As a Googler, one of my duties is to educate software engineers on how to use machine learning. I already had experience creating online tutorials, meetups, conference pre- sentations, training workshops, and coursework for private coding schools and univer- sity graduate studies, but I am always looking for new ways to effectively teach.
Prior to Google, I worked in Japanese IT as a principal research scientist for 20 years—all without deep learning. Almost everything I see today, we were doing in innovation labs 15 years ago; the difference is we needed a room full of scientists and a vast budget. It’s incredible how things have so rapidly changed as a result of deep learning.
Back in the late 2000s, I was working with small structured datasets with geospatial data from national and international sources all over the world. Coworkers called me a data scientist, but nobody knew what a data scientist really was. Then came big data, and I didn’t know the big data tools and frameworks, and suddenly I wasn’t a data sci- entist. What? I had to scramble and learn the tools and concepts behind big data and once again I was a data scientist.