Data Skeptic

Our guest today is Zoltán Kekecs, a Ph.D. holder in Behavioural Science. Zoltán highlights the problem of low replicability in journal papers and illustrates how researchers can better ensure complete replication of their research and findings. He used Bem’s experiment as an example, extensively talking about his methodology and results.

Direct download: reproducible-esp-testing.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

On the show, Iñigo Martinez, a Ph.D. student at the University of Navarra shares his survey results which investigated how data practitioners perform data science projects. He revealed the methodologies typically used by data practitioners and the success factors in data science projects.

Direct download: a-survey-of-data-science-methodologies.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 9:43am PDT

On the show today, Dino Carpentras, a post-doctoral researcher at the Computational Social Science group at ETH Zürich joins us to discuss how opinion dynamics models are built and validated. He explained how quantifying opinions is complex, and strategies to develop robust models for measuring and predicting public opinions.

Direct download: opinion-dynamics-models.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:17pm PDT

Crafting survey questions is one thing but getting your audience to fill it is yet another. On the show today, we speak with Alexander Nolte, an Associate Professor at the University of Tartu. Alexander discussed the use of Casual Affective Triggers (CAT) to incentivize people to accept survey invitations and improve the completion rate. He revealed the impact of CATs on survey response rates from a study he conducted.

Direct download: causal-affective-triggers.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 11:58am PDT

Traditional surveys have straight-jacket questions to be answered, thus restricting the information that can be gotten. Today, Ziang Xiao, a Postdoc Researcher in the FATE group at Microsoft Research Montréal, talks about conversational surveys, a type of survey that asks questions based on preceding answers. He discussed the benefits of conversational surveys and some of the challenges it poses.

Direct download: conversational-surveys.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

Today, Jenny Tang, a Ph.D. student of societal computing at Carnegie Mellon University discusses her work on the generalization of privacy and security surveys on platforms such as Amazon MTurk and Prolific. Jenny shared the drawbacks of using such online platforms, the discrepancies observed about the samples drawn, and key insights from her results.

Direct download: do-results-generalize-for-privacy-and-security-surveys.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:39pm PDT

This episode kicks off the new season of the show, Data Skeptic: Surveys.  Linhda rejoins the show for a conversation with Kyle about her experience taking surveys and what questions she has for the season.  Lastly, Kyle announces the launch of survey.dataskeptic.com, a new site we're launching to gather your opinions.  Please take a moment and share your thoughts!

Direct download: 4-out-of-5-data-scientists-agree.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:46am PDT

It may be intuitive to think crowdfunding a project drives its innovation and novelty, but there are no empirical studies that prove this. On the show, Johannes Wachs shares his research that sought to determine whether crowdfunding truly drives innovation. He used board games as a case study and shared the results he found.

Direct download: crowdfunded-board-games.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

There were reports of Russia’s interference in the 2016 US elections. In today’s episode, Koustuv Saha, a researcher at Microsoft Research walks us through the effect of targeted ads for political campaigns. Using practical examples, he discusses how targeted ads can propagate fake news, its ripple effects on electioneering, and how to find a sweet spot with targeted ads.

Direct download: russian-election-interference-effectiveness.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:05am PDT

There is an unsung kind of ad fraud brewing in the ad tech space — placement laundering fraud. On the show, Jeff Kline discusses what placement laundering fraud is, how it can be identified, and possible solutions to it. Listen to learn more.

Direct download: placement-laundering-fraud.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 9:38am PDT

Bosko Milekic, the Co-founder of Optable, a data collaboration platform for the media and advertising industry, joins us today. Bosko talked about the clean rooms, the technology driving data privacy during collaboration. He discussed why clean rooms are gaining widespread adoption, and how users can exploit Optable’s clean room platform for a secured data-sharing experience.

Direct download: data-clean-rooms.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 9:54am PDT

Kerstin Bongard-Blanchy is a Research Associate at the University of Luxembourg. She joins us to discuss her study that investigated dark patterns in web designs. She discussed the results, the effect of dark patterns effect on users, whether an average user can detect them, and the way forward to a more ethical web space.

