Publications by David Smith
Azure ML Studio now supports R 3.4
Azure ML Studio, the collaborative drag-and-drop data science workbench, now supports R 3.4 in the Execute R Script module. Now you can combine the built-in data manipulation and analysis modules of ML Studio with R scripts to accomplish other data tasks, as for example in this workflow for oil and gas tank forecasting. With the Execute R Scri...
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Working with US Census Data in R
If you need data about the American populace, there's no source more canonical than the US Census Bureau. The bureau publishes a wide range of public sets, and not just from the main Census conducted every 10 years: there are more than 100 additional surveys and programs published as well. To help R users access this rich source of data, Ari Lam...
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T-mobile uses R for Customer Service AI
T-Mobile, the global telecommunication company, is using R in production to automatically classify text messages to customer service and route them to an agent that can help. The [email protected] team used the keras library in R to build a natural language processing engine with Tensorflow, and deployed it to production as a docker container...
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AI for Good: slides and notebooks from the ODSC workshop
Last week at the ODSC West conference, I was thrilled with the interest in my Using AI for Good workshop: it was wonderful to find a room full of data scientists eager to learn how data science and artificial intelligence can be used to help people and the planet. The workshop was focused around projects from the Microsoft AI for Good program. I'...
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In case you missed it: October 2018 roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from October of particular interest to R users. Peter Provost ports some 80's-era BASIC programs for kids to R. In a podcast for Fringe FM, I discuss the ethics of AI, Microsoft and Open Source, and the R Community. Roundup of AI, Machine Learning and Data Science news from October 2018. In this epi...
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Cognitive Services in Containers
I've posted several examples here of using Azure Cognitive Services for data science applications. You can upload an an image or video to the service and extract information about faces and emotions, generate a caption describing a scene from a provided photo, or speak written text in a natural voice. (If you haven't tried the Cognitive Services...
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R now supported in Azure SQL Database
Azure SQL Database, the database-as-a-service based on Microsoft SQL Server, now offers R integration. (The service is currently in preview; details on how to sign up for the preview are provided in that link.) While you've been able to run R in SQL Server in the cloud since the release of SQL Server 2016 by running a virtual machine, Azure SQL D...
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Simulating dinosaur populations, with R
So it turns out that the 1990 Michael Crichton novel Jurassic Park is, indeed, a work of fiction. (Personal note: despite the snark to follow, the book is one of my all-time favorites — I clearly remember devouring it in 24 hours straight while ill in a hostel in France.) If the monsters and melodrama didn't give it away, then this chart seals ...
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Gender Diversity in the R and Python Communities
Many (if not most) tech communities have far more representation from men than from women (and even fewer from nonbinary folk). This is a shame, because everybody uses software, and these projects would self-evidently benefit from the talent and expertise from across the entire community. Some projects are doing better than others, though, and da...
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Reflections on the 10th anniversary of the Revolutions blog
On December 9 2008, very nearly ten years ago, the first post on Revolutions was published. Way back then, this blog was part of a young startup called Revolution Computing, which later became Revolution Analytics. (That name persists to this day in the URL of this blog.) The idea at that time was to introduce the world to a wonderful but little-...
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