Data scientists tend to use an open source software stack based on Ubuntu GNU/Linux and the R Statistical Software. This provides a powerful environment for the management, wrangling, analysis, and presentation of data. The Azure Ubuntu Data Science Virtual Machine comes pre-installed with a suite of open source software for the data scientist (including Rattle […]
The Ubuntu Data Science Virtual Machine hosted on Azure is a great place to support an R workshop or laboratory session or R training. We illustrate here the simple steps to set up a Linux Data Science Virtual Machine. Workshop attendees will have their own laptop computers and can certainly install R themselves but with […]
Microsoft is quietly reinventing itself, moving from an old business model entwined with outdated cultural norms to become relevant again as the technology leader in a data rich and computationally empowered world. For a veteran of the open source community, having actively contributed to Emacs, GNU, Linux, and now R, for over 30 years, this […]
I had the privilege to join a panel in 2014 that explored big data opportunities and challenges. Together, coordinated by Professor Zhi-Hua Zhou, we captured our thoughts into a paper published in the IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine (Volume 9, Number 4). It is an honour to learn that we have received a 2017 IEEE Outstanding […]
Data Scientists have access to a grammar for preparing data (Hadley Wickham’s tidyr package in R), a grammar for data wrangling (dplyr), and a grammar for graphics (ggplot2). At an R event hosted by CSIRO in Canberra in 2011 Hadley noted that we are missing a grammar for machine learning. At the time I doodled […]
A 5-video series called Data Science for Beginners has been released by Microsoft. It introduces practical data science concepts to a non-technical audience… making data science accessible – keeping the language clear and simple as an entry point to understanding data science. http://aka.ms/data-science-for-beginners-1 http://aka.ms/data-science-for-beginners-2 http://aka.ms/data-science-for-beginners-3 http://aka.ms/data-science-for-beginners-4 http://aka.ms/data-science-for-beginners-5 Graham @ Microsoft