Ian Cassidy: When you did a PCA, a principal component analysis, like, it was like beautiful. There was, like, a red circle in the middle of, you know, the blue on purchase, you know, data points. And there were the red purchase ones and they were all clustered together. It was, it was really interesting. And like the, the machine learning model had a really good time trying to predict that the ones in that red cluster where the things that people were were interested in purchasing. Ginette: I'm Ginette, Curtis: and I'm Curtis, Ginette: and you are listening to Data Crunch, Curtis: a podcast about how applied data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are changing the world. Ginette: Data Crunch is produced by the Data Crunch Corporation, an analytics, training, and consulting company. If you want to become the type of tech talent we talk about on our show today, you’ll need to master algorithms, machine learning concepts, computer science basics, and many other important concepts. Brilliant is a great place to start digging into these. The nice thing about Brilliant is that you can learn in bite-sized pieces at your own pace, and with a bit of consistent effort, you can tackle some really tough subjects. With 60+ courses that combine story-telling, code-writing, and interactive challenges, Brilliant helps develop the skills that are crucial to school, job interviews, and careers. Sign up for free and start learning by going to Brilliant.org slash Data Crunch, and also the first 200 people that go to that link will get 20% off the annual premium subscription.  Now onto our show. We’ve waited to publish today’s episode because Covid has taken a toll on the travel industry and lots of things have changed since we recorded this episode, but there’s good information in this episode, so we don’t want to wait too long to publish it. Hopefully 2021 changes the travel industry’s fortunes and this information becomes even more applicable. So today we chat with Ian Cassidy, former senior data scientist at Upside Business Travel. Ian: I'm Ian Cassidy. And my interests are in the machine learning optimization realm, since I have experience with that from my grad school days, and a little bit about Upside is we are a travel company, travel management company. We offer a product that is no fees, 100% free. And in fact, if you spend over a hundred thousand dollars booking travel on our website, we offer a 3% cash back, as well as free customer service, 24/7, no contracts. So that's you sign up with us, no contracts, you get all of this as soon as you sign up. We are a one-stop shop to book and manage all of your travel. In one place, we offer flights, hotels, rental cars, and we also offer expense integration and reporting for companies looking to, to manage all of their, their travelers and, and their expenses for that.Curtis: Right on. We talked before about the journey that your company has gone through, uh, to figure out how to best use data, you know, how to target and what really works with, with machine learning and things like this. So I'd love to just talk a little bit about that: where you guys started and how you guys made some decisions, what you learned along the way and what you're, what you're up to from a data science perspective.Ian: Yeah, sure. So, uh, you know, like you mentioned, things have changed quite a bit at Upside. We started off as a B2C company where we were targeting what we were calling do it yourself travelers. You did not have to be logged into our site in order to start doing a search and book flights or hotels. So that kind of made it interesting from a data collection perspective. We had like some unique IDs about who the people were that were doing the searching, but it was, it was largely kind of, you know, we didn't really know much about you when you, when you were searching. So when we started, one of the main things that we were trying to improve upon was our sorting of inventory....

Data Crunch | Artificial Intelligence | AI | Machine Learning | Big Data | Data Science

