Week 6 - Surfing the Tsunami

I took a bit longer than usual to collect my thoughts and post on the latest chapter in Surfing the Tsunami; mostly due to a combined flood of professionally relevant information that popped up in the book itself and some marketing forums I’ve been following to back-up my learning experience.

Early in my current marketing course, it was recommended that we check out Google Trends to see how public inquiry and interest rates compared to previous months and years, then take a look at some other trending or emerging “things”.  Ironically enough, I dove pretty deep into information collection in Google Trends in my last course – looking at the correlation between public interest levels and stock trading activity (specifically, the GameStop short squeeze orchestrated via Reddit).  Artificial intelligence and machine learning are starting to show the same kind of interest growth that others have just before their absolute explosion.  I’d actually argue that we’re already in the thick of the mainstreaming process, and I couldn’t agree more that this is going to be a driver for future operational needs.




I spent the last few days looking into how I even get my foot in the door on the academic side of applied machine learning.  To me, data science was always synonymous with statistics, and I’ve always leveraged my biostats background to analyze information to feed recommendations and decisions.  I know I already use a fair amount of automation in my calculations, but I hadn’t thought through the idea that I could code computers to do much of my data collection, filtering and initial analysis without human input.  This could be game-changing in my world, because we’re talking about projects that generally take about a week to work being completed almost instantaneously.  I could spot check and focus entirely on presentation. 

Last week, I started dabbling with DataRobot, per the author's recommendation.  I don’t have much feedback on that yet, but I’ll post more as I have some additional hours with it.



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