— In the News — The wonderful and terrifying implications of computers that can learn | Jeremy Howard | TEDxBrussels In this TEDx talk, Jeremy Howard offers a great overview of how machine learning works and where things are going. As a previous president of Kaggle, Jeremy knows what he's talking about. This is a very worthwhile 20 minute talk. The Current State of Machine Intelligence Shivon Zilis is a VC at Bloomberg Beta with a specific interest in startups that are based on data and machine intelligence. She spent the last three months learning about every artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data-related startup she could find. Her current list has 2,529 of them to be exact. This is a great rundown of what she found. Large Scale Deep Learning Very worthwhile slide deck about deep learning at Google that generated quite a bit of discussion on Reddit and Twitter this week. I typically don't like "reading" slide decks but this one has good depth and flows well. There's also a good "Further Reading" list on the last slide. Automatically Making Sense of Data Zoubin Ghahramani and his group at the University of Cambridge are developing The Automatic Statistician, which is billed as “an artificial intelligence for data science." Google is helping to fund the project so this is definitely worth paying attention to. But, as Derrick Harris concludes in this post, we're far from having automated tools that can turn insights into real value.

— Tools and Techniques — Simple CSV Data Wrangling with Python This is a great tutorial about working with csv data in Python. There's a lot more here to think about than you might expect. Simulating Decisions to Improve Them One of the jobs of the Zulily Data Science team is to help make better business decisions with data. Here's a great post from their engineering blog about how they do that.

— Resources — A Dozen Educational Videos on Data Science Very nice collection of educational data science videos ranging from 5 minutes to just over an hour.