Happy to announce Data Learning Week, our latest Data initiative at the Xebia Academy!
The week is packed with workshops where you can dive into our courses—for free!
What’s on the menu? It ranges from scalable and production machine learning to convincing your stakeholders through data to deep learning and AI demystification!
✨ April 8th: Scaling ML workflows with Apache Spark with Nitin Bhushan
🧠 April 9th: Demystifying AI with Enrico Erler
📈 April 10th: Enhancing Data Visualization Techniques with Lysanne van Beek
🖥️ April 11th: Developing Production-Ready ML Applications with David Coba
Great article on the nuances of Gemini and why many have labeled it (pun intended) as woke
“Today, the bots are different: they appear to know right from wrong and truth from lies. Simplifying a bit, this is a product of a mechanism known as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). In RLHF, a largely-formed LLM is fine-tuned by presenting it with a variety of prompts, and then browbeating the model to give the answers that get the highest marks from human reviewers.”
What’s happening in China is really interesting. If we trust their official figures and estimates, the economy was driven by 3 things:
Real estate (who’s crashing hard)
Consumer spending (who’s in decline, as their population is not growing and aging)
Exports (who are threatened by India and South East Asia)
As 1. is crashing, consumers—who put most of their savings in, guess what, real estate—are more conscious about spending, hurting another good 30% of their economy.
So, 2/3 of their economy is hurting and will hurt more badly in 2024.
China’s and Hong Kong’s markets are also spooked, having shed USD 1.5 TRN in January alone.
Analyzing data of protons traveling just 11 km/h less than the speed of light (299.781 km/s!), was Rogier van der Geer’s favorite occupation while working at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
He then switched to Xebia, starting to apply his travel domain knowledge to recommenders, forecasting, and fraud detection.
That’s why I’m excited that he’s participating in a panel, hosted by Mark Jacks, with Ronel Schoeman from TUI and Michael Schrage from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to discuss the Future of Travel Recommendations.
If you want to know more about customers’ behavior, how recommendations alter it, the magic behind recommendation engines, and the ethical responsibilities associated in building them, hit the link below and reserve your spot!
One of the great things Xebia has to offer is the opportunity to always be learning.
So, just before closing 2023, I started with my New Year’s resolution: learn dbt—at least the basics.
I’m glad to report that I got my dbt Learn Fundamentals credential.
The on-demand material from dbt Labs is excellent, I listened gladly to my pal Kyle Coapman (and many of his colleagues), and just before closing my laptop before the Christmas break, I got the Badge™!
On-demand learning is not for everyone, though. If you prefer to learn directly from practitioners in a class with other students, we got you covered! Our next dbt Learn class runs in March! Use code dbt10 to get 10% off!
