Data Exchange podcast
- Modern Experimentation Platforms: Che Sharma is the founder and CEO of Eppo, an experimentation framework that integrates with modern data platforms (lakehouses and cloud data warehouses). Investors and engineers have created an abundance of companies that specialize in ML infrastructure and MLOps, while applications like experimentation have received little attention. The reason isn’t ignorance: numerous books have extolled the virtues of experimentation. The reality is that most data teams live primarily in the world of reporting (with a sprinkling of ML models). Companies that are able to make experimentation more accessible end up with data and product teams that have a more intimate connection to metrics and KPIs.
- NLP and AI in Financial Services: Anshul Pandey is the CTO and co-founder of Accern, a startup helping financial services companies build and deploy AI applications via a no-code platform. Our conversation focused on the specific challenges of building AI and NLP applications within financial services, an industry that has long been one of the early adopters of AI and data technologies.
Data & Machine Learning Tools and Infrastructure
- Visual introduction to Large Language Models
- Interest in MLOps is surging
- Making Scala Work at Databricks: Li Haoyi describes an impressive suite of tools and best practices.
- Launching the Infinite Laptop: Over the last few months I’ve enjoyed early access to Anyscale’s newly launched platform. I write and test out any Python program on my laptop, add a few lines of code, and the exact same program that relies on my favorite libraries runs on a cluster. It has been a critical addition to my toolbox for recent projects involving machine learning models in time-series and NLP. As a result, I can now run code from my “laptop” that utilizes as many CPU/GPU cores as I need.
- Processing billions of events in real time at Twitter
Recommendations
With the end-of-year holidays upon us, let me close by sharing a few books and longreads I enjoyed this year:
- Cryptography: The Key to Digital Security, How It Works, and Why It Matters
- This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race
- Samuelson Friedman: A crash course in modern macroeconomics through the friendship of two Nobel laureates and leaders of competing schools of thought. With all the talk about inflation and economic uncertainty, this book is a must-read as we move towards 2022.
- How Tiger Global tore up the rules of venture capital
- Geopolitical Alpha: An Investment Framework for Predicting the Future
- The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources
- Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever
- Haruki Murakami: the T-Shirts I Love
- The Barcelona Complex: Lionel Messi And The Making–And Unmaking–Of The World’s Greatest Soccer Club
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