Roger & DJ — The Rise of Big Data and CA's COVID-19 Response

Roger and DJ share some of the history behind data science as we know it today, and reflect on their experiences working on California's COVID-19 response.

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Roger Magoulas is Senior Director of Data Strategy at Astronomer, where he works on data infrastructure, analytics, and community development. Previously, he was VP of Research at O'Reilly and co-chair of O'Reilly's Strata Data and AI Conference.

DJ Patil is a board member and former CTO of Devoted Health, a healthcare company for seniors. He was also Chief Data Scientist under the Obama administration and the Head of Data Science at LinkedIn.

Roger and DJ recently volunteered for the California COVID-19 response, and worked with data to understand case counts, bed capacities and the impact of intervention.

Connect with Roger and DJ:

📍 Roger's Twitter: https://twitter.com/rogerm

📍 DJ's Twitter: https://twitter.com/dpatil

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🌟 Transcript: http://wandb.me/gd-roger-and-dj 🌟

⏳ Timestamps:

0:00 Sneak peek, intro

1:03 Coining the terms "big data" and "data scientist"

7:12 The rise of data science teams

15:28 Big Data, Hadoop, and Spark

23:10 The importance of using the right tools

29:20 BLUF: Bottom Line Up Front

34:44 California's COVID response

41:21 The human aspects of responding to COVID

48:33 Reflecting on the impact of COVID interventions

57:06 Advice on doing meaningful data science work

1:04:18 Outro

🍀 Links:

1. "MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters" (Dean and Ghemawat, 2004): https://research.google/pubs/pub62/

2. "Big Data: Technologies and Techniques for Large-Scale Data" (Magoulas and Lorica, 2009): https://academics.uccs.edu/~ooluwada/courses/datamining/ExtraReading/BigData

3. The O'RLY book covers: https://www.businessinsider.com/these-hilarious-memes-perfectly-capture-what-its-like-to-work-in-tech-2016-4

4. "The Premonition" (Lewis, 2021): https://www.npr.org/2021/05/03/991570372/michael-lewis-the-premonition-is-a-sweeping-indictment-of-the-cdc

5. Why California's beaches are glowing with bioluminescence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVYSr19ReOs

6.

7. Sturgis Motorcyle Rally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgis_Motorcycle_Rally

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