FinTech startup VendorMach provided lessons in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and big data on the Byte campus recently. Topics covered by Chaney Ojinnaka, CEO, and Ivan Kotorov, VP, Enterprise, included:  KYC (Know Your Customer), supply chain, trust scoring and programming languages.  They explained why they chose Python over Ruby for their product.  Python's ability to analyze numbers and frameworks are key (as a Python school we're thrilled:).  VendorMach also discussed FinTech cultural attitudes in London (original headquarters) and New York City  (second office location).  By the end of the event the audience felt much much comfortable with "hot" technology buzzwords including artificial intelligence, machine learning, supply chain and more.

Web developers, rejoice! If you’ve been looking for a way to make a foray into the world of Machine Learning and Deep Learning, your learning curve has gotten that much more gentle with the introduction of the TensorFlow library in JavaScript.

Natural Language Processing or NLP for short is a field of computer science, artificial intelligence (AI) and computational linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human natural language.  It's a relatively new field and a "hot" area in technology today. Read some more about it from our Data Science instructor, Lesley Cordero. Byte Academy offers a Natural Language Processing mini-course for those who would like to study this area.

When Deepmind’s AlphaGo won 4 out of 5 matches against the then Go Champion Lee Se-dol, the entire world took notice. Heralded as a triumph for Artificial Intelligence, this moment was an important step towards making sophisticated AI powered machines a reality.

In machine learning, we are often in the realm of “function approximation”. That is, we have a certain ground-truth (y) and associated variables (X) and our aim is to use identify a function to wrap our variables in that does a good job in approximating the ground-truth. This exercise in function approximation is also known as “supervised-learning”.  

Recently HealthTech Women, a national non-profit, sat down with our Data Science instructor, Lesley Cordero to get an inside look at Artificial Intelligence, or, "AI" and how it is impacting society, particularly in healthcare and medicine.    Lesley provides her perspective in this interview in addition to a more general understanding of AI and related concepts such as machine learning, natural language processing and big data.

As long as there has been Science Fiction, the idea that machines are smarter than humans has always captivated our collective imagination. But while Artificial Intelligence (AI) has not reached that level yet, we have made considerable advances towards developing machine intelligence, as evidenced by Google, Tesla, and Uber experimenting with self-driven cars. The reason why AI has successfully burst out of universities and research labs into product is largely due to the scalability and usefulness of Deep Learning, the Machine Learning technique making this technological progress possible.

Dimensionality reduction is an important technique to overcome the curse of dimensionality in data science and machine learning. As the number of predictors (or dimensions or features) in the dataset increase, it becomes computationally more expensive (ie. increased storage space, longer computation time) and exponentially more difficult to produce accurate predictions in classification or regression models. Moreover, it is hard to wrap our head around to visualize the data points in more than 3 dimensions.

Everyone seems to be intrigued by Machine Learning, which has become a "buzz word" lately.  Although intimidating,  you can certainly break into the field, or learn more about another phrase we hear a lot, Natural Language Processing. Read some tips and background from Data Scientist, Lesley Cordero, who teaches our Data Science course. Lesley also teaches a class in machine learning for those interested in the particular area.