Machine Learning and Flight with Ian Cassidy

Implementing ML Algorithms with Ylan Kazi

Hiring Top Tech Talent

Many companies are sitting on data assets that could be revenue streams for them, without knowing it. Matt Staudt of VDC discusses making latent data profitable. Ginette: I'm Ginette, Curtis: and I'm Curtis, Ginette: and you are listening to Data Crunch, Curtis: a podcast about how applied data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are changing the world. Ginette: Data Crunch is produced by the Data Crunch Corporation, an analytics, training, and consulting company. Ginette: Today, we chat with the president and CEO at the Venture Development Center, Matt Staudt. Matt Staudt: The company that I'm with is VDC, Venture Development Center. Basically VDC is an organization that works in the alternative big data, bringing buyer and seller together. So we have a unique perspective on available data assets that are out in the marketplace and a unique perspective of the companies that utilize them, and what they're specifically looking for in the way of points of, uh, value for various data assets. My background was originally in the marketing and advertising area, where I owned a company for 20 years, IMG, Interactive Marketing Group. I left that in 2007 and joined this, which was more or less of a lifestyle organization. And we made it a full-fledged organization company back in 2010.Curtis: Now, when you say data assets, can you put a little bit of definition around that for the listeners? Just so they understand how you define a data asset? 'Cause I imagine there may be some things that you think are valuable that maybe they haven't thought of, or maybe it'll help expand our thinking around what a data asset is.Matt: Yeah, sure. In my, in my terminology "data asset" basically falls into eight different categories, where assets basically come from within the information world. So they could be things like transaction data or crowdsource data. They could be things like search data or social data sets. They fall into various categories, traditional data, meaning assets that are business to business or business to consumer generally aggregated by large companies that most everybody's heard of Dun & Bradstreet, Infogroup, Axcium, the credit bureaus, et cetera. Alternative data in our world are companies that have unique data points, unique. They're collecting unique pieces of information, usually as a byproduct of their core business. And we look at the assets that the data sets, the actual data points that they collect. And we figure out if there might be something of value to take to the marketplace, usually to the large consumers of the data, the big aggregators that I previously mentioned, but oftentimes it also fits well with some of our mid-tier players. And we have a significant amount of relationships in the brand grouping, meaning large organizations that they themselves are looking to try and take advantage of big data and utilize data in sales, marketing operations, in order to transform or help to administer certain activities that they have going on.Curtis: Do you find that this is maybe industry specific, like for example, a big insurance company, or if you're in healthcare or something like this, it tends to be more data intensive that you see more activity there or, or is this really applicable across the board? What kind of industries do you find have a lot of applications?Matt: Yeah. Well, it's interesting on the surface, you certainly think that there's probably industries that would have a larger appetite and a larger need for data than, than other organizations, but going, you know, through the list of companies that we've helped over the last 15 or 20 years, it really runs the gamut. I mean, we've worked with insurances, you mentioned insurance, insurance companies. I mentioned credit bureaus. We work with credit bureaus, risk and fraud, sales and marketing, sometimes large brands within those retail environments. So it really truly has run the gamut for us. There's,

Making Data Assets Profitable with VDC

Machine Learning with Max Sklar

Think Differently with Graph Databases

With recent events being what they are, epidemiology has come into the spotlight. What do epidemiologists do and how does data shape their everyday experience? Sitara and Mee-a from "Donuts and Data" fill us in.     Ginette: I'm Ginette, Curtis: and I'm Curtis, Ginette: and you are listening to Data Crunch, Curtis: a podcast about how applied data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are changing the world. Ginette: Data crunch is produced by the Data Crunch Corporation, an analytics training and consulting company. Many people are on the lookout for online math and science resources right now, particularly data and statistics courses, and whether you're a student looking to get ahead, a professional brushing up on cutting-edge topics, or someone who just wants to use this time to understand the world better, you should check out Brilliant. Brilliant’s thought-provoking math, science, and computer science content helps guide you to mastery by taking complex concepts and breaking them up into bite-sized understandable chunks. You'll start by having fun with their interactive explorations, over time you'll be amazed at what you can accomplish. Sign up for free and start learning by going to Brilliant.org slash Data Crunch, and also the first 200 people that go to that link will get 20% off the annual premium subscription. Now onto the show. Curtis: I'd like to welcome Sitara and Mee-a from the Instagram account Donuts and Data to talk to us today. I guess let's just have you guys introduce yourselves, as opposed to me trying to introduce you cause you know what you do better than I do. So maybe we just have some introductions. Sitara: So I'm Sitara one half of Donuts and Data. I'm a PhD student in epidemiology at the University of Texas Health Science Center. I'm also a research assistant in a lab that I work in. Mee-a: And I'm Mee-a. I am an infectious disease epidemiologist that works in the public sector. I actually met Sitara through the lab that she's currently working in. Curtis: Nice. And I'm excited to have you guys on. I just, I think epidemiology is a really interesting space, especially with what, you know, with what's going on now with COVID. I think it's more pertinent than it ever has been. Not that it ever hasn't been pertinent, but maybe it's more top of mind for people. So I'd love maybe just to have you guys level set with everybody, like what is epidemiology. There's probably some confusion about what that is and maybe how you guys got into it. And then we can get into what your day to day is and, and what it's all about. Sitara: So, epidemiology, I think everyone's kind of understanding is setting patterns of disease in the, in the human population. And so in that sense, what Mee-a and I do are the same, but instead of studying infectious diseases or the natural science part of epidemiology, what I focus on is how human behavior contributes to those patterns of disease. So I look for patterns in data associated like demographics or just behaviors, diet, nutrition, and how that contributes to getting diseases. Mee-a: For me in the public sector, it's going to be a lot of looking at incidents, rates of infectious diseases. It . . . primarily with COVID-19 right now, and just different ways that we can try to possibly implement infection prevention measures. So we are dealing a little bit more with, I don't want to say the medical side of it because we aren't clinicians, but we are dealing more with the medical side of, of the infectious disease than we are with, with the data compared to when I was in academia, at least. Curtis: So take us through maybe the end goal, right? So what you guys are working on. You're hoping to come out with, I think, some recommendations for people to, to take maybe a better understanding of how the disease spreads, so we get in front of it. What does that look like? Mee-a: I always thought that epidemiology's gold standard of what we try to achieve is probably...

