This document discusses trends in data science in 2016, including how data science is moving into new use cases such as medicine, politics, government, and neuroscience. It also covers trends in hardware, generalized libraries, leveraging workflows, and frameworks that could enable a big leap ahead. The document discusses learning trends like MOOCs, inverted classrooms, collaborative learning, and how O'Reilly Media is embracing Jupyter notebooks. It also covers measuring distance between learners and subject communities, and the importance of both people and automation working together.

2. Data Science in 2016:
Moving Up
2015-10-15 • Madrid • http://bigdataspain.org/
Paco Nathan, @pacoid
O’Reilly Media

3. • general patterns
• trends and analysis: the discipline, the jobs
• some good examples: moving up into use cases
• glimpses ahead: an emerging content
• a proposed theme
Data Science 2016: Moving Up

4. Design Patterns

5. Design Patterns
Methodology for cloud-computing architecture
(2008-06-29)
http://ceteri.blogspot.com/2008/06/methodology-for-
cloud-computing.html

6. cluster scheduler
data
pipes
some cloud
containers
analytics
search/index
elastic
compute
elastic
storage
Design Patterns

7. Design Patterns
some cloud

8. Design Patterns
some cloud
DataStax
$189.7M
Confluent
$30.9M
Databricks
$47M
Jupyter
$6M
Elastic
$104M
Docker
$162MMesosphere
$48.75M

9. Design Patterns: Issues
some cloud
• integration could be better
• that implies sharing markets
• VCs in SiliconValley dislike that
• customers need integration

10. some cloud
Design Patterns: Where?

11. Design Patterns: Where?
some cloud

12. Design Patterns: Where?
some cloud

13. Design Patterns: Where?
some cloud

14. Design Patterns: Where?
some cloud

15. Design Patterns: Where?
some cloud
• that playing field becomes
overly crowded, soon…
• what happens at that point?

16. • so much emphasis on plumbing: `data engineering`
• not enough on domain expertise, which trumps all
Much activity in Big Data seems awkwardly focused at the
bottom of the tech stack: infrastructure, not domain
However, that may be changing…
Design Patterns: Opinion

17. Interesting Trends

18. Interesting Trends
There are many possible trends to discuss, but let’s
concentrate on four of these going into 2016:
• leveraging multicore and large memory spaces
• generalized libraries for frequently repeated work
• workflows blend the best of people and computing
• framework for a big leap ahead, not just incremental

19. Original definitions for what became relational
databases had less to do with dedicated SQL
products, more similarity with something like
Spark SQL
Interesting Trend #1: Contemporary Hardware
A relational model of data
for large shared data banks
Edgar Codd
Communications of the ACM (1970)
dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=362685

20. Python Java/Scala RSQL …
DataFrame
Logical Plan
LLVMJVM GPU NVRAM
Unified API, One Engine, Automatically Optimized
Tungsten
backend
language
frontend
…
from Databricks
Interesting Trend #1: Contemporary Hardware

21. Deep Dive into ProjectTungsten:
Bringing Spark Closer to Bare Metal
Josh Rosen
spark-summit.org/2015/events/deep-dive-into-project-
tungsten-bringing-spark-closer-to-bare-metal/
Set Footer from Insert Dropdown Menu
Physical Execution:
CPU Efficient Data Structures
Keep data closure to CPU cache
Interesting Trend #1: Contemporary Hardware
from Databricks

22. Interesting Trend #2: Generalized Libraries
Tensors are a good way to handle time-series
geo-spatially distributed linked data with lots
of N-dimensional attributes
In other words, nearly a general case for handling
much of the data that we’re likely to encounter
That’s better than attempting to shoehorn data
into matrix representation, then writing lots of
custom code to support it

23. Tensor factorization may be problematic, but
probabilistic solutions seem to provide relatively
general case solutions:
TheTensor Renaissance in Data Science
Anima Anandkumar @UC Irvine
radar.oreilly.com/2015/05/the-tensor-
renaissance-in-data-science.html
Spacey RandomWalks and
Higher Order Markov Chains
David Gleich @Purdue
slideshare.net/dgleich/spacey-random-
walks-and-higher-order-markov-chains
Interesting Trend #2: Generalized Libraries

