The official list is out, so glad to see some familiar faces this year for the best #trolls in the Data Science and AI communities. Congrats! Better luck next year for those trolls that didn’t collect enough tears!
I am debuting the 1st annual TROLL Voices list, a collection of trolls. As COVID-19 continues to upend our lives, these members are using their voices to slap us awake, speak-it like-it-is, and sometimes irk us into emotional tantrums we have to delete later.
To compile the list, we used a combination of qualitative and quantitative signals — including whiney factor, blocking…
This story starts with a scary clown. Not pennywise, a real one. I was a young newlywed college student living in Sparks, Nevada just outside Reno. I was running an e-commerce company while going to school, which is really how I learned how to program in LAMP.
Since I was hosting my website and FTP server out of my house (don’t make fun, this was 2003) I wanted fast internet. I upgraded to the latest with a download speed of 3MB, it was screaming fast. Today I have 1000MB up/down and I have a few neighbors who are rumored to…
Am I smarter than you? F*ck yeah I am. Are you smarter than me? 100%, I’ll prove that too. An open conversation around imposter syndrome and how to reduce it.
Talking to people who are wanting to break into the data science space many have opened up about their concerns and anxieties around imposter syndrome. Essentially, they are worried about being “found out”. Others will discover that they know less, have gaps, or are less intelligent than their peers. The eternal interview… these feelings are normal.
The downside is they may wait longer than needed to jump into the space…
FUD sells, and so do naive academics who are woke on topics they don’t understand. Here are ways you can filter through the noise.
Here is my 10-minute digest of a piece making the rounds online: “How to recognize AI snake oil”: https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1196870349574623232. Considering that most AI is hype and 90% of AI projects fail this sounds engaging. Written by an ivy league professor, they are all super smart, let’s dive in.
The piece starts out with this example (great example BTW):
AI is the shiny new toy that differentiates people in the market right now. Everyone pretends they have AI today. In 5 years every company will, now what? What will we celebrate? Our data and what we know about it.
Big Data Hype: Rise And Fall
I was on stage in Orlando 6 years ago talking to an HR crowd about big data. Everything was big data this, big data that, got Hadoop yet?! Well… you need it?! Maybe? While speaking I realized nobody in the HR space had a big data problem. Over the next couple of years, the promise of a big data lake turned into the reality of a big data swamp. Were you duped by the big data promise?
AI Hype: Fail, Fail, Fail, Win, Fail
Now that we are climbing the hype cycle again with…
AI can finally consider all the data that matters, structured and unstructured. This becomes a threat to human appraiser job security.
All the data that matters:
What data actually matters for appraising a property? The number of bedrooms? The number of bathrooms? Absolutely. When it was built? Your neighborhood home prices? That too. There is a long list of things to consider, this is a complicated process for humans and not much has changed with the process for decades.
Something that human appraisers have struggled to consider are all of the unstructured elements on the property. Your landscaping, the view from your porch, the color/style of your neighbor’s fence, the style of your kitchen, etc... Many of these topics have been…
The data doesn’t lie. We started noticing this several years ago, first with some of the attraction data that was available. Check out the raw data for men/women attraction as a function of age:
My concept of reality has always had boundaries. Moving outside of those boundaries in the past has been classified as “science fiction”. I have noticed during my lifetime those boundaries, considered absolute, have been eroded away more than once. I see these constraints as being softer now, where what many consider impossible today will be reality tomorrow.
A Chemical Engineer’s Reality:
I studied chemical engineering in school, and chemical engineers are good with accounting in the physical world. We discuss a world where everything must balance. Whether that is mass, energy, or momentum, we can do accounting on matter and…
This AI home security system can use deep-learning and figure out when kids are making messes, or doing things that need action. This type of technology could save a life in the future (e.g. kid choking on a blind cord).
Who did this! I say as I look at the eggs, baking soda, flour, and real-lemon juice on the kitchen floor. The recipe, turned science experiment, has turned into a Jackson Pollack food painting:
Ben Taylor
Ben is a cofounder at Zeff.ai, delivering automated deep learning into production. Ben is a recognized deep-learning expert and keynote speaker.
