Decision Intelligence is a skill that Data Scientists will need in building ethical Artificial Intelligence systems
Back in March 2018, Google appointed their first ever Chief Decision Scientist in Cassie Kozyrkov. One of the responsibilities of the Chief Decision Scientist was training many of Google’s employees in Decision Intelligence, a set of skills that are increasingly important as Artificial Intelligence systems become a more prominent feature of Google’s business model. In this article I want to give a brief overview of Decision Intelligence and how I think the Data Scientist role will evolve as Decision Intelligence becomes more widely adopted.
What is Decision Intelligence
Decision Intelligence is a new discipline that is all about making good decisions when using data…
Understand how racial and gender biases in artificial intelligence systems occur and how to address them
In April 2019, New York University’s AI Now Institute released a report on the impact of bias in artificial intelligence systems. About 12 months later, you might remember the Twitter the storm caused when a pixelated image of Barack Obama was turned into a higher resolution image of the former president by an AI model. Except the model returned a high-resolution image of a white man when it was given a pixelated image of a black man. This is a classic example of the bias The AI Now Institute detailed in that NYU report. As we increasingly integrate artificial intelligence…
Content creators, YouTube and the community have pulled off some fun Easter eggs over the years
I love YouTube — I cannot remember the last time I went a full day without visiting the site. I’m sure you will know YouTube is the largest video sharing site on the internet by a wide margin. At the scale, YouTube has reached, there is scope to introduce some fun hidden Easter eggs here and there. YouTube has previously implemented hidden features that change the way the site itself behaves. At one point, if you typed in “Doge Meme” into the search bar, the results would transform into the comic sans coloured font associated with the popular meme —…
The Apple car rumours have reached fever pitch recently, but I’m not convinced
The rumours that Apple are working on a mysterious Apple Car have been swirling around from way back in 2015. In late 2020, these rumours started to heat up again with Bloomberg reporting a team at Apple has gotten as far as developing drive trains, safety mechanics and battery technology. One of the most reputable Apple analysts, Ming-Chi Kuo, has even weighed in to support the rumours that Apple are working on an electric car to rival Tesla. Having looked at all the rumours and Apple’s history with product development, I am not convinced we are going to see an…
Ultimately, the most important thing is to keep running
Running is one of the most natural ways to exercise — human beings evolved to run after all. Since I’ve taken up running during the pandemic, I’ve been looking for ways to optimise my performance. One of the things I’ve looked into is the optimal time of day for running. I am an early bird, I naturally wake up really early and my best hours of the day are between 6am and 12pm. So, I run straight out of bed — is this advisable? Would I be performing better if I ran in the afternoon or evening? This is a…
I calculate how much Medium pay me per hour of member reading time instead of per thousand views
I’ve recently completed my first full month as a writer on Medium. So far the experience as been fun and I’m reasonably happy with the performance of all my stories. Joining Medium as a writer was always about seeing how much I can earn as a freelance writer while I’m studying, so I’ve been watching my stats closely like most new writers. I’ve been interested in how much you can earn on medium per given metric even before I started writing on here. It’s an interesting question, even though it may be hard to answer given Medium’s mechanisms for calculating…
Learn the basics of collecting data from websites and storing them in DataFrames
Unsurprisingly, the currency for data scientists is data. Data is the most important part of any data science project. The internet offers a near infinite source of data if we know how to access it. That is the goal of web scraping. You could build up a massive training dataset for a machine learning project, or collect pricing data on Amazon for a bargain-hunting program, or collect weather data for an app — the possibilities are endless. In this tutorial, we are going to walk through the basics of web scraping with one of the most popular Python libraries for…
From one new runner to others
I started doing the Couch to 5K program a few weeks ago and it has been a significant positive impact to my life and self-confidence. I have learnt a lot on this journey particularly about the physical and mental challenges you face when you start running. I have some thoughts I want to share that I believe could be helpful for new runners. These are the two biggest challenges of learning to run that I wish I’d known at the start of my journey. I want to start by talking about the physical challenges.
Run boy, run
I started running a few weeks…
The odd and slightly annoying quirks of MacOS for users migrating from Windows
Apple have build a fantastic operating system in macOS. The operating system is a successor to OS X launched in 2001, which in turn succeeded the classic Mac OS which dates back to 1984. This is obviously a very mature operating system at this point. The architecture of macOS is very different to the other major operating system, Microsoft Windows. Apple’s macOS is a Unix based operating system where MS Windows is based on Microsoft’s Windows NT family of operating systems. The upshot is migrating from Windows to macOS can be a very jarring experience indeed. I remember making the…
‘Do what you love’ tops the list
We have all received bad advice at some point. I’m sure we have given out bad advice too. Often when someone offers advice, they do it with the best of intentions — with the aim to help the recipient through the situation they find themselves in. Despite best intentions though, people often give out some truly counter-productive advice, especially when it comes to life decisions. I’ve been on the receiving end of this, and I’ve watched others give out bad advice to those who really needed wise words. In this article, I want to highlight what I think is just…
Rugare Maruzani
A computational biology & machine learning PhD researcher & a very curious person