Direct download: dark-patterns-in-site-design.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 9:04am PDT

We are joined by Anthony Katsur, the CEO of IAB Tech Lab. Anthony discusses standards within the ad tech industry. He explained how IAB Tech Lab set and propagates global standards, actions to ensure compliance from advertisers, and industry trends for a more privacy-centric ad tech space.

Direct download: internet-advertising-bureau-media-lab.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 9:19am PDT

When we navigate a webpage, it is fairly easy for our mouse movement to be tracked and collected. Today, Luis Leiva, a Professor of Computer Science discusses how these mouse tracking data can be used to predict age, gender and user attention. He also discusses the privacy concerns with mouse tracking data and possible ways it can be curtailed.

Direct download: your-mouse-reveals-your-gender-and-age.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

On the show, Aleksandra Urman and Mykola Makhortykh join us to discuss their work on the comparative analysis of web search behavior using web tracking data. They shared interesting results from their analysis, bordering around the user preferences for search engines, demographic patterns, and differences between how men and women surf the net.

Direct download: measuring-web-search-behavior.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 7:56am PDT

Did Aristotle Use a Laptop?  That's a question from the StrategyQA benchmark which highlights the stretch goals for current artificial intelligence systems.  Answering a question like that requires several cognitive steps and reasoning.  Constructing a dataset of similarly challenging questions is a major undertaking.  On today's episode, Mor Geva returns to share details about the creation of StrategyQA and the larger Big Bench dataset it has been included in.

Direct download: big-bench.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 7:39pm PDT

While at first glance, the use of ad blockers drops the revenue of news publishers, this may not be completely true. On the show today, Shunyao Yan, an Assistant Professor in Marketing at Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University, discussed the effect of ad blockers on news consumption and how ad blockers can potentially be helpful for news publishers.

Direct download: ad-blockers-effect-on-news-consumption.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:17am PDT

People who do not want their data tracked and shared online can pay a token for a cookie paywall. But are the websites keeping to their side of the bargain? Victor Morel, a Postdoc candidate at the Chalmers University of Technology joins us to discuss his work around auditing the activities of cookie paywalls. He discussed the findings from his analysis and proffers some solutions to making cookie paywalls more transparent.

Direct download: your-consent-is-worth-75-euros-a-year.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 7:00am PDT

The advancement of generative language models has been a force for good, but also for evil. On the show, Avisha Das, a post-doctoral scholar at the University of Texas Health Center, joins us to discuss how attackers use machine learning to create unsuspecting phishing emails. She also discussed how she used RNN for automated email generation, with the goal of defeating statistical detectors. 

Direct download: automated-email-generation-for-targeted-attacks.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:52am PDT

Peter Gloor, a Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, takes us on a new world of tribe classification. He extensively discussed the need for such classification on the internet and how he built a machine learning model that does it. Listen to find out more!

Direct download: tribal-marketing.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:33am PDT

Direct download: nano-targetted-facebook-ads.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:55am PDT

We hear about the impeccable achievements of GPT-3 models, but such large generative models come with their bias. On the show today, Conrad Borchers, a Ph.D. student in Human-Computer Interaction, joins us to discuss the bias in GPT-3 for job ads and how such large models can be de-biased. Listen to learn more!

Direct download: debiasing-gpt3-job-ads.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

Moses Guttman from Clear ML joins us to share insights about how organizations leveraging machine learning keep their programs on track.  While many parallels exist between the software development life cycle (SWLC) and the machine learning development life cycle, successful deployments of ML in production have demonstrated that a unique set of tools is required.  Moses and I discuss the emergence of ML Ops, success stories, and how modern teams leverage tools like Clear ML's open source solution to maximize the value of ML in the organization.

 

Direct download: ml-ops-in-production.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:03pm PDT

Data sharing in the ad tech space has largely been a black box system. While it is obvious the data is being collected, the data sharing process is obscure to users. On the show today, Maaz Bin Musa and Rishab, both researchers at the University of Iowa, speak about the importance of data transparency and their tool, ATOM for data transparency. Listen to find out how ATOM uncovers data-sharing relationships in the ad-tech space.

