The legend Wes McKinney is this week's guest! He details the genesis of the ubiquitous pandas library, the forthcoming edition of his bestselling book, and how Apache Arrow brings analytics into the distributed computing era.
Wes:
• Created pandas, the industry-standard Python library for data analytics
• Co-created Apache Arrow, a language-agnostic open-source library for efficient analytics on modern distributed CPUs and GPUs
• Wrote the classic O'Reilly Media desk reference "Python for Data Analysis"
• Has worked as technical expert at prestigious firms like Cloudera, RStudio PBC, Two Sigma, and AQR Capital Management
• Today serves as co-founder and CTO of Voltron Data
In this episode, Wes takes us on a technical deep-drive through:
• The creation story of his now-ubiquitous pandas library
• A sneak peek at the third edition of his international-bestselling book
• What the Apache Arrow project is and why it's poised to revolutionize the data science and software industries
• The software and hardware tools that he uses daily to be such an epically productive software developer and entrepreneur
• Responses to great questions by listeners Daniel, David, Doug, and Brett
The SuperDataScience show's available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.
Data Tools vs. Data Platforms
This article was originally adapted from a podcast, which you can check out here.
In last week’s Five-Minute Friday, I covered the highest-paying programming languages for data scientists based on the results of O’Reilly’s 2021 Data/AI Salary Survey. Next week, I’m going to expand on those survey results by covering the highest-paid data tools and the week after that I’ll cover the highest-paying data platforms.
To make the most of those forthcoming episodes, today we are investing a few minutes in getting our definitions straight: I’ll detail what data tools are as well as what data platforms are.
Read MoreLinear Regression Fit Point by Point
With this new video, the past months of my "Calculus for Machine Learning" videos all start to come together, enabling us to apply the simplest ML model: a regression line fit to individual data points one by one by one.
This simple regression model will enable us, in next week's video, to derive the simplest-possible partial derivatives for calculating a machine learning gradient.
We publish a new video from my "Calculus for Machine Learning" course to YouTube every Wednesday. Playlist is here.
More detail about my broader "ML Foundations" curriculum and all of the associated open-source code is available in GitHub here.
Skyrocket Your Career by Sharing Your Writing
This week's guest is Khuyen Tran, one of the most preeminent voices of data science: Her blog alone receives over 100k views/month. In this episode, she details how by publishing your writing, you too can skyrocket your career.
Khuyen:
• Became an author for the Towards Data Science blog less than two years ago; already her articles garner 100k+ views per month
• Writes practical daily posts featuring Python code right here on LinkedIn, leading to her developing a highly engaged following of over 25k — in just one year!
• Recently became a technical writer for NVIDIA's Developer Blog
• Has landed four data science jobs, including her current role at Ocelot Consulting, in part thanks to her writing
• Has a perfect 4.0 GPA in the computational and applied mathematics undergraduate degree that she's on track to complete next year
In today's episode, Khuyen fills us in on:
• How publishing your writing can skyrocket your technical career
• Her tricks for maximizing engagement with the content you publish
• Her favorite data science tools and approaches
• Her tricks for prioritizing and being as epically productive as she is across her studies, her data science work, and her prodigious technical writing
And thanks to Krzysztof and Nikolay for the outstanding audience questions that Khuyen addressed on-air.
The episode's available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.
The Highest-Paying Programming Languages for Data Scientists
This article was originally adapted from a podcast, which you can check out here.
The beloved technical publisher O’Reilly recently released their 2021 Data/AI Salary Survey. It covers responses from 3000 survey respondents in the US combined with another 300 respondents from the UK. All of the respondents are subscribers to O’Reilly’s Data & AI Email Newsletter.
There’s quite a lot of detail in the report on how the salaries of data professionals vary, including by gender, level of education, career stage, industry, and geographic location. Today, I’m focusing on how salaries vary by programming language since this is an attribute that you can easily change about yourself, simply by learning something new.
Read MoreExercises on the Multivariate Chain Rule
Last week's YouTube video detailed how we use the Chain Rule for Multivariate (Partial Derivative) Calculus. This week's video features three exercises to test your comprehension of the topic.
We publish a new video from my "Calculus for Machine Learning" course to YouTube every Wednesday. Playlist is here.
More detail about my broader "ML Foundations" curriculum and all of the associated open-source code is available in GitHub here.
A.I. for Good
This week's guest is the eloquent and inspiring James Hodson, founder and CEO of the AI for Good Foundation, which leverages data and machine learning to tackle the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals.
In this episode, James details:
• Globally impactful case studies from his A.I. for Good organization across public health, DEI, and a practical database of A.I. progress on social issues
• How you yourself can get involved in helping apply A.I. for wide-reaching social benefit, whether you're a technical expert or not
• The hard and soft skills that he looks for in the data scientists that he hires
In addition to his leadership of A.I. for Good, James:
• Is an academic research fellow at the Jozef Stefan Institute, where he's focused on Natural Language Processing research
• Is Chief Science Officer at Cognism, a British tech startup
• Served as A.I. Research Manager at Bloomberg LP
• Completed a degree at Princeton University focused on Machine Translation
Thank you to Claudia Perlich for the intro to James! I learned a ton from him while filming this episode.
The episode's available on all major podcasting platforms, on YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.
Intro to Deep Reinforcement Learning at Columbia University
My goodness did I ever miss lecturing in-person! Was finally back in front of a live classroom on Friday, providing an intro to Deep Reinforcement Learning to engineering graduates at Columbia University in the City of New York.
Thank you Chong and Sam for having me. It's always a delight to lecture to your brilliant ELEN E6885 students, especially now that the pandemic is subsiding and I can interact with them meaningfully again.
You can see the slides from here as well as the associated GitHub repository here.
