Data Crunch

Welcome to another exciting episode of Data Crunch! In this episode, we dive deep into the world of data analytics and manufacturing with our special guests, Alex Reid and Jay Minutrie. Both Alex and Jay bring unique entrepreneurial and data-focused experiences to the table, making them the perfect duo for an engaging conversation about the future of manufacturing. We start with the origin story of their innovative technology, which began as an idea in Alex's father's laboratory at Tulane University. Alex, a young entrepreneur, teamed up with Jay, a seasoned industry veteran, to bring this patented technology to the market. Their complementary backgrounds served as the foundation for their successful partnership, leading to significant advancements in the manufacturing industry. As we continue the conversation, Alex and Jay discuss the challenges and opportunities they faced while introducing their hard tech into the industrial space, and how they managed to successfully navigate these obstacles with the help of a strategic acquisition by Yokogawa. The pair also share insights on how they plan to leverage their new partnership to drive even more innovation and growth in their industry. In this episode, we also explore the concept of on-demand designer materials at commodity scale. Alex shares his vision of a future where bespoke materials can be produced for specific customers at an affordable cost, leading to greater efficiency, reduced waste, and the ability to create customized products tailored to individual needs. This groundbreaking concept has the potential to revolutionize the manufacturing industry, and we dive into what it could mean for industry players and end-users alike. Alongside this fascinating discussion, we also touch on the importance of mentorship for young entrepreneurs and the value of having experienced individuals to guide and support you through the challenges of starting a business. Alex and Jay's unique partnership serves as an inspiring example of how collaboration and shared knowledge can lead to incredible success. Furthermore, our guests delve into the impact of their technology on the biopharma space, highlighting the potential for advancements in life-saving drugs and personalized medicine. With opportunities for growth in both the polymer and biopharma sectors, Alex and Jay's enthusiasm for the future is infectious, and their determination to make a difference is truly inspiring. So, join us as we explore the world of data science in manufacturing, the potential for on-demand designer materials, and the inspiring journey of two entrepreneurs who are pushing the boundaries of innovation. Don't miss this enlightening episode of Data Crunch, filled with valuable insights, engaging conversations, and a glimpse into the future of manufacturing.

Working with structured and semistructured data can be hard, but it's currently much easier than working with unstructured data, like images, video, audio, and text. We talk with Davit Buniatyan, CEO of Activeloop, who chats with us about how he works to make unstructured data for machine learning easier and faster to work with.

What's it like to build an AI product in an industry that still uses outdated project management technology and has no clear conceptual model? After receiving his PhD at Stanford, René Morkos speaks to this very situation. He describes his journey building an AI product in the construction industry.

After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with a master’s degree in artificial intelligence/robotics, Edward Cui was one of the first Uber self-driving car engineers. He’s had a lot of experience working with unstructured data and shares how we can increase the efficiency of modeling unstructured data by an order of magnitude.

What is the secret culprit behind overworked teachers and administrators in much of the educational system? We're joined by one of Data Crunch's finest, James Thomas, who tells from both a technological and personal standpoint the real difficulties faced by our teachers and students, and how the right approach to data can solve many of their problems.

If you haven't heard, GPT-3 is a machine learning model that can write text. Text that looks like a human wrote it—almost out of thin air. The real opportunity is in the ease of use. GPT-3 doesn't replace your writers. It augments them, making writing faster and more accessible without compromising your results. The last thing you want to do is compromise the quality of your content because copy is an exponential business multiplier. The more you can apply it, the more business you'll get. Despite advances in technology, one thing that hasn't changed is that people still talk about products and services—and what they say matters.

Higher education institutions house lots of important data that bad actors can access and sell on the dark web, like students' social security numbers, financial aid information, and national security research. Protecting this information should be a high priority for institutions, but it's not always easy to apply best practices and enforce compliance measures. We chat with Brandon Sherman about these issues.

As the VP of Data Science and Analytics for GE Aviation, Dinakar Deshmukh talks about how he, and the large team he is over, solve big problems internally and externally by splicing the power of data science with deep domain knowledge.

Telmo Silva created ClicData, an end-to-end SAAS BI platform, which as he describes, is the little guy coming up in the BI platform world. He talks about how his company was started, where it’s been, and where it’s going with cutting-edge R&D. He also offers additional thoughts on the role of data in the business world today.

Keeping quality customers is the aim of nearly every healthy business. Cactus Raazi challenges the typical methods of doing this and suggests alternative data-focused pricing strategies in order for businesses to survive in the future.

Robin Purohit talks to us about how he and his company are creating AI tools to help developers be more effective. Learn what their approach is, how they're training their models, and where they're headed in the future.

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...

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,

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..