Direct download: ad-network-tomography.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

When you accept cookies on a website, you cannot tell whether the cookies are used for tracking your personal data or not. Shaoor Munir’s machine learning model does that. On the show today, the Ph.D student at the University of California, discussed the world of first-party cookies and how he developed a machine learning model that predicts whether a first-party cookie is used for tracking purposes.

Direct download: first-party-tracking-cookies.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

Liza Gak, a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley, joins us to discuss her research on harmful weight loss advertising. She discussed how weight loss ads are not fact-checked, and how they typically target the most vulnerable. She extensively discussed her interview process, data analysis, and results. Listen for more!

Direct download: the-harms-of-targeted-weight-loss-ads.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

Growing your podcast to the point of monetization is not a walk in the park. Today, Rob Walch, the VP of Podcast Relations at Libsyn talks about podcast advertising. He discussed how advertising works, how to grow your audience and some blueprints to being a successful podcaster. Listen for more.

Direct download: podcast-advertising.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

When we search for products in e-commerce stores, we do not care what goes on under the hood to generate the results. However, there may be an intentional algorithmic effort to gravitate us toward a particular product. On the show, today, Abhisek Dash and Saptarshi Ghosh discuss their research on fairness in the search result of Amazon smart speakers.

Direct download: fairness-in-e-commerce-search.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 7:41am PDT

Chances are that you have bought a product online majorly because of the reviews you saw. Unfortunately, not all reviews are genuine. Today, Rajvardhan Oak shares some insight from his research on fraudulent Amazon reviews. He explained the inner workings of fraudulent reviews and revealed key insights from his qualitative and quantitative study.

Direct download: fraudulent-amazon-reviewers.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

While we give attention to textual data on the web, many do not know the unique power of echo interactions with smart devices for ad targeting. Today, our guest, Umar Iqbal joins us to discuss his study on using Amazon Smart Speakers for ad targeting. He gave interesting revelations about how voice data is captured and analysed for ad purposes. Listen to find out more.

Direct download: ad-targeting-in-amazon-smart-speakers.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:14am PDT

Rajan Udwani, an Assistant Professor at the University of California Berkeley joins us to discuss his work on AdWords with unknown budgets. He discussed the previous approaches to ad allocation, as well as his maiden approach that introduced randomization for better results. Listen for more.

Direct download: adwords-with-unknown-budgets.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

Today, we are joined by Piotr Niedźwiedź, Founder and CEO of Neptune.ai. Piotr discusses common MLOps activities by data science teams and how they can take advantage of Neptune.ai for better experiment tracking and efficiency. Listen for more!

Direct download: ml-ops-best-practices.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:00am PDT

Affiliate marketing creates an opportunity for marketers to gain a commission by promoting a product or service.  Cookies are typically used for tracking and the advertiser whose product or service is being featured pays the marketing only on transactions.

Today's episode covers those approaches and is also a story of conflict between two large companies and how one affiliate marketer got caught in the middle.

Direct download: affiliate-marketing-rabbithole.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:46am PDT

Cameron Ballard joins us today to discuss his work around YouTube conspiracy theories. He revealed interesting observations about conspiracy theories on YouTube including how predatory ads are most common in conspiracy theory videos and how YouTube’s algorithm subtly works for predatory ads. 

Direct download: monetization-of-youtube-conspiracy-theorists.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

Eric Zeng joins us to discuss his study around understanding bad ads and efforts that can be taken to limit bad ads online. He discussed how he and his co authors scrapped a large amount of ad data, applied a machine learning algorithm, and commensurate statistical results.

Direct download: user-perceptions-of-problematic-ads.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

NaLette Brodnax, a political scientist and an Assistant Professor in the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University joins us to discuss her work on analyzing digital advertisements for political campaigns. She used data for electoral campaigns on Facebook to answer questions that help us better understand how digital ads affect the outcome of elections.

 

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Direct download: political-digital-advertising-analysis.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 11:15am PDT

Direct download: fraud-detection-in-crowdfunding-campaigns.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:13am PDT

Direct download: artificial-intelligence-and-auction-design.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:59am PDT

Have you ever wondered what goes on under the hood when you accept a website’s cookies? Today, Maximilian Hils, a PhD student in Computer Science, at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, dissects the ad tech industry and the standards put in place to protect users’ data. He also shares his thoughts on the use of VPNs as well as other tools that help shield your data from prying eyes on the internet.

