Understanding Covid-19 transmission: what the data suggests about how the disease spreads
Covid-19 is turning the world upside down right now. One thing that’s extremely important to understand, in order to fight it as effectively as possible, is how the virus spreads and especially how mu...
23 Mar 202025min
Network effects re-release: when the power of a public health measure lies in widespread adoption
This week’s episode is a re-release of a recent episode, which we don’t usually do but it seems important for understanding what we can all do to slow the spread of covid-19. In brief, public health m...
15 Mar 202026min
Causal inference when you can't experiment: difference-in-differences and synthetic controls
When you need to untangle cause and effect, but you can’t run an experiment, it’s time to get creative. This episode covers difference in differences and synthetic controls, two observational causal i...
9 Mar 202020min
Better know a distribution: the Poisson distribution
This is a re-release of an episode that originally ran on October 21, 2018. The Poisson distribution is a probability distribution function used to for events that happen in time or space. It’s super...
2 Mar 202031min
The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis
Recent research into neural networks reveals that sometimes, not all parts of the neural net are equally responsible for the performance of the network overall. Instead, it seems like (in some neural...
23 Feb 202019min
Interesting technical issues prompted by GDPR and data privacy concerns
Data privacy is a huge issue right now, after years of consumers and users gaining awareness of just how much of their personal data is out there and how companies are using it. Policies like GDPR are...
17 Feb 202020min
Thinking of data science initiatives as innovation initiatives
Put yourself in the shoes of an executive at a big legacy company for a moment, operating in virtually any market vertical: you’re constantly hearing that data science is revolutionizing the world and...
10 Feb 202017min
Building a curriculum for educating data scientists: Interview with Prof. Xiao-Li Meng
As demand for data scientists grows, and it remains as relevant as ever that practicing data scientists have a solid methodological and technical foundation for their work, higher education institutio...
2 Feb 202031min
