What we’ve been reading this week 3rd May 2019

From open data and decision making to Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (with a few interesting data visualisations along the way), this is what we found interesting this week.

Our week began with Analytics Engines’ own Liam Brannigan featuring as a panellist at an event discussing the benefits of Open Data. In anticipation of the event, Liam provided us with some thoughts and insights on the topic.

We concluded our ’Making Better Decisions‘ blog series this week with a look back at some of the key areas to consider when utilising data as part of the decision-making process.

Our reading this week focused a great deal on Machine Learning. For those unfamiliar, this set of articles serve as an interesting introduction to the subject. According to blogger (and ML course creator for LinkedLearning) Adam Geitgey:

“Machine learning is the idea that there are generic algorithms that can tell you something interesting about a set of data without you having to write any custom code specific to the problem. Instead of writing code, you feed data to the generic algorithm and it builds its own logic based on the data.”

For a more critical perspective on the topic, this article seeks to establish a clear difference between Statistics and Machine Learning.

We’ll conclude our reading list this week with some interesting and insightful visualisations from the world of data!

Empires as cells | An incredibly interesting visualisation that shows the rise and fall of colonial empires as if they were cells undergoing mitosis.

How many trees? | A poignant visualisation that shows how many trees individual countries would need in order to absorb their CO2 emissions.

Music Visualisations | Take a look at some of the amazing apps and visualisations built using Spotify’s APIs, SDKs and developer tools. In particular, check out Music Popcorn and Elvisualisation.