August Edition: Summer Reads for Data Scientists

Monthly Edition

Is it time to reevaluate what counts as compelling summer reading? We think so. Conventional wisdom (and many a marketing department) would have us believe that the combination of warm weather and a slower pace calls for low-effort, low-reward entertainment: the intellectual equivalent of popsicles, if you will.

Our authors beg to differ. In the past few weeks we’ve shared numerous smart and thought-provoking articles, and they’ve found a receptive audience ready to explore complex topics. The secret might be in the execution: any article can work as a poolside, train ride, or camping diversion if it comes with an engaging voice and helps us expand our knowledge of the current Data Science and machine learning scene.

We hope you enjoy our August lineup of enlightening and highly readable picks. Before we dive in, we also wanted to thank you for all your support, with a special shoutout to any of you who’d like to make a meaningful contribution by becoming Medium members.

Speaking of Medium: the platform’s celebration of community and storytelling is coming up soon, and TDS writers and readers are warmly invited. Medium Day takes place on August 12, and registration is still open (and free). See you there?

TDS Editors

TDS Editors Highlights

Where Are All the Women? (July 2023, 10 minutes) We’ve seen many anecdotal glimpses of bias in large language models’ outputs in the past few months. Yennie Jun‘s eye-opening study takes a methodical approach to show how deep-seated the issues are when it comes to gender parity in LLMs’ representation of historical figures. It stresses the importance of tackling these biases before AI tools go fully mainstream in educational settings.
Environmental Impact of Ubiquitous Generative AI (July 2023, 15 minutes) "What might the environmental impact be if billions of people began to use generative AI extensively on a daily basis?" We might still be far from a moment when AI becomes as ubiquitous as that, but Kasper Groes Albin Ludvigsen pushes us to consider the technology’s climate implications now, when there’s still a chance to shape its future course.
Global Data Barometer: What’s the Current State of Open Data in the World? (July 2023, 8 minutes) The rapid growth in publicly available, government-issued datasets might lead some to think that we’re living in a golden age of open data. Dea Bardhoshi‘s overview of data accessibility and governance takes a global perspective and paints a more complicated story: there’s been a great deal of progress, but many challenges remain (and they tend to be unevenly distributed across regions and countries).
Is ChatGPT Actually Intelligent? (July 2023, 11 minutes) If your definition of a great summer read includes a big, splashy question and a nuanced, measured answer, you’ll appreciate Lan Chu‘s latest. The current and future abilities of tools like ChatGPT have sparked contentious debates, and Lan’s deep dive is a helpful resource for understanding how they work—and why they’re still so far from possessing anything resembling human-like understanding (let alone consciousness).
Muybridge Derby: Bringing Animal Locomotion Photographs to Life with AI (July 2023, 16 minutes) Eadweard Muybridge’s Horse in Motion photo sequence signalled the arrival of nascent film technology in the latter half of the 19th century; Robert A. Gonsalves harnesses these moving images to demonstrate the power of a more recent innovation—generative AI—to produce mesmerizing visuals on demand.
Can Data Science Find Bigfoot? (May 2023, 14 minutes) What could be more fun for a data scientists than leveraging core workflows—like exploratory data analysis, clustering, and visualization—to track down one of the world’s most famous cryptids? Bradley Stephen Shaw‘s tongue-in-cheek attempt to find Bigfoot shows that you can squeeze interesting insights even from the most unlikely sources.

Original Features

Explore our latest selection of resources and reading recommendations.

Follow TDS Lists to Discover Our Best ArticlesMake the most of our recently launched (and frequently updated) Medium lists to find all our recommended posts.
The Decisions That Set Data Teams Up for SuccessOur collection of curated posts on the kinds of choices that help data teams stand out, execute well, and produce sustainable results.