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Direct download: privacy-preference-signals.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

Ravi Krishna joins us today to talk about his recent work on a differentiable NAS framework for ads CTR prediction. He discussed what CTR prediction is about and why his NAS framework helps in building neural networks for better ads recommendation. Listen to learn about methodology, related literature and his results.

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Direct download: neural-architecture-search-for-ctr-prediction.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:19am PDT

Effectively managing a large budget of pay per click advertising demands software solutions. When spending multi-million dollar budgets on hundreds of thousands of keywords, an effective algorithmic strategy is required to optimize marketing objectives.

In this episode, Nathan Janos joins us to share insights from his work in the ad tech industry.

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Direct download: algorithmic-ppc-management.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:10pm PDT

Increasingly, people get most if not all of the information they consume online. Alongside the web sites, videos, apps, and other destinations, we’re consistently served advertisements alongside the organic content we search for or discover. Targetted ads make it possible for you to discover relevant new products you might otherwise not have heard about. Targetting can also open a pandora’s box of ethical considerations. Online advertising is a complex network of automated systems. Algorithms controlling algorithms controlling what we see.

This season of Data Skeptic will focus on the applications of data science to digital advertising technology. In this first episode in particular, Kyle shares some of his own personal experiences and insights working in pay-per-click marketing.

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Direct download: ad-tech.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:44pm PDT

Our mobile phones generate an incredible amount of data inbound and outbound. In today’s episode, Nishant Kishore, a PhD graduate of Harvard University in Infectious Disease Epidemiology, explains how mobility data from mobile phones can be captured and analysed to understand the spread of infectious diseases.

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Direct download: the-reliability-of-mobile-phone-data.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 10:31pm PDT

The pandemic changed how we lived. And this had a ripple effect on the performance of machine learning models. Ravi Parikh joins us today to discuss how the pandemic has affected the performance of machine learning models in clinical care and some actionable steps to fix it.

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Direct download: haywire-algorithms.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

Carly Lupton-Smith joins us today to speak about her research which investigated the consistency between household and county measures of school reopening. Carly is a doctoral researcher in Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Listen to know about her findings.

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Direct download: school-reopening-analysis.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 7:00am PDT

Today, we are joined by Alexander Thor, a Product Manager at Vizlib, makers of Astrato. Astrato is a data analytics and business intelligence tool built on the cloud and for the cloud. Alexander discusses the features and capabilities of Astrato for data professionals.

Visit our website for additional show notes!

 

Direct download: modern-data-stacks.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 7:00am PDT

Emojis are arguably one of the most effective ways to express emotions when texting. In today’s episode, Xuan Lu shares her research on the use of emojis by developers. She explains how the study of emojis can track the emotions of remote workers and predict future behavior. Listen to find out more!

Direct download: emoji-as-a-predictor.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 7:25am PDT

On the show today, Fabian Braesemann, a research fellow at the University of Oxford, joins us to discuss his study analyzing the gig economy. He revealed the trends he discovered since remote work became mainstream, the factors causing spatial polarization and some downsides of the gig economy. Listen to learn what he found. 
Direct download: polarizing-trends-in-the-gig-economy.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:39am PDT

On the show today, we interview Mouhamed Abdulla, a professor of Electrical Engineering at Sheridan Institute of Technology. Mouhamed joins us to discuss his study on remote teaching and learning in applied engineering. He discusses how he embraced the new approach after the pandemic, the challenges he faced and how he tackled them. Listen to find out more.

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Direct download: remote-learning-in-applied-engineering.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:29am PDT

It is difficult to estimate the effect on remote working across the board. Darja Šmite, who speaks with us today, is a professor of Software Engineering at the Blekinge Institute of Technology. In her recently published paper, she analyzed data on several companies' activities before and after remote working became prevalent. She discussed the results found, why they were and some subtle drawbacks of remote working. Check it out!

