Machine Learning for Businesses with Joshua Bloom

“You’ve got software engineers who are interested in machine learning, and think what they need to do is just bring in another module and then that will solve their problem. It’s particularly important for those people to understand that this is a different type of beast.”

Machine learning is something that many business are starting to tack onto their existing processes. Yet, to add machine learning capabilities after the fact is often a fool’s errand. Joshua argues that machine learning cannot be an afterthought, but rather must be custom developed to suit the specific problem or question that each company is trying to answer. His company, Wise.io, tackles this challenge of helping business build ground up machine learning applications that generate accurate predictions for use in an array of business processes.

Joshua Bloom is the cofounder and CTO of Wise.io. He is also an astrophysicist, and a professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley.

Questions

• What is a machine learning system?
• What is the broader impact of this improved ease of use of machine learning algorithms?
• How do you think data scientists are stratified?
• What does Wiseio do?
• How do you abstract away machine learning implementations at large organizations with enterprise software systems?
• What is it about machine learning systems that give rise to weak contracts between abstraction levels?

Links

• Josh Bloom: Keynote – A Systems View of Machine Learning
• Machine Learning: The High Interest Credit Card of Technical Debt
• Machine Learning and Technical Debt with D. Sculley
• Wise.io
• Joshua on Wikipedia
• Joshua on Twitter
  

Pranay