Data, Epidemiology, and Public Health

Vast ETL Efficiency Gain with Upsolver

Jason Kolaczkowski has worked in both a large-company data shop and in a company trying to help large companies fix their problems. He shares his perspective as senior director of healthcare analytics at NextHealth and former Kaiser employee on the importance of streamlining data definitions—and many other helpful insights. Jason Kolaczkowski: But rather than sort of be the good steward and try and anticipate the problems and make sure that the business never feels any pain from those problems, I found eventually it's sort of the opposite—that you have to expose the business to the pain of those problems to create the level of urgency required to get them to participate.  Ginette Methot: I’m Ginette, Curtis Seare: and I’m Curtis, Ginette: and you are listening to Data Crunch, Curtis: a podcast about how applied data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are changing the world. Ginette: Data Crunch is produced by the Data Crunch Corporation, an analytics training and consulting company. Jason: I actually have a humanities degree. My bachelor's is in political science where I focused in political theory. So I wasn't even on the, the hard statistical side of that discipline. And then got a master's degree in public management, so basically an MBA for government, which is a lot more pragmatic than the theory degree. And just so happened that a professor took me under my wing. He wasn't my formal advisor. He was just a professor that we sort of latched onto each other, and he came out of the Princeton school of thought around econometric analysis. And so I got into econometrics and econometric study of policy analysis and eventually was a graduate level teaching assistant. So teaching statistics to graduate students and that sent me down the rabbit hole. I got excited about this sort of marriage that I had formed. Again somewhat organically. I'd love to say it was intentional, but it wasn't around sort of here's what government I think is supposed to work like and that was theory and here's how it actually works and here's the practice. And that got me into that sort of more scientific methodology of problem solving where you're trying to piece together either experiments or creating synthetic experiments with data in order to figure out what, what exactly is working. And I loved the ambiguity of that. Do stand your ground laws work well, I don't know what does work mean. And so now I'm kind of in that theory space. What is success of a stand your ground law. Now we're talking about values and what are your near civic disciplines and that kind of thing. And then you've got to go figure out how to answer that question using data. And so that sort of holistic approach to problem solving is what started me down this path for doing some consulting in the beltway. Really strategic level business process consulting. Spent a little bit of time running my own company and got a very well versed in the need for data driven based decisions. When when, uh, your personal ability to put bread on the table is reliant on the quality of your decisions. Even though, even though it was just a small company and it wasn't even related to healthcare is actually in publishing, but then the economy turn 2007, not sure, paper publishing and small business was what I wanted to do given where the economy was going by policy degree, looked pretty good to government agencies. And I landed at the Colorado Medicaid agency, uh, the department health care policy and financing in their budget office as an analyst. And so then I was applying those econometric principles directly to healthcare. And I've been in healthcare since after three years at state Medicaid, eight years, Kaiser Permanente Colorado where I ran their payer side analytics at the end of my tenure and then ended up at, uh, next health technologies, uh, where I'm the senior director of health care analytics and ultimately sort of responsible for listening to the market and lis...

