Editor's Picks

• Machine Learning Operations (MLOps): Overview, Definition, and Architecture
  We conducted mixed-method research, including a literature review, a tool review, and expert interviews. As a result of these investigations, we provide an aggregated overview of the necessary principles, components, and roles, as well as the associated architecture and workflows. Furthermore, we furnish a definition of MLOps and highlight open challenges in the field. Finally, this work provides guidance for ML researchers and practitioners who want to automate and operate their ML products with a designated set of technologies....

• Challenges of Building Realtime ML Pipelines
  Realtime machine learning is on the rise, and as companies start introducing realtime into their ML pipelines, they are finding themselves having to weigh the trade-offs between performance, cost, and infrastructure complexity, and determine which to prioritize...In this post, we will look at some of the most typical trade-offs that occur at each stage of the transition from batch to realtime and why these advantages and disadvantages are important to keep in mind...

• Good Machine Learning Practice for Medical Device Development: Guiding Principles
  The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Health Canada, and the United Kingdom’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) have jointly identified 10 guiding principles that can inform the development of Good Machine Learning Practice (GMLP). These guiding principles will help promote safe, effective, and high-quality medical devices that use artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML)...

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Data Science Articles & Videos

• Essential Books for Data Scientists
  They used to say ‘an apple a day keeps the doctor away’, but we say ‘a chapter a day keeps the doctor away’. Okay, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration, but over the past couple of decades there has been mounting scientific evidence to support the health benefits of reading. Here, we’ve compiled a list of essential reading material for data scientists...

• Goodbye, Data Science
  I had been a data scientist for the past few years, but in 2022, I got a new job as a data engineer, and it’s been pretty good to me so far...The main reason I soured on data science is that the work felt like it didn’t matter, in multiple senses of the words “didn’t matter”...

• Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People [Video]
  Talk given at WebCamp Zagreb 2016 ...

• AI is cognitive automation, not cognitive autonomy
  Like the rest of computer science, AI is about making computers do more, not replacing humans...

• Idealism and pragmatism in visualization
  Some reactions to the Washington Post chart on the right, designed by my former student Luís Melgar, reminded me of a passage from The Art of Insight that I shared the other day. This morning, a few readers of this chart asked in social media: “Why isn't time on the X-axis?” implying that there's something wrong with that, as it breaks some convention or rule...

• Deep (Learning) Focus Newsletter
  Deep (Learning) Focus is a newsletter that I release every two weeks. Each issue picks a single topic in deep learning research, provides (hopefully) all background information relevant to understanding the topic, overviews 3-4 impactful papers in this space, and provides various links/pointers to further expanding your knowledge of the topic (e.g., implementations, tutorials, more papers, etc.)...

• A New Object Detection Benchmark
  In this paper we introduce the Roboflow 100 object detection benchmark consisting of 100 projects that span a wide array of imagery domains and task targets. We derived our benchmark selection from over 90000 public datasets, 60 million public images that are actively being worked on in the open on Roboflow....

• The connectome of an insect brain
  Brains contain networks of interconnected neurons, so knowing the network architecture is essential for understanding brain function. We therefore mapped the synaptic-resolution connectome of an insect brain (Drosophila larva) with rich behavior, including learning, value-computation, and action-selection, comprising 3,013 neurons and 544,000 synapses. We characterized neuron-types, hubs, feedforward and feedback pathways, and cross-hemisphere and brain-nerve cord interactions...

• ML Observability — Hype or Here to Stay?
  n explosion of tooling has led to a lack of consensus in the space — making it both a challenging and interesting one to explore. I hope this article will provide a useful framework for other investors who venture down the ML Observability rabbit hole...Below, we’ll delve into: What is ML Observability and why do we need it? How Observability tooling has the power to unlock a market. Why vendor solutions are in pole position to capture the value. The supporting tailwinds and hurdles we have yet to overcome. The challenges of an overload in tooling. Building a moat in a noisy market...

