This edition has 560 words which will take you about 3 minutes to read.
“We hoped for the best, but it turned out as usual.” – Viktor Chernomyrdin
Data Exchange podcast
- Challenges, Opportunities, and Trends in EdTech Stanford’s Sharon Zhou has been teaching very popular courses on GANs (generative adversarial networks) on Coursera. We discuss the state of online learning platforms, and novel applications of GANs.
- Pricing Data Products Surveys show that many data science and machine learning teams cite lack of data as a key challenge. The rise of new data exchanges and markets confirm this point. Jian Pei of Simon Fraser University recently wrote a comprehensive survey paper on how organizations assess the value of data objectively, systematically and quantitatively.
Featured Virtual Event
Healthcare NLP Summit is a FREE conference featuring speakers from Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Microsoft Research, Google Brain, MIT-IBM Watson Lab, Curai, and more. You need not be in the Healthcare/Biotech/Pharmaceutical sectors to benefit from the presentations. As the external program chair of this conference, I think anyone interested in building language applications should attend this event.
Data & Machine Learning tools and infrastructure
- Final Report of the U.S. National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence Beyond the expected public policy and national defense recommendations, this essential read covers topics such as data infrastructure, information security, hardware, adversarial ML, supply-chains, robustness and resilience, and much more. I found the best way to consume this report is by perusing the easy-to-navigate website.
- Elastic Deep Learning: Introducing Horovod on Ray A popular distributed training framework (Horovod) can now be operationalized using the most popular framework for multi-cloud distributed computing (Ray). Key quote: “We believe that Ray will continue to play an increasingly important role in bringing much needed common infrastructure and standardization to the production machine learning ecosystem, both within Uber and the industry at large.”
- Contextual calibration improves GPT-3 accuracy across many prompt format choices and examples The goal of few-shot learning tools like GPT-3 is to enable developers to rapidly prototype NLP models and applications. A group of academic researchers are building tools that “improves accuracy, reduces variance, and … makes tools like GPT-3 more effective for end users”. (code)
- Meltano Software engineering tools and processes for data pipelines and ELT.
- The Netflix Cosmos Platform Used by the streaming giant for building resource-sensitive applications, Cosmos combines several tools and techniques into this powerful paradigm: “microservices that trigger workflows that orchestrate serverless functions”.
Funding Updates
- Airbyte raises $5M seed round An open source data integration company joins the ranks of startups building tools to help companies tame their data pipelines.
- Yugabyte Secures $48M in Funding Yugabyte is a popular open source, globally distributed database that came on the scene around the same time as Google’s Spanner, FaunaDB, and CockroachDB.
- The European Investment Bank invests $9.1 million in Cortical.io A rare exception among companies that are building natural language applications, Cortical isn’t reliant on deep learning.
Recommendations
- We Are Bellingcat A fascinating new book about the online collective that uses online open-source investigation techniques to break stories and unmask conspiracy theories. The tools and techniques they rely on are explained in detail in this book.
- 4 Tips for Shipping Data Products Fast, from Shopify For more practical suggestions from data leaders at Shopify and other companies, check out our recent FREE report, Business at the Speed of AI.
- ‘How Was Your Weekend?’ Software Development Teams Working From Home During COVID-19 Results of two recent surveys confirm that key factors associated with team productivity were also of a social nature.
- Reinforcement Learning FTW … America’s Cup edition
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