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In this podcast episode, we talked with Alexander Guschin about launching a career off Kaggle.

About the Speaker: Alexander Guschin is a Machine Learning Engineer with 10+ years of experience, a Kaggle Grandmaster ranked 5th globally, and a teacher to 100K+ students. He leads DS and SE teams and contributes to open-source ML tools. 0:00 Starting with Machine Learning: Challenges and Early Steps 13:05 Community and Learning Through Kaggle Sessions 17:10 Broadening Skills Through Kaggle Participation 18:54 Early Competitions and Lessons Learned 21:10 Transitioning to Simpler Solutions Over Time
23:51 Benefits of Kaggle for Starting a Career in Machine Learning
29:08 Teamwork vs. Solo Participation in Competitions
31:14 Schoolchildren in AI Competitions 42:33 Transition to Industry and MLOps 50:13 Encouraging teamwork in student projects 50:48 Designing competitive machine learning tasks 52:22 Leaderboard types for tracking performance 53:44 Managing small-scale university classes 54:17 Experience with Coursera and online teaching 59:40 Convincing managers about Kaggle's value 61:38 Secrets of Kaggle competition success 63:11 Generative AI's impact on competitive ML 65:13 Evolution of automated ML solutions 66:22 Reflecting on competitive data science experience

🔗 CONNECT WITH ALEXANDER GUSCHINLinkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/1aguschin/Website - https://www.aguschin.com/

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Join us for our very first meetup of 2025! You'll learn all about how to use Apache Kafka beyond the consumer protocol and get an introduction to Apache Flink.

Date and Time: 🗓️ Thursday 23rd January, ⏰ 18:00 - 20:30 PM 🕘 Venue: Confluent Europe Ltd, 262 High Holborn, London WC1V 7EE, United Kingdom Attending Brands: OSO, Streambased, Gravitee & Confluent

Schedule: 18:00: Doors Open 18:00 - 18:30: Food, drinks, networking 18:30 - 19:00: "Accessing Kafka: beyond the consumer protocol" - Tom Scott (CEO Streambased) & Linus Hakansson (CPO Gravitee) 19:00 - 19:30: “Flink - Adi Polak (Director Developer Experience Engineering and Advocacy, Confluent) 19:30- 20:30pm: Additional Q&A, Networking

🎙️ \~Talk 1\~ Talk Title: Accessing Kafka: beyond the consumer protocol

Summary: The role of Kafka is expanding and with it the use cases it addresses. This brings many cool new features but also highlights some drawbacks. The standard producer/consumer pattern that has served us so well for so many years is no longer a good fit for all the things that Kafka data is used for and it's time to look beyond.Join Linus (Gravitee) and Tom (Streambased) for an in depth look at how you can interact with you Kafka clusters via REST, GraphQL, WebSockets, JDBC/ODBC and even as a simple filesystem.We'll outline the reasoning behind these new access patterns, the features that differentiate them (and the features that unite them) and show some live demos of the opportunities they create.

🗣️ Speaker 1: Tom Scott (CEO Streambased) is the founder of Streambased, Tom is building multi tenant, on-prem and cloud Kafka services to attack common Kafka pain points and break down barriers to starting your data journey.Linus Hakansson Linus Hakansson is the Chief Product Officer at Gravitee, building a next-generation management platform helping organizations secure, control and govern their Kafka and APIs

🗣️ Speaker 2: Linus Hakansson is the Chief Product Officer at Gravitee, building a next-generation management platform helping organizations secure, control and govern their Kafka and APIs

🎙️ \~Talk 2\~ Talk Title: Flink - demystifying data streaming

Summary: In an era where data velocity and volume continue to grow, the ability to process and analyze data streams in real-time is pivotal for businesses aiming to optimize operations, enhance decision-making, and maintain competitive advantages.

Apache Flink stands out as a comprehensive, open-source stream processing framework designed to meet these challenges head-on. In this session you will learn about data streaming through the lens of Apache Flink, offering insights into its architecture, capabilities, and how it seamlessly facilitates real-time data processing.Objectives: 1. Introduce Stream Processing: Provide a foundational understanding of stream processing - its importance\, use cases\, and when to use in comparison to batch processing. 2. Explore Apache Flink: Deep dive into Apache Flink's architecture\, key features\, and its unique approach to handling stateful computations\, event time processing\, and ensuring fault tolerance at scale.

🗣️ Speaker 1: Adi Polak, Director Developer Experience Engineering and Advocacy, Confluent. Adi is an experienced software engineer and people manager. For most of her professional life, she dealt with data and machine learning for transactional and analytics workloads by building large-scale systems. As a data practitioner, she developed software to solve real-world problems with Apache Spark, Kafka, HDFS, K8s, AWS, and Azure in high-throughput, high-scale production environments for companies like Akamai and Microsoft.Adi has taught Spark to thousands of students throughout the years and is the author of the successful book — Scaling Machine Learning with Spark.

When not thinking up new architecture, teaching new tech or pondering on a distributed systems challenge, you can find her at the local cultural scene.

Launching a career off Kaggle - Alexander Guschin

Outline:

• ​Launching a career off kaggle
• ​Tips and tricks for kaggle/ML competitions
• ​Career paths after kaggle grandmaster
• ​Industry oriented teaching

​About the speaker:

​Alexander Guschin is a Machine Learning Engineer with 10+ years of experience, a Kaggle Grandmaster ranked 5th globally, and a teacher to 100K+ students. He leads DS and SE teams and contributes to open-source ML tools.

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