 

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Direct download: remote-productivity.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:45am PDT

We explore this complex question in two interviews today.  First, Kasey Wagoner describes 3 approaches to remote lab sessions and an analysis of which was the most instrumental to students.  Second, Tahiya Chowdhury shares insights about the specific features of video-conferencing platforms that are lacking in comparison to in-person learning.

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Direct download: does-remote-learning-work.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

In this episode, we speak with Abdullah Kurkcu, a Lead Traffic Modeler. Abdullah joins us to discuss his recent study on the effect of COVID-19 on bicycle usage in the US. He walks us through the data gathering process, data preprocessing, feature engineering, and model building. Abdullah also disclosed his results and key takeaways from the study. Listen to find out more. 

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Direct download: covid-19-impact-on-bicycle-usage.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:46am PDT

Today, we are joined by Jennifer Jacobs and Nadya Peek, who discuss their experience in teaching remote classes for a course that is largely hands-on. The discussion was focused on digital fabrication, why it is important, the prospect for the future, the challenges with remote lectures, and everything in between.

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Direct download: learning-digital-fabrication-remotely.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 4:55am PDT

Today, we are joined by Denae Ford, a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research and an Affiliate Assistant Professor at the University of Washington. Denae discusses her work around remote work and its culminating impact on workers. She narrowed down her research to how COVID-19 has affected the working system of software engineers and the emerging challenges it brings.

 

 

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Direct download: remote-software-development.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 9:49am PDT

In this episode, we interview Jonas Landman, a Postdoc candidate at the University of Edinburg. Jonas discusses his study around quantum learning where he attempted to recreate the conventional k-means clustering algorithm and spectral clustering algorithm using quantum computing. 

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Direct download: quantum-k-means.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

K-means is widely used in real-life business problems. In this episode, Mujtaba Anwer, a researcher and Data Scientist walks us through some use cases of k-means. He also spoke extensively on how to prepare your data for clustering, find the best number of clusters to use, and turn the ‘abstract’ result into real business value. Listen to learn.  Click here to access additional show notes on our website! Thanks to our sponsor!
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Direct download: k-means-in-practice.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

Building a fair machine learning model has become a critical consideration in today’s world. In this episode, we speak with Anshuman Chabra, a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Networks. Chhabra joins us to discuss his research on building fair machine learning models and why it is important. Find out how he modeled the problem and the result found.

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Direct download: fair-hierarchical-clustering.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:23am PDT

Many people know K-means clustering as a powerful clustering technique but not all listeners will be as familiar with spectral clustering. In today’s episode, Sibylle Hess from the Data Mining group at TU Eindhoven joins us to discuss her work around spectral clustering and how its result could potentially cause a massive shift from the conventional neural networks. Listen to learn about her findings.

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Direct download: matrix-factorization-for-k-means.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

In this episode, we speak with Bernd Fritzke, a proficient financial expert and a Data Science researcher on his recent research - the breathing K-means algorithm. Bernd discussed the perks of the algorithms and what makes it stand out from other K-means variations. He extensively discussed the working principle of the algorithm and the subtle but impactful features that enables it produce top-notch results with low computational resources. Listen to learn about this algorithm.

Direct download: breathing-k-means.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

In today’s episode, Jason, an Assistant Professor of Statistical Science at Duke University talks about his research on K power means. K power means is a newly-developed algorithm by Jason and his team, that aims to solve the problem of local minima in classical K-means, without demanding heavy computational resources. Listen to find out the outcome of Jason's study.

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Direct download: power-k-means.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

In this episode, Kyle interviews Lucas Murtinho about the paper "Shallow decision treees for explainable k-means clustering" about the use of decision trees to help explain the clustering partitions. 

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Direct download: explainable-k-means.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:17am PDT

Have you ever wondered how you can use clustering to extract meaningful insight from a time-series single-feature data? In today’s episode, Ehsan speaks about his recent research on actionable feature extraction using clustering techniques. Want to find out more? Listen to discover the methodologies he used for his research and the commensurate results.

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ClearML is an open-source MLOps solution users love to customize, helping you easily Track, Orchestrate, and Automate ML workflows at scale.