24. Interesting Trend #3: Leveraging Workflows
evaluationoptimizationrepresentationcirca 2010
ETL into
cluster/cloud
data
data
visualize,
reporting
Data
Prep
Features
Learners,
Parameters
Unsupervised
Learning
Explore
train set
test set
models
Evaluate
Optimize
Scoring
production
data
use
cases
data pipelines
actionable results
decisions, feedback
bar developers
foo algorithms
APIs, algorithms, developer-centric template thinking –
these only go so far; the overall context is a workflow…

25. evaluationoptimizationrepresentationcirca 2010
ETL into
cluster/cloud
data
data
visualize,
reporting
Data
Prep
Features
Learners,
Parameters
Unsupervised
Learning
Explore
train set
test set
models
Evaluate
Optimize
Scoring
production
data
use
cases
data pipelines
actionable results
decisions, feedback
bar developers
foo algorithms
look beyond an API, beyond a
code repo … think of people
and machines working together
Interesting Trend #3: Leveraging Workflows
APIs, algorithms, developer-centric template thinking –
these only

26. Chris Ré, @Stanford
https://www.macfound.org/fellows/943/
Drugs, DNA, and Dinosaurs: Building High Quality
Knowledge Bases with DeepDive
Strata CA (2015)
TheThorn in the Side of Big Data: too few artists
Strata CA (2014)
Interesting Trend #4: A Leap Ahead

27. Chris Ré
https://www.macfound.org/fellows/943/
Drugs, DNA, and Dinosaurs: Building High Quality
Knowledge Bases with DeepDive
Strata CA (2015)
TheThorn in the Side of Big Data: too few artists
Strata CA (2014)
Interesting Trend #4: A Leap Ahead
cognitive computing “flywheel”:
probabilistic reasoning about complex
data and predictions together

28. Chris Ré
https://www.macfound.org/fellows/943/
Drugs, DNA, and Dinosaurs: Building High Quality
Knowledge Bases with DeepDive
Strata CA (2015)
TheThorn in the Side of Big Data: too few artists
Strata CA (2014)
Interesting Trend #4: A Leap Ahead

29. Data Scientists

30. William Cleveland
“Data Science: an Action Plan for Expanding
the Technical Areas of the Field of Statistics,”
International Statistical Review (2001), 69, 21-26
http://www.stat.purdue.edu/~wsc/papers/
datascience.pdf
Leo Breiman
“Statistical modeling: the two cultures”,
Statistical Science (2001), 16:199-231
http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.ss/1009213726
…also good to mention John Tukey
Data Scientists: Primary Sources

31. Data Scientists: Five Years of Strata Conference

32. One 2015 report (RJMetrics) tallied a minimum of
11,400 data scientists worldwide by scraping LinkedIn
So many suddenly, really? Perhaps that’s doubtful…
Comparing surveys: O’Reilly Media conducts salary surveys
for data scientists, along with exploring about the tools used
2013 – tools, trends, not all data is “Big”, coding scripts!
2014 – correlation of tools and skills, rapid evolution
2015 – divide blurring between open source and proprietary
Data Scientists: Everywhere, all the time?

33. http://radar.oreilly.com/2015/09/2015-data-science-salary-survey.html
John King, Roger Magoulas
Data Scientists: 2015 Survey

34. Data Scientists: 2015 Survey

35. Moving Up

36. Enlitic http://www.enlitic.com/
deep learning to assist doctors treating cancer
Moving Up: Medicine

37. Moving Up: Medicine
“Whatever the models might discover or predict, Howard
isn’t suggesting they’ll do away with a doctor’s judgment.
Rather, artificially intelligent computers could provide strong,
unbiased second opinions, or perhaps lead a doctor down
a path of investigation she other wouldn’t have considered.”
With Enlitic, a veteran data scientist plans
to fight disease using deep learning
GigaOM (2014-08-22)
https://gigaom.com/2014/08/22/with-enlitic-a-veteran-
data-scientist-plans-to-fight-disease-using-deep-learning/

