Sds Podcast Episode 2 with Hadelin De Ponteves
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SDS PODCAST EPISODE 2 WITH HADELIN DE PONTEVES Kirill: This is session number two with machine learning expert and entrepreneur, Hadelin de Ponteves. (background music plays) Welcome to the SuperDataScience podcast. My name is Kirill Eremenko. Data science coach and lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week, we bring you inspiring people and ideas to help you build your successful career in data science. Thanks for being here today and now let’s make the complex simple. (background music plays) Welcome everyone to a very special edition of the SuperDataScience podcast. And you might say this is only the second episode Kirill why is it so special? Well, that is because today I’m bringing you a very good friend of mine, Hadelin de Ponteves. And in fact, we only met a couple of months ago over a work- related project but we instantly bonded. You know how you get that feeling sometimes when you meet somebody whose values are very similar to yours..their aspirations and ambitions are very similar to yours and you instantly develop this strong connection and understanding of each other and that’s exactly what happened and I’m super excited to invite Hadelin to this podcast and we had a great chat. Hadelin - you should know about it. This guy is a machine. So for the past three years, Hadelin has been sleeping only three hours a night. And then once a week he sleeps for eight hours to catch up. For us normally like myself I sleep eight hours everyday pretty much. This guy is so driven, so passionate about achieving his goals, about working, about learning about data science, about improving his skill set and also he’s an entrepreneur so about building businesses and about giving back to communities and creating value for the world. He doesn’t even have enough time to sleep. How cool is that? How interesting of a person do you have to be to sacrifice your sleep to build things and create things and improve. He’s also a very very inspirational guy. So, Hadelin got two masters degrees because that’s the only way he could actually achieve them, by sleeping three hours a day. I was about to say a week but that would be an overkill. So, three hours a day sleeping and therefore you got two masters degrees. One of it is Machine Learning so that’s a great and interesting field of data science and we talked a lot about machine learning in fact we go deep into machine learning. In this podcast you will learn about regressions, classifications, clustering, association, rule learning, reinforcement learning, deep learning, national language processing and much more. So, lots of stuff. Hadelin it’s not a surprise that he’s worked at companies like Canal Plus which is a Canadian competitor of Netflix. So, you’ll see how Hadelin went about developing some or recommend models – models that recommend customers what movie or what show to watch next based on their previous experiences. Also, after hearing all these you won’t be surprised to learn that Hadelin of course worked on Google and there he worked with terabytes and terabytes of data. Also performing sophisticated machine learning and creating algorithms and resolving challenges so maybe some of the stuffs that you do. With Google, some of the products you use with Google actually were created and worked on by him. In this episode with super exciting. I just can’t hold back my excitement about this. For the first time ever, we reveal and exciting and brand new machine learning project that we are working on together with Hadelin. So, it’s really cool because I am here in Brisbane, Hadelin is in Paris but over the internet, over the miles and miles and miles of space, we’ve been working on this massive project we’re going to bring to the world very, very soon. So, you’ll be excited to learn about it, you’ll be one of the first people to hear about it in this podcast. Definitely check it out. Something that we hold very dear to our hearts. Also in this podcast, you will hear some very interesting and philosophical discussions about the future of machine learning. Because Hadelin had so much exposure to do machine learning and AI and things like that, he’s got his own views about what’s going to happen to the world. In fact, he’s actually writing a book. It’s going to be a fiction book but about how he sees the future of the world in the next twenty to fifty years and I’m pretty excited to see that come out. Hopefully that’ll be published sometime in the near future but otherwise we talk about how robots and AI are on one hand very positive but on the other hand can be dangerous and something that I’ve never discussed before – what kind of career implications that can have for data scientist? What kind of new jobs that can create in the future? So, controlling AI, AI security, AI oversight and things like that. So, very interesting discussions and that space as well. And at the of this podcast, we talked about some aspirations, what inspires Hadelin to move forward, who he follows, some movies that were both very interesting and exciting about so definitely check out. I think some of the movies that we’ve talked about were very interesting and actually life-changing for a data scientist and finally, Hadelin recommend his favorite book. Call away to get started and without further ado, I bring to you Hadelin de Ponteves. (background music plays) Kirill: Hey, everybody! Welcome to the Super Data Science Podcast and today we’ve got an incredible guest, Hadelin De Ponteves. Welcome Hadelin! Thank you for joining me on the show. Hadelin: Thank you very much. I’m very happy to be here. Kirill: Awesome! And right off the bat Hadelin, tell us what do you do or where have you worked before? Hadelin: Today I would characterize myself as both a data scientist and an entrepreneur and in the past, I’ve tried many things before finding my own way, before finding my passions. I tried with finance in the past and I didn’t like it because it was all about analysis and I needed to create stuff and I found out about data science, and I found out that there was a huge potential for creation. You can let your imagination go very far and we can use data science to create these things. So I started to be passionate about data science and I became a data scientist. So, I first had an experience at Canal Plus which is a French company, competitor of Netflix. I actually had a big chance there which was to build the recommender system based on data science and machine learning. So that was my first experience as a data scientist. And then I had a second work experience at Google where I worked as a data scientist as well but rather on the business side. I was implementing some machine learning algorithms or data mining models for business to create added values for business. Kirill: Awesome! Hadelin: That was my second experience. And then, I became an entrepreneur. Kirill: Awesome! Hadelin: I had this thing to become an entrepreneur and that’s what I am today. Kirill: Beautiful! So, everybody who’s listening, you can tell why I’m so excited about this interview. Hadelin actually has so much experience in data science and we’ll get to his background in just a bit. And also, this is a person that worked with Google so this is a person that has actually seen the frontier of data science, what is exactly happening on the brand new front of data science and the most exciting stuff that is happening in the world right now. So, that’s what we’re going to be digging in today. Before we continue, I’m super excited to talk about your entrepreneurial quest because we’re actually doing some work together in that space right now. So that would be really fun to share with the listeners. Can you tell us a bit more about your background before we get more into exactly what you did at Canal Plus and Google? Just tell us a bit more about your background. Where did you come from? Where were you raised? What kind of education did you participate in? Hadelin: Okay. So let’s start from scratch. Let’s start from the beginning. I was born in Paris. I was raised in Paris as well. I’ve been living nearly all my life in Paris. I found out that I was good in Mathematics in high school so I decided to pursue my education with a Bachelor in Mathematics. Then once I got the Bachelor, I started in engineering school in France. So, French engineering school are quite particular because it’s very general. You study everything. I’ve studied everything from Mathematics to Philosophy, passing by Economy, Finance. Kirill: Wow! That’s a lot. Hadelin: Yeah. It’s quite particular. It’s not like you specialize at the beginning like in other countries. But, in the final year you choose a specialization. As I said, first I was interested in Finance so I’ve tried Finance but then I quickly realized that I needed more than that, more than just analysis. I found out about data science.