In this episode, Jason Foster talks to David Bader, Distinguished Professor of the Department of Data Science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. They talk about building massive scale analytics, how to use a large amount of data to gain insights, the complexity of the data set and how to bridge the gap between architecture and algorithms. David also shares his notable experience, talks about capabilities and skills data departments require to run large-scale data projects and explores some use cases in diverse industries.

We talked about:

David’s background A day in the life of a professor David’s current projects Starting a school The different types of professors David’s recent papers Similarities and differences between research labs and startups Finding (or creating) good datasets David’s lab Balancing research and teaching as a professor David’s most rewarding research project David’s most underrated research project David’s virtual data science seminars on YouTube Teaching at universities without doing research Staying up-to-date in research David’s favorite conferences Selecting topics for research Convincing students to stay in academia and competing with industry Finding David online

Links: 

David A. Bader: https://davidbader.net/ NJIT Institute for Data Science: https://datascience.njit.edu/ Arkouda: https://github.com/Bears-R-Us/arkouda NJIT Data Science YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/NJITInstituteforDataScience

ML Zoomcamp: https://github.com/alexeygrigorev/mlbookcamp-code/tree/master/course-zoomcamp

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Our events: https://datatalks.club/events.html

Summary Exploratory data analysis works best when the feedback loop is fast and iterative. This is easy to achieve when you are working on small datasets, but as they scale up beyond what can fit on a single machine those short iterations quickly become long and tedious. The Arkouda project is a Python interface built on top of the Chapel compiler to bring back those interactive speeds for exploratory analysis on horizontally scalable compute that parallelizes operations on large volumes of data. In this episode David Bader explains how the framework operates, the algorithms that are built into it to support complex analyses, and how you can start using it today.

Announcements

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