Soft Skills on DataThrillz

Binder & Repl.it

Mon, 15 Feb 2021 17:18:46 +0000

I recently discovered two great tools for easily creating interactive coding environments without installing a thing. These tools facilitate sharing of code in multiple languages and are wonderful resources for demonstrating programming concepts when teaching a course.

Binder

The first tool is called Binder, is open-source and was released in 2017. It is awesome because it allows data scientists to share their work in Python , R or Julia in a reproducible manner. Binder can be configured for Python (Anaconda or pip environment) and R (using RStudio and/or Shiny). Multiple user interfaces can be specified. For example, for Python we can use a terminal or Jupyter notebook in the repo.

Writing Awesome READMEs

Wed, 13 Jan 2021 17:08:23 +0000

This article will explore possible items to include your Git repo README file. We will discuss several items that we can include in a README and when to include them.

What is a README?

A README file is a text file that explains a project to new user. It helps users quickly understand where to find information on the project such as brief description of your project, how to install/fork it and/or how to use your code. READMEs live in the top level directory of your repo in GitHub, Bitbucket or GitLab.

Staying Up-To-Date on AI/ML

Tue, 24 Nov 2020 16:14:54 +0000

Great Email Newsletters on AI/ML

All newsletters are released weekly.

Import AI - AI newsletter that summarizes recent news articles and research; I enjoy how honest and succinct this newsletter is; also like that the implications of new algorithms are always discussed by Jack, who is an advocate for improved ML model explicability and data privacy.
AI News Weekly - curated list of AI-related articles; presents a brief summary of each article describing the latest news, applied use cases and ethics; has ads
AI Applied use Cases Top News - curated list of the latest AI news articles; subscribers can customize their newsletters according to topics of interest; weekly
The Batch - newsletter from deeplearning.ai more academic with discussion of recent AI research papers; great breakdown of topics e.g. what’s new, why it matters and the implications
TOPBOTS - list of various AI articles recently released on TOPBOT.com; articles cover a wide array of topics e.g. NLP, ML in marketing and interpretability; articles tend to be more technical
PyImageSearch - articles on using Python to tackle real-world computer vision and deep learning problems; very practical, well-done computer vision blog. I highly recommend Adrian’s free email courses.
ODSC - newsletter with articles spanning various topics geared to beginners, experts and everyone in between. They also offer webinars (free and paid) as well as online meetups.

Podcasts

Data Skeptic has short episodes that cover various ML concepts
TWIML AI - Formally This Week in ML & AI is hosted by Sam Charrington who asks really strong questions to the latest and greatest AI/ML researchers.
Practical AI - aims to make AI accessible to everyone