Celebrating 5 Years with ODSC: An Award, A Workshop, and What’s Ahead

Last week in Boston, the Open Data Science Conference (ODSC) surprised me with their "Speaker Impact Award" to recognize the years of training I've been providing at ODSC conferences.

Thank you Sheamus McGovern (pictured) and the whole ODSC team (Alex, Alina, Anna, Deepti, Elen, Paula, Ruby) for the honor and for putting on such stellar technical conferences.

I first lectured at ODSC New York in June 2019, when I provided a half-day workshop that introduced Deep Learning. (By great chance, the now-legendary Serg Masís emceed my session!)

Since then, I've enjoyed both ODSC East (held each spring in Boston) and ODSC West (held each autumn in San Francisco) most years, delivering (typically full-day) workshops on:

• Deep Learning

• The mathematical foundations of Machine Learning (e.g., linear algebra, partial-derivative calculus)

• Training and deploying Large Language Models (with Lightning AI and Hugging Face)

This year at ODSC East, Ed Donner and I delivered a full-day training on developing and deploying Agentic A.I. featuring the open-source tools CrewAI, OpenAI Agents SDK, and Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP). The session was jam-packed for the entire day and received rave reviews.

If you couldn't make it to Boston last week, I have good news for you! I hired a film crew to capture our entire Agentic A.I. training and am currently having the footage professionally edited. In the coming weeks (as soon as possible!), we'll be publishing this on YouTube so that it's freely available to everyone worldwide. Watch this space :)

Teams of Agents: The Next Frontier in AI Collaboration, with Mike Pell

Special episode for you today (filmed in front of a live audience!) with the inventor and exceptional communicator, Mike Pell. Hear his vision for the way teams of A.I. agents will change work and life for the better.

Today’s episode features a session I hosted a couple weeks ago in Brooklyn at the inaugural "A.I. & Creativity Summit", which was run by Artist and the Machine. It was an excellent full-day event on a gloriously sunny day.

My guest for an on-stage conversation in front of a live audience was the extraordinary Mike Pell:

• Inventor of the PDF and Adobe Acrobat.

• Director of The Microsoft Garage, a global innovation program.

• Holds over 20 US Patents.

• Author of three books.

Today’s episode is entertaining, optimistic and forward-looking and will be of interest to any listener of my podcast.

In the episode, Mike details:

• Why A.I. agents are like an exoskeleton that gives you capabilities you never had time to master.

• The coming shift from passive to proactive A.I. that will interject like a trusted coworker.

• Why he believes we're "getting to the good part" in the A.I. revolution and what that means for the future of work.

The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.

How to Ensure AI Agents Are Accurate and Reliable, with Brooke Hopkins

Agentic A.I. is powerful because it has infinite breadth of capability. But this is a double-edged sword: Agents entail great risk and testing their performance is tricky... until now — thanks to Brooke Hopkins, today's guest!

Brooke:

Is Founder & CEO of Coval (YC S24), a San Francisco-based startup that provides a simulation and evaluation platform for A.I. agents. A few days ago, they announced a $3.3m fundraise that includes heavyhitter VCs like General Catalyst, MaC and Y Combinator.

• Previously was Tech Lead and Senior Software Engineer at Waymo, where she worked on simulation and evaluation for Waymo’s self-driving cars.

• Before that, she was a Software Engineer at Google.

• She holds a degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from New York University’s Abu Dhabi campus.

Despite Brooke’s highly technical background, our conversation is largely conceptual and high-level, allowing anyone who’s interested in developing and deploying Agentic A.I. applications to enjoy today’s episode.

In today’s episode, Brooke details:

• How simulation and testing best practices inspired by autonomous-vehicle development are being applied by her team at Coval to make A.I. agents useful and trustworthy in the real world.

• Why voice agents are poised to be the next major platform shift after mobile, creating entirely new ways to interact with technology.

• How companies are using creative strategies like "background overthinkers" to make A.I. agents more robust.

• What the rise of A.I. agents means for the future of human work and creativity… indeed, how agents will transform all of society.

The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.

AI Systems as Productivity Engines, with You.com’s Bryan McCann

Today, wildly intelligent Bryan McCann describes the Agentic A.I. behind his skyrocketing startup You.com and how it will lead to scientific discoveries human scientists couldn't dream of making. Don't miss this episode!

Bryan:

• Co-Founder and CTO of You.com, a prominent Bay Area A.I. startup that has raised $99m in venture capital (including a $50m Series B in September that valued the firm at nearly a billion dollars).

• Was previously Lead Research Scientist at Salesforce and an assistant on courses at Stanford such as Andrew Ng’s wildly popular machine learning course.

• Holds a Master’s in Computer Science, a Bachelor’s in Computer Science and a Bachelor’s in Philosophy, all from Stanford University.

Today’s episode should be fascinating to anyone interested in AI. In it, extremely well-spoken Bryan details:

• The philosophical underpinnings of the breakthroughs that led to the leading A.I. models we have today as well as the ones that will emerge in the coming years.

• How a coding mistake he made serendipitously revealed fundamental insights about meaning and language model alignment.

• Why he believes humanity is entering an existential crisis due to A.I., but nevertheless remains optimistic about the future.

• The fascinating connection between language models and biological proteins.

• Why A.I. systems might soon be able to make scientific discoveries humans could never dream of making.

The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.