38. Moving Up: Political Platform
http://www.predikon.ch/en/voting-patterns/residents

39. Moving Up: Political Platform
Mining Democracy
Matthias Grossglauser @EPFL
ICT Labs (2015)
http://ictlabs-summer-school.sics.se/
slides/mining%20democracy.pdf
What if a political candidate could cluster political
positions in a multi-dimensional data space, to
optimize for being recommended to voters?
http://www.predikon.ch/en/voting-patterns/residents

40. Moving Up: Government Ethics
TheWhite House has a plan to help society through data analysis
Fortune (2018-09-30)
http://fortune.com/2015/09/30/dj-patil-white-house-data/

41. Moving Up: Government Ethics
TheWhite House has a plan to help society through data analysis
Fortune (2018-09-30)
http://fortune.com/2015/09/30/dj-patil-white-house-data/
“Opening up government data about child labor to concerned data
scientists; recruiting folks to help analyze data about suicide prevention,
social injustice and incarceration; a call for mandatory and `intrinsic`
ethics instruction in every course teaching students data science; and an
effort to help the transgender community create its own census of sorts,
so that members and society can get a better grasp on the issues that
matter to the group.”

42. Moving Up: Neuroscience
Analytics +Visualization for Neuroscience:
Spark,Thunder, Lightning
Jeremy Freeman
2015-01-29
youtu.be/cBQm4LhHn9g?t=28m55s

43. For excellent examples of Science and Data
together see CodeNeuro, particularly for
use of Jupyter notebooks + Apache Spark
Moving Up: Neuroscience

44. Learning

45. Learning: What About MOOCs?

46. Massive Open Online Courses –
seven year trend, beginning with:
Connectivism and Connective Knowledge
George Siemens, Stephen Downes
University of PEI (2008)
http://cck11.mooc.ca/
Learning: What About MOOCs?
Adios EdTech. Hola something else
George Siemens (2015-09-09)
http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2015/09/09/
adios-ed-tech-hola-something-else/

47. Online education: MOOCs taken by educated few
Ezekiel Emanuel, Nature 503, 342 (2013-11-21)
• 80% students already have an advanced degree
• 80% come from the richest 6% of the population
Michael Shanks @Stanford: “retrenchment around traditional
disciplines will make disparities even more pronounced”
An Early Report Card on Massive Open Online Courses
Geoffrey Fowler, WSJ (2013-10-08)
Amherst, Duke, etc., have rejected edX
Learning: What About MOOCs?

48. Online education: MOOCs taken by educated few
Ezekiel Emanuel
• 80% students already have an advanced degree
• 80% come from the richest 6% of the population
Michael Shanks
disciplines will make disparities even more pronounced”
An Early Report Card on Massive Open Online Courses
Geoffrey Fowler
Amhers
Learning: What About MOOCs?
So then, what else works better?

49. How to Flip a Class
CTL @UT/Austin
http://ctl.utexas.edu/teaching/flipping-a-class/how
1. identify where the flipped classroom model makes
the most sense for your course
2. spend class time engaging students in application
activities with feedback
3. clarify connections between inside and outside
of class learning
4. adapt your materials for students to acquire course
content in preparation of class
5. extend learning beyond class through individual
and collaborative practice
Learning: Inverted Classroom

50. Scalable Learning
David Black-Schaffer @Uppsala
Sverker Janson @KTH SICS
https://www.scalable-learning.com/
• active learning: Flipped Classroom and Just-in-timeTeaching
• exams built directly into specific diagrams within videos
• metrics for where in video+code that students get stuck
• instructor can customize subsequent classroom discussions
(active teaching phase) based on stuck/unstuck metrics
Learning: Inverted Classroom

51. Learning programming at scale
Philip Guo
O’Reilly Radar (2015-08-13)
http://radar.oreilly.com/2015/08/learning-
programming-at-scale.html
• PythonTutor
• Codechella
Tutors could keep an eye on around
50 learners during a 30-minute session,
start 12 chat conversations, and
concurrently help 3 learners at once
Learning: Collaborative Learning

