This Week in Data Preparation (August 17, 2020)
This weekly post with news items from the data preparation market is brought to you by The Data Value Factory, the company offering Data Preparer.
12 links in this week’s post: 6 articles (on artificial intelligence, data democratization, data integration, data governance, and data migration, by Concord Technologies, MARii, Denodo, SAP, Blast Analytics, AWS, and Daelight Solutions), 1 interview (by Superb AI), 2 tutorials on data prep for Machine Learning (by Microsoft Research, and SAP), 2 company announcements (by Tableau, and Transmetrics), and 1 capital raising announcement (by Crossbeam).
How to Build the Right Team for a Successful AI Project. In this special guest feature, Simran Bagga, Program Director — AI and Machine Learning at Concord Technologies, takes a holistic look at ways to complete a successful AI project through building the right team.
The digital economy requires the democratisation of data. In this eighth guest article written exclusively for just-auto, Dato Madani Sahari, the CEO of Malaysia Automotive, Robotics and IoT Institute (MARii), reflects on our digital lifestyles, the data being generated and the increasing need for the smart integration of databases — alongside data protection — to get the best societal outcomes.
Balancing Data Integration with Data Governance. Database Trends and Applications (DBTA) recently held a webinar with Quinn Lewis, consulting director, Denodo; Keith Lambert, VP, marketing and business development, Kore Technologies; and Ginger Gatling, senior director, SAP, who discussed key technologies and best practices for overcoming data integration and governance challenges.
A Simple Strategy For Asking Your Data The Right Questions. “When the questions you can ask the data are unlimited but the time and resources to find the answers aren’t, you need a strategy for how you query the data for meaningful insights.” said Brent Dykes, Sr. Director of Insights and Data Storytelling at Blast Analytics and author of “Effective Data Storytelling: How to Drive Change with Data, Narrative, and Visuals”.
How data-literate is your organization? Ishit Vachhrajani, Enterprise Strategist at Amazon Web Services (AWS), prefers the term “data proficiency” to data literacy, because the goal goes beyond data awareness to knowing how to put it to use. “It’s not just about democratizing access to data,” he says. “It’s about democratizing action using that data.”
Successful Data Migration Projects Take Planning. Dan Wheeler, founder & CEO of Daelight Solutions shares his insights on planning data migration projects.
Hyun Kim, CEO and Co-Founder, Superb AI — Interview Series. “We are on a real mission to democratize AI and want people to know that there are enterprise companies such as ourselves that are vested in providing as much as possible to further the adoption and integration of AI into our everyday lives.” said Kim, in this interview for Unite.AI.
Data Prep for Machine Learning: Encoding. Dr. James McCaffrey of Microsoft Research uses a full code program and screenshots to explain how to programmatically encode categorical data for use with a machine learning prediction model such as a neural network classification or regression system.
Introduction to Smart Data Wrangling. With the smart wrangling capabilities in SAP Analytics Cloud, you can get immersed in gaining insights from your data through stories and analysis, without worrying about getting the data prepared perfectly from the start. In this blogpost, SAP’s Josef Hampp shows the new Custom Expression Editor and how it works.
Tableau 2020.3 highlighted by new data prep capabilities. “I don’t see any Salesforce-specific progress in 2020.3, but work is definitely underway to better integrate the analytical options within the Salesforce portfolio,” said Doug Henschen, principal analyst at Constellation Research, noting that last month Salesforce introduced a marketing-specific integration between AI marketing software vendor Datorama and Tableau. Similarly, Dave Menninger, senior vice president and research director at Ventana Research, said he still doesn’t see evidence of much collaboration between Salesforce and Tableau. While analysts see no evidence yet of significant collaboration between Tableau and Salesforce, Ryan McShane, Tableau’s director of product marketing, said that becoming part of Salesforce has sped up the vendor’s development pipeline. “We’re going to add more features around analytics, self-service, enterprise, cloud, and of course around Salesforce,” McShane said. “The future is bright.”
Bulgaria’s Transmetrics uses augmented intelligence to help customers. Alexis Zubiolo, Lead Data Scientist at Transmetrics explained, “Data quality is often a major issue when working in logistics. The two main reasons are the lack of discipline and automation in the data acquisition process (missing scans, package dimensions, etc.) and the fact that there are many different transportation management systems (TMS) with various data structures.”
Partner ecosystem platform Crossbeam secures $25M in Series B funding. Crossbeam, a software startup headquartered in Philadelphia, has reportedly closed its series B funding round after securing $25 million, which was led by Redpoint Ventures with support from existing investors including Salesforce Ventures, FirstMark Capital, Uncork Capital, Slack Fund, plus Okta Ventures and Partnership Leaders among the new investors. Bob Moore, CEO and Co-founder, stated that the company wasn’t looking to raise funds but made a call to do so as Redpoint had shown keen interest in their platform which is actively being used by their portfolio companies and out of market firms. For the record, Crossbeam is a software platform that helps companies automate partnership data integration and consequently expedites labor intensive processes like account mapping.
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