• Gitlab SQL Style Guide
  This guide establishes our standards for SQL and are enforced by the SQLFluff linter and by code review. The target code changes that this stile guide apply to are those made using dbt...

• Text-to-Image: Diffusion, Text Conditioning, Guidance, Latent Space
  Text-to-image has advanced at a breathless pace in 2021 - 2022, starting with DALL·E, then DALL·E 2, Imagen, and now Stable Diffusion. I dug into a couple of papers to learn more about the space and organized my understanding into a few key concepts: Diffusion: Gradually add noise to data and then learn to generate data from noise Text conditioning: Generating images given (i.e., conditioned on) a text prompt Classifier guidance: Using classifier gradients to text-increase image alignment Latent space: Applying diffusion on image embeddings instead of image pixels...

• A/B Testing with Multiple Metrics
  A lot of literature references and guidance about A/B testing anchor on tests based on one single comparison or one single metric. Some of my friends working in tech also shared that they typically focus on one primary metric when performing experiment designs (e.g., study design and sample size calculation etc.)...I'm curious if this is a common practice in the tech industry (especially the non-biotech industries)...What I learned from industry practitioners is that multiple metrics (usually 3 to 5) are monitored even though the sample size might be based on one primary metric...

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Jobs

• Senior Data Analyst - Epic Games - New York
  
  Epic Games spans across 19 countries with 55 studios and 4,500+ employees globally. For over 25 years, we’ve been making award-winning games and engine technology that empowers others to make visually stunning games and 3D content that bring environments to life like never before.
  
  Use your expert experience in data & analytics to build powerful stories and visuals that inform the games we make, the technology we develop, and business decisions that drive Epic... Epic Games is looking for a Senior Data Analyst to help us create the models that fuel our creator economy. The successful candidate will have excellent SQL knowledge, and enjoy combining analytic skills with business acumen to provide the data and insights that will drive our continued success...
   

Training & Resources

• Not only is Stable Diffusion 2.0 not bad, but really better ——my prompt engineering experiments
  Stability.ai released the Stable Diffusion 2.0 model last weekend, which is the biggest update since Stable Diffusion 1.4 since August. However, the new release caused controversy in the AI art community. Users complained the distorted anatomical structures and weird fuzzy textures in generative outcomes look more like downgrade rather than an update. A mass especially when compared to the eye-pleasured easily-satisfied outcomes from Midjourney v4...

• Causal Confounds in Sequential Decision Making
  In causal inference, we call a random variable that we don’t observe that influences a relationship we’d like to model a confounder. Using techniques from causal inference, we derive provably correct and scalable algorithms for sequential decision making in these sorts of confounded settings...We’re going to be focused mostly on imitation learning...

• Sketch-Guided Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
  Our key idea is to train a Latent Guidance Predictor (LGP) - a small, per-pixel, Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) that maps latent features of noisy images to spatial maps, where the deep features are extracted from the core Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM) network...We take a particular focus on the sketch-to-image translation task, revealing a robust and expressive way to generate images that follow the guidance of a sketch of arbitrary style or domain...

Last Week's Newsletter's 3 Most Clicked Links

• What Does it Mean to Give Someone What They Want? The Nature of Preferences in Recommender Systems

• Gitlab Data Team Handbook

• World's Simplest Data Pipeline?

Cutting Room Floor

• DALL-E-Bot: Introducing Web-Scale Diffusion Models to Robotics
• Seeing Beyond the Brain: Conditional Diffusion Model with Sparse Masked Modeling for Vision Decoding
• State-of-the-Art Estimation of Protein Model Accuracy Using AlphaFold
• Datacast Episode 103: Computational Economics, Statistical Arbitrage, and Adaptable Data Consolidation With Eric Daimler
• Agreement-on-the-Line: Predicting the Performance of Neural Networks under Distribution Shift