52. Data-driven Education and the Quantified Student
Lorena Barba @GWU
PyData Seattle (2015)
https://youtu.be/2YIZ2SY9mW4
• keynote talk: abstract, slides
• homepage
• Open edX Universities Symposium, DC 2015-11-11
Learning: If you study just one link from this talk…

53. If by some bizarre chance you haven’t used
it already, go to https://jupyter.org/
• 50+ different language kernels
• new funding 2015-07
• UC Berkeley, Cal Poly
• nbgrader autograder by Jess Hamrick
• jupyterhub multi-user server
• curating a list of examples
• repeatable science!
see also:
Teaching with Jupyter Notebooks
http://tinyurl.com/scipy2015-education
Learning: Jupyter Project

54. Embracing Jupyter Notebooks at O'Reilly
Andrew Odewahn
O’Reilly Media (2015-05-07)
https://beta.oreilly.com/ideas/jupyter-at-oreilly
O’Reilly Media is using our Atlas platform
to make Jupyter Notebooks a first class
authoring environment for our publishing
program
Jupyter, Thebe, Atlas, Docker, etc.
Learning: O’Reilly Media

55. Learning: O’Reilly Media
https://beta.oreilly.com/

56. in-person blended on-demand
Mostly
Synchronous
Mostly
Asynch
Inverted
Classroom
Subscription
Free
Content
Learning: Audience Patterns

57. Is it possible to measure “distance” between
a learner and a subject community?
From Amateurs to Connoisseurs:
Modeling the Evolution of User
Expertise through Online Reviews
Julian McAuley, Jure Leskovec
http://i.stanford.edu/~julian/pdfs/www13.pdf
Learning: Machine Learning about People Learning

58. Learning,Assessment,Team Building, Diversity –
these can be accomplished together, in situ
Collective Intelligence in Human Groups
Anita Williams Woolley @CMU
https://youtu.be/Bz1dDiW2mvM
• balance of participation (no one dominates)
• 2+ women engaging within the group
• group size < 9
• diversity of formal backgrounds
Learning: Machine Learning about People Learning

59. People + Automation

60. Data Science teams apply machine learning (automation)
to help arrive at key insights, to learn what is important
in data sets – finding the proverbial needle in the haystack
Cognitive Computing exhibits people + automation
as a process, in a learning context
That’s also a basic tenet of workflows in general:
people + automation
And a key aspect of the emerging gig economy too…
People + Automation

61. People + Automation: Gig Economy

62. People + Automation: Gig Economy
http://orchestra.unlimitedlabs.com/
“Workflows with humans and machines”

63. People + Automation: Gig Economy
Workers in aWorld of Continuous Partial Employment
Tim O’Reilly
Medium (2015-08-31)
https://medium.com/the-wtf-economy/workers-in-a-
world-of-continuous-partial-employment-4d7b53f18f96
http://conferences.oreilly.com/next-economy

64. Learning is key. Effective use of Data Science in these new
economic conditions requires people + automation, learning
together – albeit in different ways. Plus, there’s an excellent
framework for that:
Autopoiesis and Cognition
Humberto Maturana, FranciscoVarela
Springer (1973)
https://books.google.es/books?id=nVmcN9Ja68kC
People + Automation

65. I’d like to leave this as a theme for you to consider about
Data Science 2016, Moving Up into use cases…
We see an intersection of key points in both the emerging
Cognitive Computing context and the Gig Economy in general:
systems of people + automation, learning together
It posits an interesting duality for use to leverage
With that I wish you a great conference here at Big Data Spain!
People + Automation

66. Gracias

67. contact:
Just Enough Math
O’Reilly (2014)
justenoughmath.com
preview: youtu.be/TQ58cWgdCpA
monthly newsletter for updates,
events, conf summaries, etc.:
liber118.com/pxn/
Intro to Apache Spark
O’Reilly (2015)
shop.oreilly.com/product/
0636920036807.do