in the USA, you should know that some rules are coming to California then – we should all think about the importance of these rules – as individuals and as business owners.

Natural Language Processing with Prem Ganeshkumar Mar 11, 2019

Show notes

How do you make a computer program understand a language, a natural language, like English? Can we create a program that can create sentences, paragraphs, articles, or stories?

In this episode, we explore the basics of Natural Language Processing from Prem Ganeshkumar who is a Lead Natural Language Processing Research Engineer at Agolo in New York City.

After this episode, you should be able to pass our Data Science Imposters Natural Langugage Processing Quiz – https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdmgFmnoLfyxfu0tc_xjk4HS4u3ZxaAi4X-XxuoYfABLPkWmg/viewform

Fight or Flight? Mar 04, 2019

Show notes

At Antonio’s latest visit to the Motor Vehicle Commission, he finds out two things. First, sometimes it’s hard to change data once a mistaken occurs. Second, he will take flight before a fight.

We then talk about Amazon and the second headquarter that never was. Apparently, Amazon feels like Antonio – they also took flight.

With or without Amazon, NYC’s tech scene continues to flourish.

An interview with Dr. Noemi Derzsy Feb 19, 2019

Show notes

Dr. Noemi Derzsy is currently a Senior Inventive Scientist at AT&T Labs within the Data Science and AI Research organization. In addition to getting to know what her position entailed, we wanted to know how she got there (especially given her Physics background), how she thought about the data science discipline, and where she saw the future of the field.

Dr. Derzsy gives us her take on data engineering vs. data science teams. Antonio and Jordy seemed to agree. She gives advice to those looking for opportunities in the field. She uses her words more carefully than we do and used the term ‘geographically isolated’ for one of the places that we three had in common. We could not agree more with her assessment.

Dr. Derzsy is also a NASA Datanaut and she shared her experiences about the program. You can find more details here: https://open.nasa.gov/explore/datanauts/

We are in awe with how much Dr. Derzsy has done in the field thus far and will certainly keep tuned for newer developments.

Ep. 49 – Interview with Dr. Haftan Eckholdt – Chief Data Officer & Chief Science Officer at Understood.org Feb 01, 2019

Show notes

In this episode, we interview Dr. Haftan Eckholdt – Chief Data Officer & Chief Science Officer at Understood.org. Understand’s goal is to help the millions of parents whose children, ages 3–20, are struggling with learning and attention issues.

Haftan takes us through his journey from rigging computers for distributed computing to generating models associated to the insurance industry and then onto technology companies (including Plated and Audible).

Haftan has plenty of ideas about how to integrate data and technology in his latest endeavor. He discusses direct and indirect data and examples of how data can be leveraged in positive ways. We certainly look forward to hearing about his success.

Cheap Noodles, Beers, and Bayesian Econometrics with Jim Savage Jan 17, 2019

Show notes

Jim Savage is the Head of Data Science at @lendableinc He joins us on the show to take us to school about statistics, his company, the work he’s been doing, and cheap noodles.

Jordy and Antonio have Jim make sense of this blog post for them: https://khakieconomics.github.io/2017/01/01/Building-useful-models-for-industry.html

Along the way, we learn how Jim’s life really revolves around pizza. (Please note that he had pizza for dinner). He also talks about commitment and how that translates to short term goals (30 days) and long term goals (6 years).

We made a new friend and we hope you enjoy the conversation as much as we did.

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