Direct download: customer-clustering.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

Linh Da joins us to explore how image segmentation can be done using k-means clustering.  Image segmentation involves dividing an image into a distinct set of segments.  One such approach is to do this purely on color, in which case, k-means clustering is a good option. 

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In the image below, you can see the k-means clustering segmentation results for the same image with the values of 2, 4, 6, and 8 for k.

Lilac Crowned Amazon

 
Direct download: k-means-image-segmentation.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 4:00pm PDT

In today’s episode, Gregory Glatzer explained his machine learning project that involved the prediction of elephant movement and settlement, in a bid to limit the activities of poachers. He used two machine learning algorithms, DBSCAN and K-Means clustering at different stages of the project. Listen to learn about why these two techniques were useful and what conclusions could be drawn.

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Direct download: tracking-elephant-clusters.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:43pm PDT

Welcome to our new season, Data Skeptic: k-means clustering.  Each week will feature an interview or discussion related to this classic algorithm, it's use cases, and analysis.

This episode is an overview of the topic presented in several segments.

Direct download: k-means-clustering.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:44am PDT

Frank Bell, Snowflake Data Superhero, and SnowPro, joins us today to talk about his book “Snowflake Essentials: Getting Started with Big Data in the Cloud.” 

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Direct download: snowflake-essentials.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

Zack Labe, a Post-Doctoral Researcher at Colorado State University, joins us today to discuss his work “Detecting Climate Signals using Explainable AI with Single Forcing Large Ensembles.”
Works Mentioned
“Detecting Climate Signals using Explainable AI with Single Forcing Large Ensembles”
by Zachary M. Labe, Elizabeth A. Barnes

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Direct download: explainable-climate-science.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:24am PDT

Erin Boyle, the Head of Data Science at Myst AI, joins us today to talk about her work with Myst AI, a time series forecasting platform and service with the objective for positively impacting sustainability.

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Direct download: energy-forecasting-pipelines.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

Sean Law, Principle Data Scientist, R&D at a Fortune 500 Company, comes on to talk about his creation of the STUMPY Python Library.

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Direct download: matrix-profiles-in-stumpy.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

Data scientists and psychics have at least one major thing in common. Both professions attempt to predict the future. In the case of a data scientist, this is done using algorithms, data, and often comes with some measure of quality such as a confidence interval or estimated accuracy. In contrast, psychics rely on their intuition or an appeal to the supernatural as the source for their predictions. Still, in the interest of empirical evidence, the quality of predictions made by psychics can be put to the test.

The Great Australian Psychic Prediction Project seeks to do exactly that. It's the longest known project tracking annual predictions made by psychics, and the accuracy of those predictions in hindsight. Richard Saunders, host of The Skeptic Zone Podcast, joins us to share the results of this decadal study.

Read the full report: https://www.skeptics.com.au/2021/12/09/psychic-project-full-results-released/

And follow the Skeptics Zone: https://www.skepticzone.tv/

 

Direct download: the-great-australian-prediction-project.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:30pm PDT

Georgia Papacharalampous, Researcher at the National Technical University of Athens, joins us today to talk about her work “Probabilistic water demand forecasting using quantile regression algorithms.”

Visit Springboard and use promo code DATASKEPTIC to receive a $750 discount

Direct download: water-demand-forecasting.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 9:30am PDT

John Watson, Principal Software Engineer at Splunk, joins us today to talk about Splunk and OpenTelemetry.

 

Direct download: open-telemetry.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

Yusan Lin, a Research Scientist at Visa Research, comes on today to talk about her work "Predicting Next-Season Designs on High Fashion Runway."

Direct download: fashion-predictions.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

Time series topics on Data Skeptic predate our current season.  This holiday special collects three popular mini-episodes from the archive that discuss time series topics with a few new comments from Kyle.

Direct download: time-series-mini-episodes.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:02am PDT

Dr. Darren Shannon, a Lecturer in Quantitative Finance in the Department of Accounting and Finance, University of Limerick, joins us today to talk about his work "Extending the Heston Model to Forecast Motor Vehicle Collision Rates."

