Dataspace Newsletter: Your Chicken is Fried in Crude Oil – Data Science Proves It!

Greetings from Dataspace!

In this issue of the Dataspace Newsletter we’re taking a break from the more classical and businessy (aka boring) applications for machine learning and data science. Instead, we invite you to open the door to explore all of the ways that you really want to be using your growing data science skills, especially in a time of quarantine when we have all had to focus on what is really important to us.

  • Priority numero uno: Cats. Have you adopted too many cats to keep you company during quarantine? Are you running out of ideas for names for said cats? A neural network can take care of that for you! Details (and some amazing cat name suggestions) here!
  • Second priority: Staying safe and avoiding all of the things that you didn’t know were dangerous. This set of easily consumable data visualizations provides some insights into things you never knew you should be worried about. The connection between chicken and crude oil may surprise you!
  • Third Priority: Keeping our favorite TV shows alive forever!! While the current situation dictates that we can’t actually film any new episodes of Friends or Game of Thrones, you can train a neural net to generate endless scripts for all of your favorite shows! These machine generated episodes might be slightly incoherent, but…. many of us felt that way about Season 8 of GOT anyway, right?
  • Priority 4: Improving my jokes. Yes, there is an algorithm for that! Check out this article for details on the process of leveraging various machine learning techniques to hone in on predicting funniness levels!
  • But perhaps most important of all, in these unprecedented times we’ve been called upon to ponder the existential questions that define our humanity. Questions such as: Where can I get the best burrito? Is there really such a thing as a ‘best’ burrito?? Check out this unique data science project exploring the possible methods to quantify the qualities that define a great burrito, and get some suggestions on burritos that you may want to try. For science!

Until next time, happy coding!

Ben’s Take

 

Katie, our lead recruiter, has written our last few newsletters and this time she’s really outdone herself. How can I possibly top tools to help name kittens? Where is she coming up with this stuff?!

Our Latest Project: Ensuring Data Privacy Compliance

Yes, a number of us are still very hard at work on Golden Record, our cross-database record matching tool. In fact, this week I wrote a blog post about using a record matching technology, like Golden Record, to help organizations comply with GDPR, CCPA, and other data privacy regulations. There is a growing list of jurisdictions that require you to know all the places that personal information is stored. But, this is very hard to do if all the systems that hold person data don’t share common identifiers, like customer ID number. Golden Record provides the ability to recognize all the places where a person’s data exists so you can confidently respond to privacy-related requests. Noncompliance can, and has, led to multi million dollar fines. Get more details from my blog post.

OK, now back to automating feline naming! Thanks for reading!

-Ben

 

Suggestions?

 

What do you think? How can we make this newsletter more useful to you? What topics would you like to see more of? Want to contribute an article? Just want to catch up and chat?

I’d love to hear from you! Email me at benjamin.taub@dataspace.com.

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