Some Thoughts on Mary Meeker's Internet Trends 2019

Mary Meeker is a venture capitalist whose work focuses primarily on the internet and new technologies. Each year she produces a report about internet trends - both looking back and looking forward. It is always highly anticipated you can check out this year’s here. Below are some of my key takeaways after reading: ...

June 12, 2019 · 2 min

Using Apache Drill to Access Parquet Files in PowerBI

When you are working with data, especially larger data sets, you will come across parquet files. Parquet is a binary columnar storage format which is efficient for several large data use cases both in terms of compression and speed. ...

June 10, 2019 · 3 min

How AI Is Aiding Repression

Highly recommended reading - How Artifical Intelligence is Reshaping Repression Some points of note: “Around the world, AI systems are showing their potential for abetting repressive regimes and upending the relationship between citizen and state, thereby accelerating a global resurgence of authoritarianism.” AI technology, primarily in the form of facial recognition is being adopted by security forces, driven, in part, with investment from China. Zimbabwe is implementing facial recognition - this is a country that recently carried out large post-election crackdowns. ...

February 3, 2019 · 2 min

AI and the Art of Lying

Interesting article - “Will AI end the Art of Lying?” Some points of note: Swarm Intelligence: the concept that more minds are greater than one is being explored with interesting results from an AI perspective ...

August 22, 2018 · 1 min

Prepare for Exam 70-774 - Performing Cloud Data Science with Azure Machine Learning

I recently passed Exam 70-774 - Performing Cloud Data Science with Azure Machine Learning and thought it may be helpful to provide some guidance on how best to prepare for the exam. ...

April 13, 2018 · 7 min

Building A Great Data Lake (or How to Avoid a Data Swamp)

What is a Data Lake? A Data Lake is a term that gets thrown around a fair amount, often in conjunction with big data. But what does it really mean? At its core, its a central repository for storing unlimited amounts of data from many different sources that you can bring analytics to bear on top of to gain insights. ...

April 2, 2018 · 6 min

Blockchain Explained Simply

Blockchain technology is all the rage these days. You hear about it more and more yet what does it really do and how can you use it? ...

March 16, 2018 · 6 min

Demystifying The Ways to Use R in the Microsoft Ecosystem

In 2015, Microsoft acquired Revolution Analytics. Microsoft R was a rebranding of Revolution R. Since the R landscape at Microsoft can be a bit confusing I want to try to lay it out simply. First, Microsoft R Server has been rebranded to Microsoft Machine Learning Server. At the time of writing, ML Server 9.2 was available. So, what are the different ways to use R from Microsoft? ...

February 25, 2018 · 5 min

Getting Started with Deep Learning

I have recently started to work on a set of introductory videos focusing on deep learning and neural networks. The goal of these videos is to explain some of the basic concepts behind various types of neural networks and then give you a hands-on example to show you how you can build your own neural network. I showcase a variety of frameworks such as Keras, CNTK and Tensorflow. I also use a variety of tools from Jupyter Notebooks through to Azure Machine Learning Workbench. I will continue to add more videos over time. You can check out the full collection here. ...

February 17, 2018 · 1 min

Seamless Migration to Azure SQL Database with the Database Migration Service

December 2, 2017 · 3 min