Direct download: forecasting-motor-vehicle-collision-rates.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

Eric Manibardo, PhD Student at the University of the Basque Country in Spain, comes on today to share his work, "Deep Learning for Road Traffic Forecasting: Does it Make a Difference?"

Direct download: deep-learning-for-road-traffic-forecasting.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

Daniele Gammelli, PhD Student in Machine Learning at Technical University of Denmark and visiting PhD Student at Stanford University, joins us today to talk about his work "Predictive and Prescriptive Performance of Bike-Sharing Demand Forecasts for Inventory Management."

Direct download: bike-share-demand-forecasting.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

Mahdi Abolghasemi, Lecturer at Monash University, joins us today to talk about his work "Demand forecasting in supply chain: The impact of demand volatility in the presence of promotion."

 

Direct download: forecasting-in-supply-chain.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

The retail holiday “black Friday” occurs the day after Thanksgiving in the United States. It’s dubbed this because many retail companies spend the first 10 months of the year running at a loss (in the red) before finally earning as much as 80% of their revenue in the last two months of the year.

This episode features four interviews with guests bringing unique data-driven perspectives on the topic of analyzing this seeming outlier in a time series dataset.

Direct download: black-friday.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 7:24am PDT

Alex Terenin, Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Cambridge, joins us today to talk about his work "Aligning Time Series on Incomparable Spaces."

Direct download: aligning-time-series-on-incomparable-spaces.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

Today we are joined again by Ben Fulcher, leader of the Dynamics and Neural Systems Group at the University of Sydney in Australia, to talk about hctsa, a software package for running highly comparative time-series analysis.

Direct download: comparing-time-series-with-hctsa.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:01am PDT

Gerrit van den Burg, Postdoctoral Researcher at The Alan Turing Institute, joins us today to discuss his work "An Evaluation of Change Point Detection Algorithms."

Direct download: change-point-detection-algorithms.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:14am PDT

Bahman Rostami-Tabar, Senior Lecturer in Management Science at Cardiff University, joins us today to talk about his work "Forecasting and its Beneficiaries."

Direct download: time-series-for-good.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

Alex Mallen, Computer Science student at the University of Washington, and Henning Lange, a Postdoctoral Scholar in Applied Math at the University of Washington, join us today to share their work "Deep Probabilistic Koopman: Long-term Time-Series Forecasting Under Periodic Uncertainties."

Direct download: long-term-time-series-forecasting.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

Fotios Petropoulos, Professor of Management Science at the University of Bath in The U.K., joins us today to talk about his work "Fast and Frugal Time Series Forecasting."

Direct download: fast-and-frugal-time-series-forecasting.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:13pm PDT

Manie Tadayon, a PhD graduate from the ECE department at University of California, Los Angeles, joins us today to talk about his work “Comparative Analysis of the Hidden Markov Model and LSTM: A Simulative Approach.”

Direct download: causal-inference-in-educational-systems.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

Sankeerth Rao Karingula, ML Researcher at Palo Alto Networks, joins us today to talk about his work “Boosted Embeddings for Time Series Forecasting.”


Works Mentioned
Boosted Embeddings for Time Series Forecasting
by Sankeerth Rao Karingula, Nandini Ramanan, Rasool Tahmasbi, Mehrnaz Amjadi, Deokwoo Jung, Ricky Si, Charanraj Thimmisetty, Luisa Polania Cabrera, Marjorie Sayer, Claudionor Nunes Coelho Jr

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sankeerthrao/

https://twitter.com/sankeerthrao3 

https://lod2021.icas.cc/ 

Direct download: boosted-embeddings-for-time-series.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

David Daly, Performance Engineer at MongoDB, joins us today to discuss "The Use of Change Point Detection to Identify Software Performance Regressions in a Continuous Integration System".

Works Mentioned
The Use of Change Point Detection to Identify Software Performance Regressions in a Continuous Integration System
by David Daly, William Brown, Henrik Ingo, Jim O’Leary, David BradfordSocial Media

David's Website
David's Twitter
Mongodb


Direct download: change-point-detection-in-continuous-integration-systems.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

Samya Tajmouati, a PhD student in Data Science at the University of Science of Kenitra, Morocco, joins us today to discuss her work Applying K-Nearest Neighbors to Time Series Forecasting: Two New Approaches.

