The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica

Subscribe : iTunes , Android , Spotify , Stitcher , Google , and RSS . In this episode of the Data Exchange I speak with Denise Gosnell , Chief Data Officer at DataStax. Denise is also the co-author of the new book, The Practitioner’s Guide to Graph Data , which covers foundational tools and techniques needed to utilize graph technologies in production applications.  This conversation is a great i...

In this episode of the Data Exchange I speak with Amy Heineike , Principal Product Architect at Primer.ai, a startup building machines that can read and write. Primer recently used their technology to build COVID-19 Primer , a web site that provides an overview of the latest research papers, media coverage, and social media conversations pertaining to COVID-19. Detailed show notes can be found on...

In this episode of the Data Exchange I speak with Christopher Nguyen , CEO of Arimo (a Panasonic company). I first met Christopher in the early days of Apache Spark, Arimo was one of the first companies to embrace Spark and make it a central component of their data platform. He was also an early proponent of exploring deep learning for enterprise applications. A serial entrepreneur, Christopher wa...

In this episode of the Data Exchange I speak with Matthew Honnibal , founder of Explosion AI , a startup focused on building developer tools for AI and natural language processing. Matthew and team are the creators of popular tools like spaCy (NLP), Thinc (lightweight deep learning library), and Prodigy (annotation and active learning).  Our conversation focused on a range of topics including: spa...

In this episode of the Data Exchange I speak with Chris Wiggins , Associate Professor at Columbia University, Chief Data Scientist at the New York Times, and co-founder of hackNY. He began his career in theoretical physics but he always had a strong interest in applying quantitative techniques to other disciplines. Early in his career he became interested in applications of machine learning to pro...

In this episode of the Data Exchange I speak with Andrew Burt , Chief Legal Officer at Immuta and co-founder and Managing Partner of BNH.ai , a new law firm focused on AI compliance and related topics. As AI and machine learning become more widely deployed, lawyers and technologists need to collaborate more closely so they can identify and mitigate liabilities and risks associated with AI. BNH is...

In this episode of the Data Exchange our special correspondent and editor Jenn Webb speaks with Arum Verma , Head of Quantitative Research Solutions at Bloomberg. My first job post-academia was as lead quant in a small hedge fund. Since then, I’ve followed the industry from afar and I’ve long been interested in the role of data and models in financial services. Arun and I discussed quantitative fi...

In this episode of the Data Exchange I speak with Harish Doddi , cofounder of Datatron , a startup focused on helping companies operationalize machine learning. Over the past two years, Harish has worked closely with enterprises to understand their needs in the areas of model operations and model governance. Last year Harish and I, along with David Talby, wrote two articles on these topics. In the...

In this episode of the Data Exchange I speak with Wes McKinney , Director of Ursa Labs and an Apache Arrow PMC Member. Wes is the creator of pandas , one of the most widely used Python libraries for data science. He is also the author of the best-selling book, “Python for Data Analysis” – a book that has become essential reading for both aspiring and experienced data scientists. Our conversation f...

In this episode of the Data Exchange I speak with Pete Warden , Staff Research Engineer at Google. Pete is a prolific author and teacher, and he has made many important contributions across many open source software projects. To name just a couple of his projects: he put together the Data Science toolkit (open data sets and open-source tools for data science) and he assembled tools to help develop...

In this episode of the Data Exchange I speak with Evan Sparks, cofounder and CEO of Determined AI, a startup that recently open sourced a platform for training deep learning models.  Many of the impressive results and applications of deep learning have happened at a handful of companies and research groups. As more companies use deep learning they are learning that infrastructure for training and...

In this episode of the Data Exchange I speak with Kenneth Stanley , a Senior Research Manager at Uber AI and a Professor at UCF . Ken just announced that starting in June he is starting a new research group focused on open-endedness at OpenAI.  He is a pioneer in the field of neuroevolution – a method for evolving and learning neural networks through evolutionary algorithms. Ken and his colleague,...

