Linear Digressions

The topic of bias in word embeddings gets yet another pass this week. It all started a few years ago, when an analogy task performed on Word2Vec embeddings showed some indications of gender bias aroun...

24 Juni 201918min

There’s been a lot of interest lately in the attention mechanism in neural nets—it’s got a colloquial name (who’s not familiar with the idea of “attention”?) but it’s more like a technical trick that’...

17 Juni 201926min

This week’s episode is a special one, as we’re welcoming a guest: Joel Grus is a data scientist with a strong software engineering streak, and he does an impressive amount of speaking, writing, and po...

10 Juni 201939min

What do you get when you cross a support vector machine with matrix factorization? You get a factorization machine, and a darn fine algorithm for recommendation engines.

3 Juni 201920min

We've already talked about neural nets in some detail (links below), and in particular we've been blown away by the way that image recognition from convolutional neural nets can be fed into recurrent ...

27 Maj 201919min

We often hear from folks wondering what advice we can give them as they search for their first job in data science. What does a hiring manager look for? Should someone focus on taking classes online, ...

19 Maj 201917min

This week, we've got a fun paper by our friends at Google about the hidden costs of maintaining machine learning workflows. If you've worked in software before, you're probably familiar with the idea...

12 Maj 201922min

If you’re like most software engineers and, especially, data scientists, you find it really hard to make accurate estimates of how long a project will take to complete. Don’t feel bad: statistics is m...

5 Maj 201919min