122. Sadie St. Lawrence - Trends in data science

122. Sadie St. Lawrence - Trends in data science

Author: The TDS team May 4, 2022 Duration: 43:02

As you might know if you follow the podcast, we usually talk about the world of cutting-edge AI capabilities, and some of the emerging safety risks and other challenges that the future of AI might bring. But I thought that for today’s episode, it would be fun to change things up a bit and talk about the applied side of data science, and how the field has evolved over the last year or two.

And I found the perfect guest to do that with: her name is Sadie St. Lawrence, and among other things, she’s the founder of Women in Data — a community that helps women enter the field of data and advance throughout their careers — and she’s also the host of the Data Bytes podcast, a seasoned data scientist and a community builder extraordinaire. Sadie joined me to talk about her founder’s journey, what data science looks like today, and even the possibilities that blockchains introduce for data science on this episode of the towards data science podcast.

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Intro music:

- Artist: Ron Gelinas

- Track Title: Daybreak Chill Blend (original mix)

- Link to Track: https://youtu.be/d8Y2sKIgFWc

***

Chapters:

  • 2:00 Founding Women in Data
  • 6:30 Having gendered conversations
  • 11:00 The cultural aspect
  • 16:45 Opportunities in blockchain
  • 22:00 The blockchain database
  • 32:30 Data science education
  • 37:00 GPT-3 and unstructured data
  • 39:30 Data science as a career
  • 42:50 Wrap-up

While the active production of Towards Data Science has concluded, its archive remains a vital resource. Created by The TDS team, this collection captures a specific moment in the rapid evolution of data science and artificial intelligence. Each conversation pulls you directly into the room with leading researchers and practitioners who were shaping the tools and theories of their time. The discussions are not abstract lectures; they are grounded explorations of real-world problems, ethical dilemmas, and technical challenges that defined the field's trajectory. You'll hear experts dissect the implications of their work, from algorithmic fairness to the practicalities of deploying models at scale. This podcast served as a forum for nuanced debate, where complex ideas were unpacked with clarity and depth. Listening now offers a unique historical perspective, a chance to understand the foundational conversations that continue to influence where technology is headed next. The archive of Towards Data Science stands as a substantive record of insight, preserving the voices and questions from the forefront of a digital revolution.
Author: Language: en-us Episodes: 50

Towards Data Science
Podcast Episodes
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Duration: 1:02:44
AI research is often framed as a kind of human-versus-machine rivalry that will inevitably lead to the defeat — and even wholesale replacement of — human beings by artificial superintelligences that have their own sense…
92. Daniel Filan - Peering into neural nets for AI safety [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:06:02
Many AI researchers think it’s going to be hard to design AI systems that continue to remain safe as AI capabilities increase. We’ve seen already on the podcast that the field of AI alignment has emerged to tackle this p…
91. Peter Gao - Self-driving cars: Past, present and future [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:01:21
Cruise is a self-driving car startup founded in 2013 — at a time when most people thought of self-driving cars as the stuff of science fiction. And yet, just three years later, the company was acquired by GM for over a b…
90. Jeffrey Ding - China’s AI ambitions and why they matter [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 49:07
There are a lot of reasons to pay attention to China’s AI initiatives. Some are purely technological: Chinese companies are producing increasingly high-quality AI research, and they’re poised to become even more importan…