4 Strategic Takeaways from ODSC 2017

From teams and priorities to communication and crowdsourcing

Lux Research recently attended the 2017 Open Data Science Conference (ODSC) in Boston, a large, multi-day event with speakers ranging from Amazon’s Data and Analytics Practice Lead to the U.S. EPA’s Chief Data Scientist. The conference presented a solid mix of technical topics and strategic advice, covering trends in applied data science and specific techniques within analytics, big data, and machine learning. Although the agenda included a variety of technical deep-dives, four particular strategic themes stood out for us, each speaking to some of the bigger challenges and opportunities facing big data and analytics today:

1. Prioritize business-impacting analytics over the latest machine-learning algorithms: While there is no doubt that various aspects of artificial intelligence will revolutionize industries in the decades to come, there is a risk in jumping in too early if it distracts from impacting the core business. In his keynote, DataRobot‘s CEO Jeremy Achin emphasized the point, saying that data scientists should “play around with classifying cats and dogs using the latest deep-learning algorithms on their own time” (see this report “Defining Intelligence – An Overview of Artificial Intelligence, Beyond the Hype and Into the Methods and Applications”), and instead focus on the things that have a measurable impact to their firms’ bottom lines. Although the advice sounds sensible and perhaps even obvious, firms continue to get it wrong – Jeremy gave the example of one of the world’s largest financial companies spending hundreds of millions to build up a data science team with hundreds of people on it, only to fire most of those employees after about three years when the team could not show a measurable return on investment.

2. Beware the lure of building data scientist teams made up of rock-star unicorns: In a talk on how to build and position effective data science teams, Angela Bassa, Director of Data Science at iRobot, covered some key pitfalls to avoid. Rather than jumping in with a massive investment, she recommended starting with a smaller team comprised of a handful of data scientists and growing that team gradually – and, perhaps even more importantly, aiming for a careful balance in team dynamics. The current white-hot status of data science and machine learning has led to a hyper-competitive recruitment environment, where the best performers – what Angela called “super data scientists,” strong in many facets of the discipline – are in high demand. However, Angela noted that having too many of these folks on the same team could destroy its productivity and dynamics, and instead emphasized a diversity in perspectives, disciplines, and seniority. Those implementing a data science team will also have to navigate a complex web of stakeholders when choosing projects and demonstrating value, since usually data science does not fit in a single part of the company, instead spanning across from product to engineering to operations to marketing to finance and beyond.

3. Even giants can benefit from crowdsourced strategies: Real estate database behemoth Zillow – whose annual revenues are more than $650 million – discussed its use of machine learning, and its future plans to open up its most prized algorithms for broader inputs. Jasjeet Thind, Zillow’s VP of Data Science and Engineering, covered how the company has a variety of use cases that benefit from machine learning, ranging from forecasting home price trends (its so-called “Zestimate”) to business analytics to personalization of its user experience. For example, to improve its home price estimates, Zillow is exploring deep-learning-based image recognition to analyze photos of listed homes’ interiors, seeing if high-end artwork or stainless-steel appliances are present in the photos, as a proxy for raised home value. The platform’s scale is massive – 100 million unique active users, interacting with an inventory of about 140 million listed properties – and Zillow retrains its machine-learning models on a daily basis. Even with all this in-house knowledge, the company is still looking to outsiders as a way to accelerate its innovation here, and is in the process of opening up a “Zillow Prize” effort as a way to crowdsource innovation around some of its core algorithm work.

4. Communicating and building trust of ten takes more time than building the algorithms: The Chief Data Scientist of the U.S. EPA, Robin Thottungal, discussed how his government agency continues to push for broader adoption of sensors, analytics, data science, and visualization. As an example, he gave the case of algae blooms, which applied data science could help identify and track better, with positive outcomes for water quality and public health. He explained that in the U.S. EPA’s experience, doing the data science – from building the algorithms to the visualization – was only part of the battle, with many more hours spent on communicating the results with stakeholders and building up trust in the methodology and results. In this case, where the “customers” for the findings are scattered across various regional offices, the battle to get buy-in, trust, and adoption is prolonged and all-important if the data scientists’ and engineers’ work is to have a real-world impact.

As data science and machine learning continue to reach higher and higher interest, these key takeaways from ODSC 2017 offer timely reminders around the fundamentals of focusing on business impact, building balanced teams, and emphasizing communication, even amidst the interest in the newest deep-learning algorithms and convolutional neural nets.

©ODSC2017