We have Khalifeh Al Jadda, Director of Data Science at Home Depot. Khalifeh has solid knowledge in large scale machine learning and data mining techniques.

He tells us how in retail some businesses are still running manually, without the use of automation tools, so the job of data science leaders is to educate business partners and show them by example and with data the value that data science and artificial intelligence can deliver to their organizations.

Later on, he explains their workflow is managed by product managers and starts with the data scientist taking the responsibility of building the machine learning model, training the model, validating it and even going all the way towards testing it. Then, machine learning engineers take over and scale up the code, they clean it, perform unit testing and do everything needed for it to be ready for production.

Quotes:

• "I started my journey in the industry from that point, which was the first internship I got in 2015. That’s the first advice I give to anyone, if you are in graduate school, if you are a student, make sure to pursue an internship before graduation. It’ll make your life much easier after graduation."
• "It’s been an interesting journey, a great journey. I hope that everyone actually goes through those challenges in their careers, because  it makes you a better and stronger data scientist."
• "You cannot build a team with only computer vision people, or a team with just statistical people. You need to bring people from different backgrounds. That’s what my organization includes. It includes people from all backgrounds."

Read the full episode summary here: Episode #135 Enjoy the show!

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