Web Picks (week of 16 November 2015)

Every two weeks, we find the most interesting data science links from around the web and collect them in Data Science Briefings, the DataMiningApps newsletter. Subscribe now for free if you want to be the first to get up to speed on interesting resources.


  • Here’s How Smart Facebook’s AI Has Become
    This Wired article features the legendary Yann LeCun, director of AI at Facebook, talking about the company’s new, virtual assistant. However, this article finds that their might still be more human insight behind the AI than Facebook is willing to admit.
  • Comparing 7 Python Data Visualization Tools
    Nice overview of commonly used Python data visualization tools by Vik Paruchuri, exploring the capabilities of matplotlib, vispy, bokeh, seaborn, pygal, folium, and networkx.
  • The New Data Engineering Ecosystem: Trends and Rising Stars
    Over the past few years, there has been an exponential increase in the amount of data available to individuals, companies, and the general public. This has spurred a surge of new “Big Data” technologies; each tool has its own strengths and weaknesses, and there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution for every use case. This post aims to outline these technologies and investigate how they fit together.
  • Deep Neural Decision Forests [pdf]
    Finally, from Microsoft Research, we find a paper on a new technique combining that “unifies classification trees with the representation learning functionality known from deep convolutional networks”. On the other hand, Microsoft’s Distributed Machine Learning Toolkit didn’t manage to leave a big impact compared to TensorFlow.