Book Image

Creators of Intelligence

By : Dr. Alex Antic
Book Image

Creators of Intelligence

By: Dr. Alex Antic

Overview of this book

A Gartner prediction in 2018 led to numerous articles stating that "85% of AI and machine learning projects fail to deliver.” Although it's unclear whether a mass extinction event occurred for AI implementations at the end of 2022, the question remains: how can I ensure that my project delivers value and doesn't become a statistic? The demand for data scientists has only grown since 2015, when they were dubbed the new “rock stars” of business. But how can you become a data science rock star? As a new senior data leader, how can you build and manage a productive team? And what is the path to becoming a chief data officer? Creators of Intelligence is a collection of in-depth, one-on-one interviews where Dr. Alex Antic, a recognized data science leader, explores the answers to these questions and more with some of the world's leading data science leaders and CDOs. Interviews with: Cortnie Abercrombie, Edward Santow, Kshira Saagar, Charles Martin, Petar Veličković, Kathleen Maley, Kirk Borne, Nikolaj Van Omme, Jason Tamara Widjaja, Jon Whittle, Althea Davis, Igor Halperin, Christina Stathopoulos, Angshuman Ghosh, Maria Milosavljevic, Dr. Meri Rosich, Dat Tran, and Stephane Doyen.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
1
Chapter 1: Introducing the Creators of Intelligence

Organizing a data team

AA: Speaking of teams, some organizations ask themselves, “Should we be centralizing the data science function? Should it be distributed and based in different business units?” Do you have a preference that you’ve used in the past? Of course, it depends on the organization and the analytics maturity, but do you tend to favor one over the other with how you structure the teams that you manage?

AG: When you’re first starting out, if you’re a small company, you can’t have a lot of different teams. Generally, you start with a centralized approach. Because the team is centralized, all the data is together; you have one source of truth. And generally, those people are good with the technical areas. They can solve technical problems quickly, and they can talk to each other. Knowledge sharing within the data team is very good. It definitely has a lot of benefits.

The challenge is that domain knowledge is also very important...