Vanishing Gradients

a data podcast with hugo bowne-anderson

About the show

A podcast about all things data, brought to you by data scientist Hugo Bowne-Anderson.

It's time for more critical conversations about the challenges in our industry in order to build better compasses for the solution space! To this end, this podcast will consist of long-format conversations between Hugo and other people who work broadly in the data science, machine learning, and AI spaces. We'll dive deep into all the moving parts of the data world, so if you're new to the space, you'll have an opportunity to learn from the experts. And if you've been around for a while, you'll find out what's happening in many other parts of the data world.

Episodes

  • Poster Image

    Episode 21: Deploying LLMs in Production: Lessons Learned

    November 14th, 2023  |  Season 1  |  1 hr 8 mins

    Hugo speaks with Hamel Husain (ex-Github, Airbnb), a machine learning engineer who loves building machine learning infrastructure and tools, about generative AI, large language models, the business value they can generate, and how to get started.

  • Poster Image

    Episode 20: Data Science: Past, Present, and Future

    October 5th, 2023  |  Season 1  |  1 hr 26 mins

    Hugo speaks with Chris Wiggins (Columbia, NYTimes) and Matthew Jones (Princeton) about their recent book How Data Happened, and the Columbia course it expands upon, data: past, present, and future.

  • Poster Image

    Episode 19: Privacy and Security in Data Science and Machine Learning

    August 15th, 2023  |  Season 1  |  1 hr 23 mins

    Hugo speaks with Katharine Jarmul about privacy and security in data science and machine learning. Katharine is a Principal Data Scientist at Thoughtworks Germany focusing on privacy, ethics, and security for data science workflows.

  • Poster Image

    Episode 18: Research Data Science in Biotech

    May 25th, 2023  |  Season 1  |  1 hr 12 mins
    ai, biotech, data science, machine learning, open source, python

    Machine learning, deep learning, Bayesian inference for drug discovery, OSS, and accelerating discovery science to the speed of thought!

  • Poster Image

    Episode 17: End-to-End Data Science

    February 17th, 2023  |  Season 1  |  1 hr 16 mins

    It’s time to get real about how data science and machine learning actually deliver value! Hugo speaks with Tanya Cashorali, a data scientist and consultant that helps businesses get the most out of data, about what end-to-end data science looks like across many industries, such as retail, defense, biotech, and sports.

  • Poster Image

    Episode 16: Data Science and Decision Making Under Uncertainty

    December 15th, 2022  |  Season 1  |  1 hr 23 mins

    Hugo speaks with JD Long, agricultural economist, quant, and stochastic modeler, about data science, ML, and the nitty gritty of decision making under uncertainty, including how we can use our knowledge of risk, uncertainty, probabilistic thinking, causal inference, and more to help us use data science and machine learning to make better decisions in an uncertain world.

  • Poster Image

    Episode 15: Uncertainty, Risk, and Simulation in Data Science

    December 8th, 2022  |  Season 1  |  53 mins 30 secs

    Hugo speaks with JD Long, agricultural economist, quant, and stochastic modeler, about decision making under uncertainty and how we can use our knowledge of risk, uncertainty, probabilistic thinking, causal inference, and more to help us use data science and machine learning to make better decisions in an uncertain world.

  • Poster Image

    Episode 14: Decision Science, MLOps, and Machine Learning Everywhere

    November 21st, 2022  |  Season 1  |  1 hr 9 mins

    Hugo reads 3 audio essays about decision science, MLOps, and what happens when machine learning models are everywhere

  • Poster Image

    Episode 13: The Data Science Skills Gap, Economics, and Public Health

    October 12th, 2022  |  Season 1  |  1 hr 22 mins

    Hugo speaks with Norma Padron, CEO of EmpiricaLab, about data science education and continuous learning for people working in healthcare, broadly construed, along with how we can think about the democratization of data science skills more generally.

  • Poster Image

    Episode 12: Data Science for Social Media: Twitter and Reddit

    September 30th, 2022  |  Season 1  |  1 hr 32 mins

    Hugo speaks with Katie Bauer about her time working in data science at both Twitter and Reddit. At the time of recording, Katie was a data science manager at Twitter and prior to that, a founding member of the data team at Reddit.

  • Poster Image

    Episode 11: Data Science: The Great Stagnation

    September 16th, 2022  |  Season 1  |  1 hr 45 mins

    Hugo speaks with Mark Saroufim, an Applied AI Engineer at Meta who works on PyTorch where his team’s main focus is making it as easy as possible for people to deploy PyTorch in production outside Meta.

  • Poster Image

    Episode 10: Investing in Machine Learning

    August 19th, 2022  |  Season 1  |  1 hr 26 mins

    Hugo speaks with Sarah Catanzaro, General Partner at Amplify Partners, about investing in data science and machine learning tooling and where we see progress happening in the space.

  • Poster Image

    9: AutoML, Literate Programming, and Data Tooling Cargo Cults

    July 19th, 2022  |  Season 1  |  1 hr 41 mins

    Hugo speaks with Hamel Husain, Head of Data Science at Outerbounds, with extensive experience in data science consulting, at DataRobot, Airbnb, and Github.

  • Poster Image

    Episode 8: The Open Source Cybernetic Revolution

    May 16th, 2022  |  Season 1  |  1 hr 5 mins

    Hugo speaks with Peter Wang, CEO of Anaconda, about what the value proposition of data science actually is, data not as the new oil, but rather data as toxic, nuclear sludge, the fact that data isn’t real (and what we really have are frozen models), and the future promise of data science, Gifting economies with finite game economics thrust onto them.

    They also dive into an experimental conversation around open source software development as a model for the development of human civilization, in the context of developing systems that prize local generativity over global extractive principles. If that’s a mouthful, which it was, or an earful, which it may have been, all will be revealed in the conversation.

  • Poster Image

    Episode 7: The Evolution of Python for Data Science

    May 2nd, 2022  |  Season 1  |  1 hr 2 mins
    ai, data science, machine learning, python

    Hugo speaks with Peter Wang, CEO of Anaconda, about how Python became so big in data science, machine learning, and AI. They jump into many of the technical and sociological beginnings of Python being used for data science, a history of PyData, the conda distribution, and NUMFOCUS.

  • Poster Image

    Episode 6: Bullshit Jobs in Data Science (and what to do about them)

    April 5th, 2022  |  Season 1  |  1 hr 27 mins

    Hugo speaks with Jacqueline Nolis, Chief Product Officer at Saturn Cloud (formerly Head of Data Science), about all types of failure modes in data science, ML, and AI, and they delve into bullshit jobs in data science (yes, that’s a technical term, as you’ll find out) –they discuss the elements that are bullshit, the elements that aren’t, and how to increase the ratio of the latter to the former.