Boston December Meet-Up Recap

Do you have a love/hate relationship with your data?

If you found yourself saying “yes”, you are not alone. 

At our December meet-up, Phil Mazenett, Corporate Sales Engineer and John Lynch, Corporate Systems Engineer, at AtScale shared their insights as to what common challenges data professionals are experiencing around their data throughout the modeling process. 

Mazenett states that in his experience a lot of his customers frequent the same obstacles that could be solved by:

1. Gaining access to the right tools, drivers, and packages to do whatever is necessary to load the data. 

2. Having an organized process that is searchable and easy to leverage your data. Mazenett shares that, “Many people are doing a lot of work that has already been done. A lot of people have ended up creating data sets that have already been created, analyzing models that have already been analyzed, and creating features that have already been created. There is no centralized location for people to look at what is available for them- the way that the data has been analyzed. You need an organized process that makes it easy to leverage.” 

3. Ensuring that everyone on your team has the same KPIs and definitions. 

4. Enabling people to have a singular point of access of your data no matter where it sits. 

5. Enhancing autonomy as the reliance on data engineers to give you your data places you in a cycle of long wait times and decreased productivity. 

How do you solve this? 

Mazenett and Lynch believe that there are multiple ways to ease the pain without having to buy a particular product or solution as every product will have their own unique approaches and benefits. However, investing in a semantic layer is a step in the right direction. Mazenett explains that with a semantic layer, you can portray your data in a way that invites people to ask questions, making your data be of more use and value. 

Thank you to ODSC for hosting this event! 

We want to see you at our next meet-up! Join our mailing list for event updates!

Boston: December Meet-Up News

Boston, join us next week (12/17) for our December meet-up! 

This month, we are being hosted by ODSC.

We have Phil Mazenett, Corporate Sales Engineer and John Lynch, Corporate Systems Engineer at AtScale sharing how to overcome the common challenges in data acquisition and the reliance on data engineering to do the heavy lifting for data science and analytics.

Register for free today: http://bit.ly/33YzCM0 

San Francisco November Meet-Up Recap

80% of a data scientist’s life is spent taking on tasks that don’t relate to data science. 

Why? 

Last week at ODSC’s and Synapse’s meet-up in San Francisco, Matt Baird, co-founder and CTO of AtScale caught up with bay area technology professionals for a talk on “The Power of Combining BI Analytics and Machine Learning.” Baird explained how in today’s companies it is not uncommon that your team “already has people doing descriptive analytics (BI),” and there is no need to repeat the process furthering business disruption. Who suffers? The data science team.

Baird emphasized the importance of getting into “flow,” making sure your data infrastructure supports your productivity stating that “if you have to pause because you don't know what the data means, can't get access to the data, have to figure out how to join the data from different databases, etc. you get out of flow and your productivity goes down massively.”

So, how can you work towards a solution that doesn’t disrupt your business operations? 

Cue virtualization. 

Baird states, “Virtualization hides the complexity of data engineering and data operations so you can focus on the fun stuff - the science!” 

We want to see you at our next meet-up! Join our mailing list for event updates! 

San Francisco: November Meet-Up News

San Francisco, join us on Thursday 11/21 for our monthly meet-up! 

This month we’re joining IBM, AtScale, ODSC, and Synapse.

From IBM, Sepideh Seigzadeh, Data Scientist/ Machine Learning Engineer, will be presenting “Making Data Science Go Faster.” In this talk, learn how “Watson OpenScale helps enterprises bring transparency and audit-ability to AI-infused applications by highlighting possible fairness issues, and generating explanations for individual transactions, including the attributes that were used to make the prediction.” 

From AtScale, Matt Baird, CTO and co-founder will be speak to his expertise about descriptive and prescriptive analytics as well as incorporate his vast knowledge in data warehousing, big data, and machine learning. Matt is one of the co-founders of AtScale and is the CTO. 

Register for free today: http://bit.ly/2pzzq7S

Dinner Series Recap: CRISPR on Gene Editing

What if you could alter the human genome? With CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) technology, this thought is made possible.

At our latest dinner, hack/reduce participants had the opportunity to listen to two human genome experts; Sarah Goodwin and Alex Plockik. The two had attended graduate school together at UCSF where they studied biochemistry and cell biology. 

Our dinner focused on the general concepts of CRISPR and the work that Sarah has been doing on a film called Human Nature, where she is the producer and lead science advisor. The film is a documentary that presents an in-depth description of the gene editing process of CRISPR. The technology came to life in 2013 and provides a way of controlling the basic genetic processes of life which can help cure diseases and provide other benefits to humankind and the environment in which we all call home.

October 23rd. CRISPR presenting to hack/reduce participants at Explorateur.

While many praise the advancements produced by gene editing, some remain skeptic of its moral compass. Would you want individuals to alter their offspring to be smarter, taller, more attractive? Is that fair? Who will have access to this technology? How will this influence the human experience? 

Since we are still in the early stages of CRISPR and human genome editing there are many answers that are yet to be uncovered. What are your thoughts on gene editing? 

*Interested in learning more about the work that CRISPR is doing? Check out our events page for Human Nature screening dates (will be announced in 2020).