Ben Dubow studied the Middle East during his undergrad and took a job tracking terrorist groups.  After a brief stint at a large tech company, he launched Omelas, a company that combines AI and subject matter expertise to deliver intelligence to national security professionals.In today's episode, our Senior Content Advisor Q McCallum caught up with Ben to learn more about what Omelas is up to and how the company applies AI and data analysis to its mission.Along the way they explore the value of data in context; why it's important to ask the right questions of the right data, and not just ..read more

Sometimes the most valuable data IN your company ... is the data LEAVING your company.That's Solomon Kahn's view on data products, as well as the premise behind his latest venture: Delivery Layer.For this episode, our Senior Content Advisor Q McCallum reached out to Solomon to check in on the new startup, and to tap his expertise in the world of data products.Solomon's been at this a while.  He's run high-revenue data products in some notable places, including Nielsen.  Over the years he's learned a lot and we're excited for him to share some of that hard-earned knowledge here on the ..read more

In this episode, James and Q explore: The ideas of risk and uncertainty. What is "probabilistic thinking" and why is it important for data scientists? The career progression of a data analyst, and what it means to develop statistical acumen. Thinking in terms of distributions, and thinking in different moments of a distribution. Seeing BI, AI, and simulation in terms of punctuation.  (No, seriously.) How to bridge the gap into thinking probabilistically And, just a reminder: James only speaks for himself in this episode and he does not represent his employer.Links mentioned during our d ..read more

We've all heard the term "economist," sure. But exactly what does and economist do? And as economics is a very data-driven field, where does their work intersect with data science, machine learning, and AI? To answer that question, Senior Content Advisor Q McCallum spoke with Amar Natt, PhD. She's an economist at Econ One Research, and her work focuses on advanced analytics and predictive modeling. Does that sound like ML to you? Well, Amar explains that it's similar in some ways, different in others. From there, she tells us about techniques economists can learn from data scientists, and what ..read more

When people think about The Home Depot, they probably think more about lumber and tile than they do ML models.  Sure, there is plenty of lumber.  But machine learning also plays a key role in the business, in places that customers can see as well as the behind-the-scenes operations.Senior Content Advisor Q McCallum met up with Pat Woowong, Director of Data Science at The Home Depot, to explore how the company mixes their very rich dataset with domain knowledge to employ machine learning deep inside the business.  To frame this, he walked me through the Falloff model and Lead sco ..read more

This episode is a recording of the coffee chat at the Data Science Salon Virtual on May 18th, 2022, which focused on Applying AI and ML to Retail & E-Commerce. Charles Irizarry, CEO and Founder at Phygital had the chance to talk to Ankita Mangal, Senior Data Scientist at Procter & Gamble. Tune in to hear about ML techniques they are using in their current roles, tools to put ML into production, model explainability, and future trends ..read more

A lot of data scientists work in the private sector: finance, adtech, retail, and all that.  Today's guest offers her perspective on what it means to do data work in the federal space.In this conversation, our Senior Content Advisor Q McCallum spoke with Dr. Pragyansmita Nayak, Chief Data Scientist at Hitachi Vantara Federal.  They explored how different federal agencies use data and how they share datasets with each other. They also talked about how to measure operational efficiency, when you can't rely on metrics like "profit." And, the big question: should we release t-shirts that ..read more

In this episode, our Senior Content Advisor Q McCallum met up with Murium Iqbal from Etsy. They spoke about an important skill for data scientists: software development! Data scientists write a lot of code, sure, but few of them come from a formal software dev background. That can lead them to struggle with slow, buggy code that ultimately holds back the company's ML efforts. Want to write cleaner, more performant code? Looking for ways to make those model deployments more reproducible? Listen to Murium and Q explore topics such as writing tests, using Docker to isolate dependencies, and learn ..read more

This episode is a recording of the panel conversation at the virtual Data Science Salon in April 2022, which focused on AI & machine learning applications in the enterprise. Charles Irizarry (CEO & Co-Founder at Strata.ai) had the chance to talk to Amarita Natt (Managing Director, Data Science at Econ One Research), Preethi Raghavan (VP, Data Science Practice Lead at Fidelity Investments) and Serg Masís (Climate and Agronomic Data Scientist at Syngenta) about the important topic of model interpretability and how to create trust in AI products ..read more

Charles Irizarry, CEO & Co-Founder at Strata.ai had the chance to talk to Nirmal Budhathoki, Senior Data Scientist at VMware Carbon Black and Moody Hadi, Group Manager - New Product Development & Financial Engineering at S&P Global. Tune in to hear about ML techniques they are using in their current roles, tools to put ML into production, model explainability, and future trends ..read more