Data Flexibility in Healthcare

For David Guralnick, education, AI, and cognitive psychology have always held possibility. With many years of experience in this niche, David runs a company that designs education programs, which employ AI and machine learning, for large companies, universities, and everything in between.   David Guralnick: Somehow what's happened in a lot of the uses of technology and education to this point is we've taken the mass education system that was there only to solve a scalability problem, not because it was the best educational method. So we've taken that and now we've scaled that even further online because it's easy to do and easy to track. Ginette Methot: I’m Ginette, Curtis Seare: and I’m Curtis, Ginette: and you are listening to Data Crunch, Curtis: a podcast about how applied data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are changing the world. Ginette: Data Crunch is produced by the Data Crunch Corporation, an analytics training and consulting company. Curtis: First off, I'd like to thank everyone who has taken the Tableau fundamentals zombie course that we announced the last episode. We've been getting a lot of great feedback from you. It's fun to see how people are enjoying the course and thinking that it's fun and also clear and it's helping them learn the fundamentals of Tableau. The reason we made that course is because Tableau and data visualization are really important skills. They can help you get a better job, they can help you add value to your organization. And so we hope that the course is helping people out. Also, according to the feedback that we have received, we've made a couple of enhancements to the course, so there are now quizzes to test your knowledge. There are quick tips with each of the videos to help you go a little bit further than even what the videos teach. We've also included a way to earn badges and a certificate so that you can show off your skills to your employer or whoever. And we've also thrown in a couple other bonuses. One is our a hundred plus page manual that we actually use to train at fortune 500 companies so that'll have screenshots and tutorials and tips and tricks on the Tableau fundamentals. And we have also included a checklist and a cheat sheet, both of which we actually use internally in our consulting practice to help us do good work. One of them will help you know which kind of chart to use in any given scenario that you may encounter, whether that's a bar chart or a scatter plot or any number of other more advanced charts. And the other is a checklist that you can run down and say, "do I have this, this, this and this in my visualization before I take it to present to someone to make sure that that's going to be a good experience." So hopefully all of that equals something that is really going to help you guys. And something also where you can learn Tableau and have fun doing it, saving the world from the zombie apocalypse, and the price has risen a little bit since last time. But for our long-time listeners here, if you use the code "podcastzombie" without any spaces in the middle, then that'll go ahead and take off 25% of the list price that is currently on the page. So hopefully more of you guys can take it and keep giving us feedback so we can keep improving it. And we would love to hear from you Ginette: Now onto the show today. We chat with David Guralnick, president and CEO of kaleidoscope learning. David: I've had a long time interest in both education and technology going way, way back. I was, I was lucky enough to go to an elementary school outside of Washington DC called Green acres school in Rockville, Maryland, which was very project based. So it was non-traditional education. You worked on projects, you worked collaboratively with people, your teachers' role was almost as much an advisor and mentor as a traditional teacher. It wasn't person in front of the room talking at you, and you learn how to, you know,

Education and AI

Many of us are stuck at home right now, due to the Covid-19 pandemic. There are pros and cons to this. We have less of a commute, more quality time with people in our households, and time to do little tasks we've been putting off. On the flip side, it can feel isolating, basic necessities are much more of a concern, and every day often feels the same. Today we talk about taking advantage of extra time by upskilling in economies that may suffer as a result of the pandemic.

Upskilling from Home

Early stage venture investing has little data to draw from to make good investing decisions. So how has Connetic Ventures successfully developed a data system to inform their investment decisions? We chat with Chris Hjelm about the process they've used to develop something that does just that. 

