The Gretel Epoch #1
Gretel Friends & Privacy Fans —
Welcome to the first edition of The Gretel Epoch, your source for privacy engineering insights, product updates, educational content, upcoming events, and community news from Gretel!
Getting Started With Synthetic Data
New to working with synthetic data? Here are links to Gretel’s docs, Github, and Slack community, a video on creating synthetic data, and a workshop on How To Build A Synthetic Data Pipeline In Minutes Using Gretel And Apache Airflow. Privacy made easy.
Reflections on Veterans Day
Since the end of World War 1, Americans have collectively paused on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, to celebrate the veterans who have served in the U.S. Armed Forces. Today, our gratitude goes out to those veterans and the active members of the military who have made tremendous personal sacrifices to protect our nation.
To mark the occasion, Gretel co-founder and CTO John Myers shared some thoughts on his 12 years of military experience as a former Cyberspace Warfare Officer in the U.S. Air Force, and specifically, on how he supported the largest Noncombatant Evacuation Operation (NEO) in history — approximately 124,000 people evacuated via airlift, from Afghanistan — by using his skills as a military officer, software developer, and data engineer.
Here’s a glimpse from his blog:
“The mission was to put together as much open-source intelligence as possible for potential ground exfiltration routes and provide it to the various group leads so they could pass it along to the people still on the ground. For the next 72 hours or so we converted our dining room and kitchen into a mini operations center and dove in. We called our various efforts Operation GTFO.”
Read the amazing true story, which includes code samples John used to quickly and safely aggregate geolocation data for location density analysis, and how he used a hexagonal grid system.
Named Entity Recognition for unstructured text. Data sets today increasingly contain reviews, comments, or other free-form text that could contain PII (personally identifiable information). We now have the ability to use spaCy’s NLP capabilities to seamlessly label and transform person name and location entities in your data sets. You can get started quickly with our SaaS APIs, or deploy Gretel’s NLP services into your own cloud or VPC. Read all about it here.
Bonus feature — Signing up for Gretel is now even easier! Don’t want to use your Google or Github account to sign up for Gretel? Now all you have to do is enter your work email address, and we’ll email you a magic link for instant access. No passwords to remember. It’s safe, secure and easier than ever. Give it a try!
Gretel Blueprints — Templates For Synthetic Data Projects
One of the top requests we heard from developers using Gretel’s open-source synthetic data libraries was to make it incredibly simple to get started on use cases including data anonymization, privacy engineering, and data balancing.
This is why we created Gretel Blueprints — collections of sample code and sample datasets that utilize Gretel’s SDKs that can be easily adapted to solve customer-specific use cases in healthcare and life sciences, finance, gaming, and more! Gretel Blueprints are hosted on GitHub.
Have an idea for other Blueprints? Request a new Blueprint on Twitter! Or Slack.
Privacy Engineering Webinar
Last month, Gretel’s Danielle Beringer joined Samara Starkman and Carole Piovesan, of the Toronto-based data, healthcare, and business law firm, INQ Law, for a deep dive on privacy engineering, and why it has become essential to ensuring data privacy. You can watch the full conversation, including Q&A from the attendees.
Gretel Raises Series B
In case you missed it, Gretel announced a $50M Series B funding round in October. Following the announcement, Gretel CEO Ali Golshan explained why privacy by design matters more than ever, and why it’s Gretel’s mission to bring “privacy by design” tools to every developer.
Gretel Community
If you’re part of the growing community using Gretel’s open-source synthetic data libraries and/or our privacy tools in your work we’d love to hear from you! We’re hoping to improve your experience with us and so have 2 questions for you:
- What problems are you trying to solve with synthetic data?
- What tutorial topic(s) would be most useful for your synthetic data project and/or learning?
Thanks in advance for your responses! In future newsletters, look for a challenge question — we’ll be giving away cool swag…so stay tuned!
If you have any questions, shoot us a note at community@gretel.ai or through Gretel’s community Slack channels. Otherwise, we’ll see you online.
Cheers,
— The Gretel Team
About Gretel.ai
Gretel pioneered Privacy Engineering as a Service and a toolkit for synthetic data that features easy-to-use APIs and an open-source AI-based core, built for developers.