In this episode of the Data Exchange I speak with Bruno Gonçalves , a data scientist working at the intersection of Data Science and Finance. I have known Bruno for several years and we met when I recruited him to teach several extremely popular conference tutorials and talks on machine learning and deep learning. Prior to shifting over to data science, he spent several years as a researcher focus...

In this episode of the Data Exchange I speak with Rob Munro , CEO of Machine Learning Consulting and author of the forthcoming book, “Human-in-the-loop Machine Learning” . If you want a copy of Rob’s book, use the discount code podexchange20 . Our conversation covered: Rob’s experience building data and machine learning products at Powerset , Idibon , and AWS. Natural language processing - Given R...

In this episode of the Data Exchange I speak with Chris Nicholson , founder and CEO of Pathmind , a startup applying deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to simulation problems.  In a recent post I highlighted two areas where companies can begin to add DRL to their suite of tools: personalization and recommendation engines, and simulation software. My interest in the interplay between DRL and simulat...

In this episode of the Data Exchange I speak with Solmaz Shahalizadeh , VP and Head of Data Science and Data Platform Engineering at Shopify . Shopify is a powerhouse in ecommerce and their technology powers over a million businesses worldwide. Solmaz is a frequent speaker and presenter at conferences throughout the world and she has played a critical role in helping Shopify scale its data and mac...

In this episode of the Data Exchange I speak with Edo Liberty , founder of Hypercube , a startup building tools for deploying deep learning models in search and information retrieval involving large collections. When I spoke at AI Week in Tel Aviv last November several friends encouraged me to learn more about Hypercube - I’m glad I took their advice! Our conversation covered several topics includ...

In this episode of the Data Exchange I speak with Alejandro Saucedo, Engineering Director at Seldon , a startup building tools for productionizing machine learning. Alejandro is also Chief Scientist at The Institute for Ethical AI & Machine Learning , a UK-based research center that conducts “research into processes and frameworks that support the responsible development, deployment and operat...

In this episode of the Data Exchange I speak with Edmon Begoli , Chief Data Architect at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).  Edmon has developed and implemented large-scale data applications on systems like Open MPI, Hadoop/MapReduce, Apache Calcite, Apache Spark, and Akka . Most recently he has been building large-scale machine learning and natural language applications with Ray , a distribute...

In this episode of the Data Exchange I speak with Krishna Gade , founder and CEO at Fiddler Labs , a startup focused on helping companies build trustworthy and understandable AI solutions. Prior to founding Fiddler, Krishna led engineering teams at Pinterest and Facebook. Our conversation included a range of topics, including: Krishna’s background as an engineering manager at Facebook and Pinteres...

In this episode of the Data Exchange I speak with Dean Wampler , Head of Developer Relations at Anyscale , the startup founded by the creators of Ray . Ray is a distributed execution framework that makes it easy to scale machine learning and Python applications. It has a very simple API and as someone who uses both Python and machine learning, Ray has been a wonderful addition to my toolbox.  Dean...

In this episode of the Data Exchange I speak with  Dafna Shahaf , Associate Professor at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She also runs the hyadata lab , a research group that consistently produces unique and interesting projects at the intersection of computer science, data, and the social sciences. Our conversation included a range of topics, in...

In this episode of the Data Exchange I speak with David Talby , co-creator of Spark NLP , an open source, highly scalable, production grade natural language processing (NLP) library. Spark NLP has become one of the more popular NLP libraries and is available on PyPI, Conda, Maven, and Spark Packages. With recent advances in research in large-scale natural language models, there is strong interest...

In this episode of the Data Exchange I speak with Morten Dahl , research scientist at Dropout Labs , a startup building a platform and tools for privacy-preserving machine learning. He is also behind TF Encrypted , an open source framework for encrypted machine learning in TensorFlow.  The rise of privacy regulations like CCPA and GDPR combined with the growing importance of ML has led to a strong...

Sijie Guo on how Apache Pulsar is able to handle both queuing and streaming, and both online and offline applications. In this episode of the Data Exchange I speak with Sijie Guo , founder of StreamNative , a new startup focused on making enterprise messaging technologies - specifically Apache Pulsar - easy to use on the cloud. Sijie was previously a cofounder of Streamlio ( acquired by Splunk ) a...