• Having mastered Space Invaders, chess, and Go, AI tackles video soccer
  Google’s artificial-intelligence researchers have created a football simulator for training the next generation of machine-learning algorithms...

• Nvidia breaks records in training and inference for real-time conversational AI
  The biggest achievements Nvidia announced today include its breaking the hour mark in training BERT, one of the world’s most advanced AI language models and a state-of-the-art model widely considered a good standard for natural language processing. ...

• I wasn’t getting hired as a Data Scientist. So I sought data on who is.
  Instead of focusing on skills thought to be required of data scientists, we can look at what they have actually done before...I had conflated the practice of data science with the strategy to become part of it. To my surprise, these turned out not to be the same thing. Like most novices, I was putting together information from a haphazard mix of blog posts, the requirements section of data science job postings, and hearsay from people in the field. The skills-heavy focus of these sources, not to mention the castigating and often moralizing tone that data scientists can and should learn a whole bunch of things, can ironically entrap beginners in a never-ending cycle of chasing after the latest skills, when perhaps the most efficient strategy would be to quickly land an adjacent data-related position first and then learn the skills on the job...

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• AI Algorithms Need FDA-Style Drug Trials
  Opinion: Algorithms cause permanent side effects on society. They need clinical tests...Imagine a couple of caffeine-addled biochemistry majors late at night in their dorm kitchen cooking up a new medicine that proves remarkably effective at soothing colds but inadvertently causes permanent behavioral changes. Those who ingest it become radically politicized and shout uncontrollably in casual conversation. Still, the concoction sells to billions of people. This sounds preposterous, because the FDA would never let such a drug reach the market...

• The Logic of Risk Taking
  Imagine that your cousin Theodorus goes to the Casino 100 days in a row, starting with a set amount. On day 28 cousin Theodorus is bust. Will there be day 29? "Black Swan" author explains Deep flaw in the Logic of Risk Taking...

• Project Euphonia’s Personalized Speech Recognition for Non-Standard Speech
  Project Euphonia is a speech-to-text transcription model for those with atypical speech. In a new interspeech2019 paper, learn how researchers are collaborating with the ALS community to develop Euphonia for those with ALS or other speech impairments...

• Observability at Scale: Building Uber’s Alerting Ecosystem
  Our Observability team built a robust, scalable metrics and alerting pipeline to detect, mitigate, and notify engineers of issues as they occur...

• MineRL: Towards AI in Minecraft
  Welcome to MineRL. We want to solve Minecraft using state-of-the-art Machine Learning! To do so, we have created one of the largest imitation learning datasets with over 60 million frames of recorded human player data. Our dataset includes a set of tasks which highlights many of the hardest problems in modern-day Reinforcement Learning: sparse rewards and hierarchical policies...

• VisualBERT: A Simple and Performant Baseline for Vision and Language
  We propose VisualBERT, a simple and flexible framework for modeling a broad range of vision-and-language tasks. VisualBERT consists of a stack of Transformer layers that implicitly align elements of an input text and regions in an associated input image with self-attention. We further propose two visually-grounded language model objectives for pre-training VisualBERT on image caption data...

• GauGAN plugin for GIMP
  I created a GIMP plugin so you can play with GauGAN in a fully featured graphics editor...

• How Much Do Data Scientists Make? - An Exploration of H1B Salary Data
  If the market for data scientists is so hot, then just how much exactly are they being paid?...I got my salary data from this awesome website that indexes the Labor Condition Application (LCA) data from the Department of Labor (DOL). Basically, when a company intends to hire an employee that requires H1B visa sponsorship, they need to file a LCA with the DOL prior to filing a H1B visa petition. This LCA contains company, salary, and job title data that is publicly available to all...

• How To Get A Data Science Hiring Manager To Take You Seriously
  You're going to industry events to network with data science hiring managers and they don't seem very interested in someone with your background...

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• Data Scientist - PepsiCo - NYC
  
  PepsiCo’s Data Science and Analytics group is a team of data scientists, technology specialists, and business innovators who operate within eCommerce to build industry-leading systems and solutions. By focusing on machine learning and automation, the Data Science & Analytics group is pushing the bounds of possibility for PepsiCo and its strategic partners...

        Want to post a job here? Email us for details >> team@datascienceweekly.org

• When BERT meets Pytorch - A walkthrough of using BERT with pytorch for a multilabel classification use-case
  It’s almost been a year since the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community had its pivotal ImageNet moment. Pre-trained Language models have now begun to play exceedingly important roles in NLP pipelines for multifarious downstream tasks, especially when there’s a scarcity of training data. They can encode general aspects and semantics of text into dense vector representations that are universally useful...In this post, we focus on Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), a general purpose language representation model open-sourced by Google in November 2018. We won’t be going into the finer details of the BERT architecture, since we’re primarily concerned with integrating BERT into custom pytorch model pipelines...

• Behaviour Suite for Reinforcement Learning (bsuite)
  bsuite is a collection of carefully-designed experiments that investigate core capabilities of a reinforcement learning (RL) agent with two main objectives...

• The most powerful idea in data science
  A quick fix for separating red herrings from useful patterns...

• Python Crash Course: A Hands-On, Project-Based Introduction to Programming Thorough introduction to programming with Python...
  "I have read multiple beginner guides to Python. I am currently up to chapter 11 in Python Crash Course. So far this is far and away my favorite Python programming book..."...
  For a detailed list of books covering Data Science, Machine Learning, AI and associated programming languages check out our resources page
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  P.S., Enjoy the newsletter? Please forward it to your friends and colleagues - we'd love to have them onboard :) All the best, Hannah & Sebastian