Author: Ben Lorica

A scalable time-series database that supports SQL

~ Ben Lorica

[A version of this post appears on the O’Reilly Radar.]

The O’Reilly Data Show Podcast: Michael Freedman on TimescaleDB and scaling SQL for time-series.

Subscribe to the O’Reilly Data Show Podcast to explore the opportunities and techniques driving big data, data science, and AI. Find us on Stitcher, TuneIn, iTunes, SoundCloud, RSS.

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Michael Freedman, CTO of Timescale and professor of computer science at Princeton University. When I first heard that Freedman and his collaborators were building a time-series database, my immediate reaction was: “Don’t we have enough options already?” The early incarnation of Timescale was a startup focused on IoT, and it was while building tools for the IoT problem space that Freedman and the rest of the Timescale team came to realize that the database they needed wasn’t available (at least out in open source). Specifically, they wanted a database that could easily support complex queries and the sort of real-time applications many have come to associate with streaming platforms. Based on early reactions to TimescaleDB, many users concur.

Here are some highlights from our conversation:
Continue reading “A scalable time-series database that supports SQL” →

Programming collective intelligence for financial trading

~ Ben Lorica

[A version of this post appears on the O’Reilly Radar.]

The O’Reilly Data Show Podcast: Geoffrey Bradway on building a trading system that synthesizes many different models.

Subscribe to the O’Reilly Data Show Podcast to explore the opportunities and techniques driving big data, data science, and AI. Find us on Stitcher, TuneIn, iTunes, SoundCloud, RSS.

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Geoffrey Bradway, VP of engineering at Numerai, a new hedge fund that relies on contributions of external data scientists. The company hosts regular competitions where data scientists submit machine learning models for classification tasks. The most promising submissions are then added to an ensemble of models that the company uses to trade in real-world financial markets.

To minimize model redundancy, Numerai filters out entries that produce signals that are already well-covered by existing models in their ensemble. The company also plans to use (Ethereum) blockchain technology to develop an incentive system to reward models that do well on live data (not ones that overfit and do well on historical data).

Here are some highlights from our conversation:
Continue reading “Programming collective intelligence for financial trading” →

Creating large training data sets quickly

~ Ben Lorica

[A version of this post appears on the O’Reilly Radar.]

The O’Reilly Data Show Podcast: Alex Ratner on why weak supervision is the key to unlocking dark data.

Subscribe to the O’Reilly Data Show Podcast to explore the opportunities and techniques driving big data, data science, and AI. Find us on Stitcher, TuneIn, iTunes, SoundCloud, RSS.

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Alex Ratner, a graduate student at Stanford and a member of Christopher Ré’s Hazy research group. Training data has always been important in building machine learning algorithms, and the rise of data-hungry deep learning models has heightened the need for labeled data sets. In fact, the challenge of creating training data is ongoing for many companies; specific applications change over time, and what were gold standard data sets may no longer apply to changing situations.

Ré and his collaborators proposed a framework for quickly building large training data sets. In essence, they observed that high-quality models can be constructed from noisy training data. Some of these ideas were discussed in a previous episode featuring Mike Cafarella (jump to minute 24:16 for a description of an earlier project called DeepDive).

By developing a framework for mining low-quality sources in order to build high-quality machine learning models, Ré and his collaborators help researchers extract information previously hidden in unstructured data sources (so-called “dark data” buried in text, images, charts, and so on).

Here are some highlights from my conversation with Ratner:
Continue reading “Creating large training data sets quickly” →

What are machine learning engineers?

~ Ben Lorica

[A version of this appears on the O’Reilly Radar.]

A new role focused on creating data products and making data science work in production.

by Ben Lorica and Mike Loukides

We’ve been talking about data science and data scientists for a decade now. While there’s always been some debate over what “data scientist” means, we’ve reached the point where many universities, online academies, and bootcamps offer data science programs: master’s degrees, certifications, you name it. The world was a simpler place when we only had statistics. But simplicity isn’t always healthy, and the diversity of data science programs demonstrates nothing if not the demand for data scientists.

As the field of data science has developed, any number of poorly distinguished specialties have emerged. Companies use the terms “data scientist” and “data science team” to describe a variety of roles, including:

  • individuals who carry out ad hoc analysis and reporting (including BI and business analytics)
  • people who are responsible for statistical analysis and modeling, which, in many cases, involves formal experiments and tests
  • machine learning modelers who increasingly develop prototypes using notebooks

And that listing doesn’t include the people DJ Patil and Jeff Hammerbacher were thinking of when they coined the term “data scientist”: the people who are building products from data. These data scientists are most similar to the machine learning modelers, except that they’re building something: they’re product-centric, rather than researchers. They typically work across large portions of data products. Whatever the role, data scientists aren’t just statisticians; they frequently have doctorates in the sciences, with a lot of practical experience working with data at scale. They are almost always strong programmers, not just specialists in R or some other statistical package. They understand data ingestion, data cleaning, prototyping, bringing prototypes to production, product design, setting up and managing data infrastructure, and much more. In practice, they turn out to be the archetypal Silicon Valley “unicorns”: rare and very hard to hire.

