When Does AI Make Sense?
Every emerging technology is accompanied by CEOs champing at the bit. Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is no different. The C-Suite is throwing “AI” into as many conversations as possible to appease shareholders and give off the appearance of a technologically savvy company. While organizations love to embrace new technologies,...
Book Review: Designing Machine Learning Systems
An important part of every data science professional’s growth journey is evolving from data preparation and model training to owning the entire machine learning development cycle. The full cycle includes data ingestion, data cleaning and preparation, feature engineering, model training, model evaluation, model deployment, model serving, and model maintenance....
Building a Climate Change MEME Generator
Memes are the most efficient messenger in society today. Is there any other vehicle that can carry a powerful statement across the world as quickly and efficiently as a good meme? This thought process was the inspiration for my group’s entry into OpenAI’s recent Climate Hackathon: The Climate Change...
Software Will Replace Your Financial Advisor
As a data scientist, I find it hard to believe that anyone would trust their financial portfolio to an advisor who doesn’t understand the basics of statistics and probability. Yet, how many investors do you know who blindly trust their advisor or financial planner? How many of those advisors...
Poor Data Quality Destroys Machine Learning Models
Whether it is Alexa answering a question or Elon preaching self-driving cars, business leaders see exciting machine learning use cases everywhere they look. The hype around artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) is staggering. So much of the mainstream discussion centers around these exciting applications, but they often...
Using Machine Learning to Estimate Price Elasticity
During the final semester of my grad school analytics program, I was tasked with estimating price elasticity for wine. At first glance, this seemed like a simple objective. In economics, I was taught that price elasticity is the percent change in demand given the percent change in price (i.e....
Neural Networking With Cocktails
By Jeff Lundy While most people took up breadmaking during the pandemic, I got into cocktails. I don’t know how it took me so long to get into cocktails, as it basically combines chemistry with booze. As a nicety for my houseguests (whenever we have those again), I coded...
Book Review: The Hundred-Page Machine Learning Book
I first ordered The Hundred-Page Machine Learning book back in May and am only just now finishing it up. In COVID-time, that was about 10 years ago. As you might have inferred, this book is NOT a quick read. What it lacks in easy reading, it makes up for...
The Future of Data Scientists
In the fall of 2012, I remember my mother telling me about an article that said data scientists are the new, sexy profession. The moment stuck with me because nobody wants to hear their parents utter the word, “sexy”. Unbeknownst to me at the time, this Harvard Business Review...