Blog

Mar 31, 2017 · announcement

Free eBook: Development Workflows for Data Scientists

Cover image from Development Workflows for Data Scientists eBook

Working with over 30 enterprise clients, in industries like financial services, insurance, publishing, and retail, the Fast Forward Labs team has had ample opportunity to observe the challenges of doing data science in practice. By now, most organizations have moved beyond traditional waterfall software development process to adopt more risk-tolerant and agile methodologies. But directly applying agile to data science can create friction, as data products require more leeway for experimentation and exploration, as well as open communication between business, science, and engineering teams.

With so many data teams looking for guidance, we’re excited to see O’Reilly’s new (free!) eBook, Development Workflows for Data Scientists (PDF), which features insights from our Friederike Schuur. The book includes guidance on structuring teams, designing workflows, optimizing processes to learn from previous work, documenting outcomes, and communicating results to non-technical colleagues. Friederike, for example, contrasts the value documentation in standard software development versus experimental data product development:

In data science and machine learning you’re doing so many things before you know what actually works. You can’t just document the working solution. It’s equally valuable to know the dead ends. Otherwise, someone else will take the same approach.

Check out the book, and feel free to contact us at cffl@cloudera.com with questions about your own data science processes!

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Apr 14, 2017 · demo
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Mar 25, 2017 · talk slides

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Reports

In-depth guides to specific machine learning capabilities

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Notebook

ASR with Whisper

Explore the capabilities of OpenAI's Whisper for automatic speech recognition by creating your own voice recordings!
https://colab.research.google.com/github/fastforwardlabs/whisper-openai/blob/master/WhisperDemo.ipynb
Library

NeuralQA

A usable library for question answering on large datasets.
https://neuralqa.fastforwardlabs.com
Notebook

Explain BERT for Question Answering Models

Tensorflow 2.0 notebook to explain and visualize a HuggingFace BERT for Question Answering model.
https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1tTiOgJ7xvy3sjfiFC9OozbjAX1ho8WN9?usp=sharing
Notebooks

NLP for Question Answering

Ongoing posts and code documenting the process of building a question answering model.
https://qa.fastforwardlabs.com

Cloudera Fast Forward Labs

Making the recently possible useful.

Cloudera Fast Forward Labs is an applied machine learning research group. Our mission is to empower enterprise data science practitioners to apply emergent academic research to production machine learning use cases in practical and socially responsible ways, while also driving innovation through the Cloudera ecosystem. Our team brings thoughtful, creative, and diverse perspectives to deeply researched work. In this way, we strive to help organizations make the most of their ML investment as well as educate and inspire the broader machine learning and data science community.

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