Fail More
Fail more! Failing is very very good. For Five-Minute Friday this week, I elaborate on why.
SuperDataScience episodes are available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.
The Chain Rule for Partial Derivatives
For this week's YouTube video, we apply the Chain Rule (introduced earlier in the series in the single-variable case) to find the partial derivatives of multivariate functions — such as Machine Learning functions!
We publish a new video from my "Calculus for Machine Learning" course to YouTube every Wednesday. Playlist is here.
More detail about my broader "ML Foundations" curriculum and all of the associated open-source code is available in GitHub here.
Courses in Data Science and Machine Learning
This week's guest is super fun Sadie St. Lawrence, an exceptionally popular data science instructor with over 300k students all-time. She fills us in on her exciting new ML Certificate and the global impact of her Women In Data org.
Sadie:
• Teaches data science at the University of California, Davis
• Her Coursera course is one of the all-time most popular
• Is Founder and CEO of Women in Data, a community of 20k across 15 countries
• Holds a Master's in Analytics from Villanova University
In this episode, she digs into:
• The content of her existing iconic data science course
• The curriculum of her epic forthcoming Machine Learning Certificate
• The mission, impact, and vision of the Women in Data organization
• Her path into data science from music performance
• Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and the future of technology
Thanks to Harpreet Sahota for introducing me to Sadie! I absolutely loved filming this episode.
Listen or watch here.
Does Caffeine Hurt Productivity? (Part 3: Scientific Literature)
For Five-Minute Friday yesterworkday, I concluded my three-part series on whether caffeine disrupts productivity by broadening from the experiment I ran on myself to the academic literature on the topic.
My Jupyter notebook of data and analysis of the caffeine vs productivity experiment I ran on myself is here.
SuperDataScience episodes are available on all major podcasting platforms and YouTube, and on SuperDataScience.com.
Partial Derivative Notation
This week's YouTube video is a quick one on the common options for partial derivative notation.
We publish a new video from my "Calculus for Machine Learning" course to YouTube every Wednesday. Playlist is here.
More detail about my broader "ML Foundations" curriculum and all of the associated open-source code is available in GitHub here.
Accelerating Impact through Community — with Chrys Wu
This week's guest is global tech community builder Chrys Wu who details how you too can leverage communities to accelerate your career. This is the first SuperDataScience episode ever recorded in-person!
In addition to accelerating your career with community, Chrys covers:
• K-pop music and its associated cultural movement
• How the Write/Speak/Code and Hacks/Hackers organizations she co-founded leverage community to make a massive global impact for marginalized genders and journalism, respectively
• Her top resources — social media accounts, blogs, and podcasts — for staying abreast of the latest in data science and machine learning
Chrys is a consultant who specializes in product development and change management. She's also a co-founder of both Write/Speak/Code and Hacks/Hackers, the latter of which has grown to 70 chapters across five continents.
Listen or watch here.
"Math for Machine Learning" course on Udemy complete!
After a year of filming and editing, my "Math for Machine Learning" course on Udemy is complete! To celebrate, we put together this epic video that overviews the 15-hour curriculum in under two minutes.
Over 83,000 students have registered for the course, which provides an introduction to all of the essential Linear Algebra and Calculus that one needs to be an expert Machine Learning practitioner. It's full of hundreds of hands-on code demos in the key Python tensor libraries — NumPy, TensorFlow, and PyTorch — to make learning fun and intuitive.
You can check out the course here.
Does Caffeine Hurt Productivity? (Part 2: Experimental Results)
For this week's Five-Minute Friday, I detail the results of the experiment I ran on myself (chart shown) that suggests my productivity is significantly higher when I don't drink coffee than when I do. Am I alone in this?
You can check out the episode here and a Jupyter notebook of my data and statistical analysis here.
Advanced Partial-Derivative Exercises
My "Machine Learning Foundations" video this week features fun geometrical examples in order to strengthen your command of the partial derivative theory that we covered in the preceding videos.
We publish a new video from my "Calculus for Machine Learning" course to YouTube every Wednesday. Playlist is here.
More detail about my broader "ML Foundations" curriculum and all of the associated open-source code is available in GitHub here.
Transformers for Natural Language Processing
This week's guest is award-winning author Denis Rothman. He details how Transformer models (like GPT-3) have revolutionized Natural Language Processing (NLP) in recent years. He also explains Explainable AI (XAI).
Denis:
• Is the author of three technical books on artificial intelligence
• His most recent book, "Transformers for NLP", led him to win this year's Data Community Content Creator Award for technical book author
• Spent 25 years as co-founder of French A.I. company Planilog
• Has been patenting A.I. algos such as those for chatbots since 1982
In this episode, Denis fills us in on:
• What Natural Language Processing is
• What Transformer architectures are (e.g., BERT, GPT-3)
• Tools we can use to explain *why* A.I. algorithms provide a particular output
We covered audience questions from Serg, Chiara, and Jean-charles during filming. For those we didn't get to ask, Denis is kindly answering via a LinkedIn post today!
The episode's available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.
Translations of Deep Learning Illustrated – Now available in Traditional Chinese
My book, Deep Learning Illustrated, recently became available in Traditional Chinese alongside the existing Russian, German, and Korean translations. The new edition instantly became a #1-bestseller in Taiwan.
Thanks to Neville Huang for diligently translating to Traditional Chinese from the original English. Neville also tipped me off to the #1-bestseller status — I've put the screenshot he shared with me on LinkedIn.
Does Caffeine Hurt Productivity? (Part 1)
For Five-Minute Friday this week, I lay out my hypothesis that caffeine decreases people's capacity to focus deeply on work. Next week, we'll review the results of the months-long coffee experiment I ran on myself!
(If you can't wait to see the experiment results, you can head to jonkrohn.com/coffee to check them out.)
Listen or watch here.