This applies to many tech job interviews. But here we provide specific advice for data scientists and other professionals with a similar background. More advice is being added regularly. 

Here's the list:

1. Not doing any research on the company prior to the interview.
2. Not understanding whether they want to hire a…

So far in 2016, we’ve heard a lot about Big Data, the Internet of Things, and the hottest new marketing technique on the block: ‘hyper-personalised’ marketing. Marketers are increasingly interested in focusing their efforts on individuals, not database segments, because that all-important personal attention is shown to increase engagement, inspire customer loyalty and…

You have gathered gigabytes or terabytes of unstructured text, for instance scraping the Internet, or pieces of email from your employees or users, or tweets, or millions of products that you want to categorize (only product description and product name is available - sometimes with typos). Now you want to make sense of it, and extract value, possibly design a nice search engine so that your customers can easily find your products. The core algorithm that you need is an automated cataloguer,…

And creates the first legit, private lottery company. The winning numbers, to be published each week, are just as random and unpredictable (if not more) than winning numbers from state lotteries. It can be designed so that the expected gains for participants are far more favorable and more closely aligned with what casinos offer: in short, the odds of winning and multiplying your (say) $20 bet by (say) 10 or 100, can easily be made much higher than in traditional lotteries. It even beats the…

If you are a start-up director in 2016, not a week goes by without someone talking to you about unicorns.

It is difficult to imagine the feeling of riding a unicorn. Do you feel the wind of success rush against its skin? Do you fear the arrows and traps of pitiless hunters? Do you feel a special sense of excitement when you get to the end of the rainbow of profits?

I find it easier to imagine the state of mind of the directors of Cloudera, Hortonworks or MapR, who are now the…

Let me clarify something before my friends who work for cross channel attribution companies try to kill me. I don’t think that the market for cross-channel attribution is inherently dead, but I do believe that the way most vendors offer those services today is dead.

I believe that the markets for marketing mix modeling and cross channel attribution are going to merge…

Every January, mighty crowds of electronics and IT professionals descend on Las-Vegas, Nevada to attend the annual Consumer Electronics Show. CES 2016 has just wrapped up, and it turned out to be the largest yet: 160,000 attendees, 3,800 exhibitors, and nearly 2.5 million square feet of exhibit space.

One trend that continued into this year’s record-breaking CES was the increased competition in the home automation space. Companies large and small…

The education system used to have two streams. Bright students went to schools of higher learning – universities and colleges, where, among other things, they learned how to design stuff. So-so students were filtered into professional schools, where they became plumbers, carpenters, and factory machinists. In other words, these “average” students became the makers of things. This dual educational stream – creators and makers – has served the society well.…

"Information is the oil of the 21st century, and Analytics is the combustion engine."

The Volume, Variety and Velocity of data coming into your organization continue to reach unprecedented levels. This phenomenal growth means that not only…

Step by step guide on implementing a customer segmentation solution - without paying millions of dollars for an enterprise platform.

Customer micro-segmentation is without a doubt one of the most powerful methods for extracting value from your database, and a must for every frequent flyer loyalty program.  Segmentation underpins almost every aspect of a successful program, from loyalty marketing, revenue management, member engagement and being able to measure analytics and…

It’s all well and good to ask if androids dream of electric sheep, but science fact has evolved to a point where it’s beginning to coincide with science fiction.  No, we don’t have autonomous androids struggling with existential crises — yet — but we are getting ever closer to what people tend to call “artificial intelligence.”

Machine Learning is a sub-set of…

The year of mobile - we’ve heard this phrase proclaimed every January for the past couple of years, followed by dizzying amounts of variations and extensions such as the…

Starred articles are new additions or updated content, posted between Thursday and Sunday. The weekly digest has six sections: (1) Featured Resources and Technical Contributions, (2) Featured Articles and Case Studies, (3) From our Sponsors, (4) News, Events, Books, Training, Forum Questions, (5) Picture of the Week, and (6) Syndicated Content.

The full version is always published Monday.…

Data is everywhere, created and used by just about anyone. The days when companies or individuals had to pay significant sums of money to access useful and interesting datasets is long gone. Here is our top 20 list of the best free data sources available online.

1. Data.gov.uk the UK government’s open data portal including the British National Bibliography – metadata on all UK books and publications since 1950.

2. …

Guest blog post by Florian Douetteau. Originally posted here. The original title is "Will Balkanization of Data Science lead to one Empire or many Republics?"

My grandmother was born in a country called Yugoslavia. As you may know, Yugoslavia was one country with seven borders,…

Summary: Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is the long sought after ‘brain’ that brings together all the branches of AI into a general purpose platform that can perform with human level intelligence in a broad variety of tasks.  Will it free us or replace us?  It’s closer than you think.

Can you see the forest for the trees?  That’s…

Andrej Karpathy’s post “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks” made splashes last year. The basic premise is that you can create a recurrent neural network to learn language features character-by-character. But is the resultant model any different from a Markov chain built for the same purpose? I implemented a character-by-character Markov chain in R to find out.…

The ongoing pursuit of data solutions occupies mindshare of consumers, vendors and service providers alike as they invest considerable amount of time, costs and efforts. The past attempts to concur data have resulted in solutions that combined databases, applications and tools with limited success. We are still struggling with a few unresolved, persistent legacy challenges such as - 

Data everywhere

Today, every enterprise has huge data…

This article was written by Bernard Marr. 

Almost everyone can agree that big data has taken the business world by storm, but what’s next?  Will data continue to grow?  What technologies will develop around it? Or will big data become a relic as quickly as the next trend — cognitive technology? fast data? — appears on the horizon.   

Let’s look at some…