Key Takeaways from the Open Data Science Conference 2015 | Georgian PartnersGeorgian Partners

"A couple of weeks ago I attended the Open Data Science Conference (ODSC) in Boston. Held over two days, ODSC brought together practitioners and thought leaders in the open source and data science fields. The agenda was rich with 72 presentations and 21 workshops, and was kicked off with keynotes from Anthony Goldbloom (Kaggle’s CEO) and Josh Wills (the Senior Director of Data Science at Cloudera). I know that many of you are time-poor, so before I go into detail about the conference, here are my three main takeaways: Data science teams are rapidly adopting tools that help them be more productive in key areas including data wrangling (e.g., Trifacta and DataKitchen) and in the area of machine learning ‘as a service’ and large-scale machine learning platforms (e.g., DataRobot, Azure Machine Learning, AWS Machine Learning, and H2O). The open source data science ecosystem is vibrant and growing quickly. The most popular modeling environments being languages like R, Python, and toolkits such as Vowpal Wabbit and H2O. Anthony Goldbloom captured the mood at the conference when he said “No one wins competitions on Kaggle using SAS or SPSS.” All this data science activity is helping bring new applied analytics solutions to market in a range of industries including CRM for healthcare and workplace optimization. That’s the quick version, you can read more below about what I felt were some of the highlights from #OSDC 2015, including links to presentations and further reading ..."