How to Reduce Uncertainty in Early Stage Venture Funding

If you've ever tried to find a doctor in the United States, you likely know how hard it is to find one who's the right fit—it takes quite a bit of research to find good information to make an informed choice. Wouldn't it be nice to easily find a doctor who is the right fit for you? Using data, Covera Health aims to do just that in the radiology specialty. Ron Vianu: I think the tools are really improving year over year to a significant degree, but like anything else, the tools themselves are only as useful as how you apply them. You can have the most amazing tools that could understand very large datasets, but you know how you approach looking for solutions, I think can dramatically impact. Do you yield anything useful Ginette Methot: I’m Ginette, Curtis Seare: and I’m Curtis, Ginette: and you are listening to Data Crunch, Curtis: a podcast about how applied data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are changing the world. Ginette: Data Crunch is produced by the Data Crunch Corporation, an analytics training and consulting company. If you're a business leader listening to our podcast and would like to move 10 times faster and be 10 times smarter than your competitors, we're running a webinar on February 13th where you can learn how to do this and more. Just go to datacrunchcorp.com/go to sign up today for free. If you're a subject matter expert in your field, like our guest today, and you're looking to understand data science and machine learning, brilliant.org is a great place to dig deeper. Their classes, help you understand algorithms, machine learning concepts, computer science basics, and many other important concepts in data science and machine learning. The nice thing about brilliant.org is that you can learn in bite-sized pieces at your own pace. Their courses have storytelling, code writing and interactive challenges, which makes them entertaining, challenging, and educational. Sign up for free and start learning by going to brilliant.org/data crunch. And also the first 200 people that go to that link will get 20% off the annual premium subscription. Today we chat with Ron Vianu, the CEO of Covera Health. Let's get right to it. Curtis: What inspired you to get into what you're doing, uh, to start Covera health? Where did the idea come from and what drives you? So if we could start there and learn a little bit about you and the beginnings of Covera health, that would be great. Ron: Sure. Uh, and I, I guess it's important to state that, you know, I'm a problem solver by nature, and my entire professional career, I've been a serial entrepreneur building companies to solve very specific problems. And as it relates to Covera, the, the Genesis of it was understanding that there were two problems in the market with respect to, uh, the healthcare space, which is where we're focused that were historically unsolved and there were no efforts really to solve them in, from my perspective, a data-driven way. And that was around understanding quality of physicians that is predictive to whether or not they'll be successful with individual patients as they walk through their practice. And so if you, and we're focused on the world of radiology, which today is highly commoditized and what that means is that there was a presumption that wherever you get an MRI or a CT study for some injury or illness, it doesn't matter where you go. It's more about convenience and price perhaps. Whereas what we understand given our research and the, the various things that we've published since our beginning is that one, it's like every other medical specialty. It's highly variable. Two, since radiology supports all other medical specialties in a, as a tool for diagnosis, diagnostic purposes, any sort of variability within that specialty has a cascading effect on patients downstream. And so for us, the beginning was, is this something that is solvable through data?

Data in Healthcare with Ron Vianu

We talk with Ben Jones, CEO of Data Literacy, who's on a mission to help everyone understand the language of data. He goes over some common data pitfalls, learning strategies, and unique stories about both epic failures and great successes using data in the real world. Ginette Methot: I’m Ginette, Curtis Seare: and I’m Curtis, Ginette: and you are listening to Data Crunch, Curtis: a podcast about how applied data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are changing the world. Ginette: Data Crunch is produced by the Data Crunch Corporation, an analytics training and consulting company. It’s becoming increasingly important in our world to be data literate and to understand the basics of AI and machine learning, and Brilliant.org is a great place to dig deeper into this and related topics. Their classes help you understand algorithms, machine learning concepts, computer science basics, and many other important concepts in data science and machine learning. The nice thing about Brilliant.org is that you can learn in bite-sized pieces at your own pace. Their courses have storytelling, code-writing, and interactive challenges, which makes them entertaining, challenging, and educational. Sign up for free and start learning by going to Brilliant.org/DataCrunch, and also the first 200 people that go to that link will get 20% off the annual premium subscription. Curtis: Ben Jones is here with me on the podcast today. This is a couple months coming. Excited to have him on the show. He's well known in the data visualization community, he's done a lot of great work there. Uh, used to work for Tableau. Now he's off doing his own thing, has a company called Data Literacy, which is interesting. We're going to dig into that and also has a new book out called Avoiding Data Pitfalls. So all of this is really great stuff and we're happy to have you here, Ben. Before we get going, just give yourself a brief introduction for anyone who may not know you and we can go from there. Ben: Yeah, great. Thanks Curtis. You mentioned some of the highlights there. I uh, worked for Tableau for about seven years running the Tableau public platform, uh, in which time I wrote a book called Communicating Data with Tableau. And the fun thing was for me that launched kind of a teaching, um, mini side gig for me at the University of Washington, which really made me fall in love with this idea of just helping people get excited about working with data. Having that light bulb moment where they feel like they've got what it takes. And so that's what caused me to really want to lead Tableau and launch my own company Data Literacy at dataliteracy.com which is where I help people, you know, as I say, learn the language of data, right? Whether that's reading charts and graphs, whether that's exploring data and communicating it to other people through training programs to the public as well as working one on one with clients and such. So it's been a been an exciting year doing that. Also, other things about me, I live here in Seattle, I love it up here and go hiking and backpacking when I can and have three teenage boys all in high school. So that keeps me busy too. And it's been a fun week for me getting this book out and seeing it's a start to ship and seeing people get it. Curtis: Let's talk a little bit about that because the book, it sounds super interesting, right? Avoiding Data Pitfalls, and there are a lot of pitfalls that people fall into. So I'm curious what you're seeing, why you decided to write the book, how difficult of a process it was and then some of the insights that you have in there as well. Ben: Yeah, so I feel like the tools that are out there now are so powerful and way more so than when I was going to school in the 90s, and it's amazing what you can do with those tools. And I think also it's amazing that it's amazing how easy it is to mislead yourself. And so I started realizing that that's sometim...

