Top 5 Videos from Extract Conference 2015
Extract conference, 2015 was a day jam-packed with data stories meant to entertain, educate and inspire. The stories were a combination of data analytics and growth hacking told by the people who know it the best. They are all interesting and here are my favorite top 5 videos for Data Stories Worth Sharing.
1. Deep learning - Andrew Ng
Andrew Ng, Chief Scientist at Baidu, talks about recent developments in Deep Learning and the work being done by Baidu. This session explores what deep learning is all about and why it matters in 20 minutes — liquid gold. If you had to see just one presentation from the conference this would be it. The slides are posted here: https://www.slideshare.net/ExtractConf
2. Kaggle Lessons and Learnings— Anthony Goldbloom
Anthony Goldbloom, Founder & CEO of Kaggle, gives an overview of Kaggle. Kaggle is a platform for machine learning competitions on which companies and researchers post their data and statisticians and data miners from all over the world compete to produce the best models. Since the early days of Kaggle, several companies have used the competition to find elegant solutions for complex real-life problems. He also discussed the recent shift in the use of different algorithms over time; recently xgboost+ensembles are winning most of the recent competitions. Most of the code is posted at Kaggle Scripts, which can run code and access datasets from the browser without downloading anything, not even the data. Check out some cool examples here https://www.kaggle.com/scripts
3. The Beautiful Science of Data Visualization — Jeff Pettiross
Jeff Pettiross, Head of UX at Tableau, discusses the history and science of Data Visualizations. I really liked his venture into the history of Visualization with Minard’s cartographic depiction of numerical data on a map ofNapoleon’s disastrous losses suffered during the Russian campaign of 1812. He also discussed recent scientific advances in Data Visualization — what works and how to use it.
4. Google Search Ranking Factors — 2015, Rand Fishkin
Rand Fisher, Founder of SEO powerhouse Moz, discusses how Googles search ranking operates and what factors really matter. In an effort to make Google’s search algorithm more transparent, he discusses how he used correlation data to extract what matters.
5. Collecting Startup Funding Data — Sarah Catanzaro
Sarah Catanzaro, Head of Data Science at Mattermark, describes their journey using Machine Learning to Collect Startup Funding Data. She goes over the transition to ML from manual data collection and offers an overview of data scrubbing, human support and validation and their learnings.
Bonus: drizzy.ai — Matt Ellsworth
Yes I know, I was trying to pick just the top 5 but Matt’s presentation on Recreating a Rapper From Scratch was too good to pass up. Matt is a Distribution Partner at 500 Startups and is funny as hell. He narrates his journey of creating an intelligence entity for Comedy Hack Day 15, which tweets and responds like rapper Drake.
These videos were quite enlightening and if you are interested in seeing rest of the videos here’s the complete playlist
Extract Conference, San Francisco 2015 Videos