What’s important isn’t that we have well-defined specialties; in a thriving field, there will always be huge gray areas. What made “data science” so powerful was the realization that there was more to data than actuarial statistics, business intelligence, and data warehousing. Breaking down the silos that separated data people from the rest of the organization—software development, marketing, management, HR—is what made data science distinct. Its core concept was that data was applicable to everything. The data scientist’s mandate was to gather, and put to use, all the data. No department went untouched.
Continue reading “What are machine learning engineers?” →

Data science and deep learning in retail

~ Ben Lorica

[A version of this post appears on the O’Reilly Radar.]

The O’Reilly Data Show Podcast: Jeremy Stanley on hiring and leading machine learning engineers to build world-class data products.

Subscribe to the O’Reilly Data Show Podcast to explore the opportunities and techniques driving big data, data science, and AI. Find us on Stitcher, TuneIn, iTunes, SoundCloud, RSS.

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Jeremy Stanley, VP of data science at Instacart, a popular grocery delivery service that is expanding rapidly. As Stanley describes it, Instacart operates a four-sided marketplace comprised of retail stores, products within the stores, shoppers assigned to the stores, and customers who order from Instacart. The objective is to get fresh groceries from popular retailers delivered to customers in a timely fashion. Instacart’s goals land them in the center of the many opportunities and challenges involved in building high-impact data products.

Retail produces some of the most interesting case studies involving the use of big data and machine learning. This observation holds true for companies worldwide: I’m seeing data products in retail in the U.S. and Europe, and some of the most exciting developments are happening in Asia. We covered the intersection of retail and logistics at a recent Strata Data conference, where we showcased the use of data and machine learning in transportation and logistics.

Here are some highlights from my conversation with Jeremy Stanley:
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Language understanding remains one of AI’s grand challenges

~ Ben Lorica ~ Leave a comment

[A version of this post appears on the O’Reilly Radar.]

The O’Reilly Data Show Podcast: David Ferrucci on the evolution of AI systems for language understanding.

Subscribe to the O’Reilly Data Show Podcast to explore the opportunities and techniques driving big data, data science, and AI. Find us on Stitcher, TuneIn, iTunes, SoundCloud, RSS.

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with David Ferrucci, founder of Elemental Cognition and senior technologist at Bridgewater Associates. Ferrucci served as principal investigator of IBM’s DeepQA project and led the Watson team that became champion of the Jeopardy! quiz show. Elemental Cognition (EC) is a research group focused on building an AI system that will be equipped with state-of-the-art natural language understanding technologies. Ferrucci envisions that EC will ship with foundational knowledge in many subject areas, but will be able to very quickly acquire knowledge in other (specialized) domains with the help of “human mentors.”

Having built and deployed several prominent AI systems through the years, I also wanted to get Ferrucci’s perspective on the evolution of AI technologies, and how enterprises can take advantage of all the exciting recent developments.

Here are some highlights from our conversation:
Continue reading “Language understanding remains one of AI’s grand challenges” →

Data preparation in the age of deep learning

~ Ben Lorica ~ Leave a comment

[A version of this post appears on the O’Reilly Radar.]

The O’Reilly Data Show Podcast: Lukas Biewald on why companies are spending millions of dollars on labeled data sets.

Subscribe to the O’Reilly Data Show Podcast to explore the opportunities and techniques driving big data, data science, and AI. Find us on Stitcher, TuneIn, iTunes, SoundCloud, RSS.

In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Lukas Biewald, co-founder and chief data scientist at CrowdFlower. In a previous episode we covered how the rise of deep learning is fueling the need for large labeled data sets and high-performance computing systems. CrowdFlower has a service that many leading companies have come to rely on to provide them with labeled data sets to train machine learning models. As deep learning models get larger and more complex, they require training data sets that are bigger than those required by other machine learning techniques.

The CrowdFlower platform combines the contributions of human workers and algorithms. Through a process called active learning, they send difficult tasks or edge cases to humans, and they let the algorithms handle the more routine examples. But, how do you decide when to use human workers? In a simple example involving building an automatic classifier, you will probably want to send human workers cases when your machine learning algorithms signal uncertainty (probability scores are on the low side) or when your ensemble of machine learning algorithms signals disagreement. As Biewald describes in our conversation, active learning is much more subtle, and the CrowdFlower platform, in particular, is able to combine humans and algorithms to handle more sophisticated tasks.

Here are some highlights from our conversation:
Continue reading “Data preparation in the age of deep learning” →