Direct download: applying-k-nearest-neighbors-to-time-series.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

Dr. Feng Li, (@f3ngli) is an Associate Professor of Statistics in the School of Statistics and Mathematics at Central University of Finance and Economics in Beijing, China. He joins us today to discuss his work Distributed ARIMA Models for Ultra-long Time Series.

Direct download: ultra-long-time-series.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

Angus Dempster, PhD Student at Monash University in Australia, comes on today to talk about MINIROCKET: A Very Fast (Almost) Deterministic Transform for Time Series Classification, a fast deterministic transform for time series classification. MINIROCKET reformulates ROCKET, gaining a 75x improvement on larger datasets with essentially the same performance. In this episode, we talk about the insights that realized this speedup as well as use cases.

Direct download: minirocket.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

Chongshou Li, Associate Professor at Southwest Jiaotong University in China, joins us today to talk about his work Why are the ARIMA and SARIMA not Sufficient.

Direct download: arima-is-not-sufficient.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

Ben Fulcher, Senior Lecturer at the School of Physics at the University of Sydney in Australia, comes on today to talk about his project Comp Engine.

Follow Ben on Twitter: @bendfulcher
For posts about time series analysis : @comptimeseries
comp-engine.org

Direct download: comp-engine.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

Nitin Pundir, PhD candidate at University Florida and works at the Florida Institute for Cybersecurity Research, comes on today to talk about his work “RanStop: A Hardware-assisted Runtime Crypto-Ransomware Detection Technique.”

FICS Research Lab - https://fics.institute.ufl.edu/ 

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/nitin-pundir470/

Direct download: detecting-ransomware.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

Florian Eckerli, a recent graduate of Zurich University of Applied Sciences, comes on the show today to discuss his work Generative Adversarial Networks in Finance: An Overview.

Direct download: gans-in-finance.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

Today on the show we have Daniel Omeiza, a doctoral student in the computer science department of the University of Oxford, who joins us to talk about his work Efficient Machine Learning for Large-Scale Urban Land-Use Forecasting in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Direct download: predicting-urban-land-use.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

Today on the show we have Elizabeth Barnes, Associate Professor in the department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University, who joins us to talk about her work Identifying Opportunities for Skillful Weather Prediction with Interpretable Neural Networks. Find more from the Barnes Research Group on their site.

Weather is notoriously difficult to predict. Complex systems are demanding of computational power. Further, the chaotic nature of, well, nature, makes accurate forecasting especially difficult the longer into the future one wants to look. Yet all is not lost!

In this interview, we explore the use of machine learning to help identify certain conditions under which the weather system has entered an unusually predictable position in it’s normally chaotic state space.

Direct download: opportunities-for-skillful-weather-prediction.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

Today on the show we have Andrea Fronzetti Colladon (@iandreafc), currently working at the University of Perugia and inventor of the Semantic Brand Score, joins us to talk about his work studying human communication and social interaction.

We discuss the paper Look inside. Predicting Stock Prices by Analyzing an Enterprise Intranet Social Network and Using Word Co-Occurrence Networks.

Direct download: predicting-stock-prices.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:00am PDT

Today on the show we have Boris Oreshkin @boreshkin, a Senior Research Scientist at Unity Technologies, who joins us today to talk about his work N-BEATS: Neural Basis Expansion Analysis for Interpretable Time Series Forecasting.

Works Mentioned:
N-BEATS: Neural Basis Expansion Analysis for Interpretable Time Series Forecasting
By Boris N. Oreshkin, Dmitri Carpov, Nicolas Chapados, Yoshua Bengio
https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.10437

Social Media
Linkedin

Twitter 

Direct download: nbeats.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:04am PDT

Today we are back with another episode discussing AI in the work field. AI has, is, and will continue to facilitate the automation of work done by humans. Sometimes this may be an entire role. Other times it may automate a particular part of their role, scaling their effectiveness.

Carl Stimson, a Freelance Japanese to English translator, comes on the show to talk about his work in translation and his perspective about how AI will change translation in the future. 

Direct download: translation-automation.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:48pm PDT