Data Literacy with Ben Jones

How do you build a comprehensive view of a topic on social media? Jordan Breslauer would say you let a machine learning tool scan the social sphere and add information as conversations evolve, with help from humans in the loop. Ginette Methot: I’m Ginette, Curtis Seare: and I’m Curtis, Ginette: and you are listening to Data Crunch, Curtis: a podcast about how applied data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are changing the world. Ginette: Data Crunch is produced by the Data Crunch Corporation, an analytics training and consulting company. Ginette: Many of you want to gain a deeper understanding of data science and machine learning, and Brilliant.org is a great place to dig deeper into these topics. Their classes help you understand algorithms, machine learning concepts, computer science basics, probability, computer memory, and many other important concepts in data science and machine learning. The nice thing about Brilliant.org is that you can learn in bite-sized pieces at your own pace. Their courses have storytelling, code-writing, and interactive challenges, which makes them entertaining, challenging, and educational. Sign up for free and start learning by going to Brilliant.org slash Data Crunch, and also the first 200 people that go to that link will get 20% off the annual premium subscription. Let’s get into our conversation with Jordan Breslauer, senior director of data analytics and customer success at social standards. Jordan: My name is Jordan Breslauer. I'm the senior director of data analytics and customer success at social standards. I've always been a data geek as it pertains to sports. I think of Moneyball when I was younger, I always wanted to be kind of a the next Billy Bean and I, when I started working for sports franchises right after high school and early college days, I just realized that, that type of work culture is wasn't for me, but I was so, so into trying to answer questions with data that had no previously clear answer, you know? I loved answering subjective questions like, or what makes the best player or how do, how do I know who the best player is? And I thought what was always fun was to try and bring some sort of structured subjectivity to those sorts of questions through using data. And that's really what got me passionate about data in the first place. But then I just started to apply it to a number of different business questions that I always thought were quite interesting, which have a great deal of subjectivity. And that led me to Nielsen originally where my main question that I was answering on a day-to-day basis, what was, what makes a great ad? Uh, what I found though is that advertising at least, especially as it pertains to TV, is really where brands were moving away from and a lot of the real consumer analytics that people were looking for were trying to underpin people in their natural environment, particularly on social media. And I hadn't seen any company that had done it well. Uh, and I happened to meet social standards during my time at Nielsen and was truly just blown away with this ability to essentially take a large input of conversations that people were happening or happening, I should say, and bring some sort of structure to them to actually be able to analyze them and understand what people were talking about as it pertained to different types of topics. And so I think that's really what brought me here was the fascination with this huge amount of data behind the ways that people were talking about on social. And the fact that it had some structure to it, which actually allowed for real analytics to be put behind it. Curtis: It's a hard thing to do though. Right? You know, to answer this question of how do we extract real value or real insight from social media and you'd mentioned historically or up to this point, companies that that are trying to do that missed the mark.

Social Media and Machine Learning

Whether you like it or not, your world is shaped by data. We explore how it impacts people, society, and llamas perched high on Peruvian mountain peaks—through interviews, inquest, and inference. We talk to interesting people doing intriguing things with data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science, and all things revolving around them.

hubhopper

Data Crunch | Artificial Intelligence | AI | Machine Learnin...

hubhopper