ICYMI the Startup markets are getting hotter in the Data Science space. Every time I turn around, some small company got millions of dollars in startup funding. It used to be a company with an algorithm or data science library but now it’s Data Science platforms. These platforms are suddenly all the rage and many new entrants are racing to gain market and mind share. The above image from FundersandFounders.com really captures a successful startup from inception to IPO. Most interesting for me is how the ownership “pie” is cut over time. If you’re the Founder, you first start out with a 50/50 share with your Co-Founder. Then you get some Seed money, say from an Angel Investor like Howard, which takes a small % of ownership. ...

Yikes. Bottom line: Robots do replace workers. On the other hand, some industries that don’t automate end up losing workers anyway, because their costs are too high and their customers go elsewhere. For workers, robots are only part of the problem. - Via Bloomberg

I’ve been following Howard and Fred on and off over the years. They’re old Web 2.0 veterans like me and have kept a blog going for over 10 years. It’s always nice to see continuity and recently I found a great interview of Fred at MIT on Howard’s blog. It’s just under an hour and gives advice to students interested in the Venture Capitalist (VC) field. CheerleadersWhat caught my ear (and Howard’s too) was how his wife (Gotham Girl) is his biggest cheerleader. What does he exactly mean by that? She was the one that supported and believed in him to go out into Venture Capitalism. ...

Let’s talk Process Mining and Engineering. Why? Because it’s the silver bullet that many Engineering firms are looking for but have never found. Let me explain. I’ve spent years working at small and large Engineering firms and they hardly made any money. Engineering firms are notorious for making 1 to 3% net margin at the end of the day. The joke was that the only reason these firms exist is to keep people employed! Don’t get me wrong, Engineering is a great and rewarding career! I did it for 20 years and have fond memories of it, but I hated the constant stress to squeeze out every nickel. ...

Despite all the bruhaha that’s going on in Washington, entrepreneurs are reinventing how children are educated. Teachers and EdTech companies need to work together to create the products that will create permanent change in classrooms across the globe. Teachers need EdTech companies to build great products to serve their students more effectively. EdTech companies need teachers to buy into their creations so that they can find a successful home for their products. It needs to be a two-way street of communication and production. The authentic insight a teacher can provide, paired with the manpower and brainpower that a EdTech company can bring to the table, the world of education could be changed massively and for the better. ...

Some of these projects are darn cool. Perhaps the best one is Amazon releasing instructions on how to turn your Pi into an Echo Dot. Of course the weather station project and retro video arcade game project is cool too. I love my Raspberry Pi! I have a small army of them and I use them for all kinds of projects. I used one for my weather station, I built a RapidMiner Server cluster once, and I use them to tweet out my posts ...

If you want to execute any Python in RapidMiner, you have to use the Execute Python operator. This operator makes things so simple that people use the hell out o fit. However, it wasn’t so simple in the “old days.” It could still be done but it required more effort, and that’s what I did with the Julia Language. I mashed up the Julia Language with RapidMiner with only a few extra steps. ...

I have a daily downtime routine. Every evening I set aside about a hour and think. I sit or walk around the house and ruminate about all sorts of random things. Sometimes it’s with a glass of wine and more often it’s with a cup of black tea and milk. Sometimes my mind wanders to what I did that day or what I didn’t finish. Other times I get inspired to write a new blog post or create a new tutorial. Sometimes it’s an epiphany like the impact of Big Data and Infrastructure. ...

It looks like Google is catching up to the idea of machine learning on a Raspberry Pi! Someone put RapidMiner on a Pi back in 2013 but it was slow because the Pi was underpowered. The Pi has been a great thin client and a small, but capable server. I’ve used it for my Personal Weather Station project and as an FTP server. Based on the news, things are about to get interesting for both Google and Raspberry Pi. ...

Stacking models is a great technique for squeezing out more performance. First, let me describe what I mean by stacking. The idea is to divide the training set into several pieces like you would do in k-folds cross validation. For each fold, the rest of the folds are used to obtain a predictions using all the models 1…M. Via Burak Himmetoglu’s Blog