Data Chatter – Details, episodes & analysis

The phrase “using data to tell stories” is so commonly used nowadays that it runs the risk of becoming a cliche, if it hasn’t become one already. This episode’s guest flips this logic around - instead of using data to tell stories, he uses stories to teach data science!

Arvind Venkatadri is a faculty member at Srishti Manipal School of Art, Design and Technology. His research/teaching interests include TRIZ, Computation in R, Design using Open Source Electronics Hardware, and Complexity Science. He is part of the School of Foundation Studies at SMI.

This is a very wide ranging conversation. We talk about, among other things, The Three Musketeers, Lawrence of Arabia and Legally Blonde. We talk about how Arvind leverages all of these to teach his students data science and logic and game theory.

At a time when the field of data science is rife with “pile stirring”, where a large section of practitioners treat it as an extension of software engineering, Arvind’s approach, centred on stories and the human experience, is really refreshing. His approach also gives a pointer on how to widen the base in terms of attracting people into data science. 

I must apologise for one thing - this conversation was recorded during Deepavali in November 2021, so you can occasionally hear the sound of firecrackers in the background. I really hope you can get past that and listen to Arvind’s stories.

Show Notes

00:03:00: Arvind’s journey into teaching Data Science in an art school

00:05:45: Teaching data science to art students

00:15:45: Teaching statistics through art and stories. Wassily Kandinsky

00:23:00: Teaching coding through art

00:31:00: Shapes and colours and emotions

00:44:00: Lawrence of Arabia (can’t say more here in the description!)

00:50:00: Data science and the human experience

Links:

Arvind’s homepage

Arvind on Twitter

Arvind’s course on R for artists and designers

An intro to Wassily Kandinsky's work

Data Chatter is a podcast on all things data. It is a series of conversations with experts and industry leaders in data, and each week we aim to unpack a different compartment of the "data suitcase".

The podcast is hosted by Karthik Shashidhar. He is a blogger, newspaper columnist, book author and a former data and strategy consultant. Karthik currently heads Analytics and Business Intelligence for Delhivery, one of India’s largest logistics companies.

You can follow him on twitter at @karthiks, and read his blog at noenthuda.com

There is a conception, or misconception, that journalists are not good at maths. It is rather common to see newspaper headlines and graphics that make basic mathematical and logical errors.

On the other hand, in the last decade or so, we have seen a massive rise in “data journalism”. With more and more data being available, journalists are able to write stories exclusively based on data.

How do these two square off?

To answer this, we have Sukumar Ranganathan, editor in chief of the Hindustan Times. He was previously editor of Mint, of which he was one of the founding editors. It was while he was at Mint that he gave a big push to the then nascent field of “data journalism”, inviting writers such as HowIndiaLives, Rukmini S and myself to write data-backed pieces for Mint. He has previously worked in editorial leadership roles at The Hindu Businessline and Business Today.

Sukumar has degrees in chemical engineering, maths, and business administration, and is interested in mathematics, science and technology, the history of business, new media, and data-based political journalism. He reads and collects comic books and is an amateur birder. He tweets under the ID @HT_ed

Show Notes:

00:03:15: Are journalists really bad at maths?
00:16:30: Impact of bad data on public policy, and information theory
00:21:00: How data in journalism has changed in the last 20-25 years
00:23:00: The data journalism story
00:31:15: Judging a data story
00:45:30: Advice to budding data journalists

Data Chatter is a podcast on all things data. It is a series of conversations with experts and industry leaders in data, and each week we aim to unpack a different compartment of the "data suitcase".

The podcast is hosted by Karthik Shashidhar. He is a blogger, newspaper columnist, book author and a former data and strategy consultant. Karthik currently heads Analytics and Business Intelligence for Delhivery, one of India’s largest logistics companies.

You can follow him on twitter at @karthiks, and read his blog at noenthuda.com

For a lot of people, their first introduction to data and analytics happens through sport. Fans have tracked batting and bowling averages for many decades now. In the 1990s, with the coming of satellite TV in India, cricket fans had their first brush with bar graphs and line graphs, with “manhattans” and “worms” respectively.

In the last two decades, following the publication of Michael Lewis’s Moneyball, the field of sports analytics hsa exploded. A couple of months before this podcast was released, it was revealed that footballer Kevin De Bruyne had hired a sports analytics firm in order to better negotiate his contract with Manchester City. And along the way, analytics has entered smaller sports such as kabaddi and volleyball.

Today’s conversation is a double header, featuring the husband-wife duo of Arvind Sivdas and Dhanya P, who are also founders of KabaddiAdda, a Kabaddi platform. They have worked in analytics in cricket, badminton, volleyball and kabaddi, among other sports. We talk about the evolution of sports analytics, how to quantify “continuous sports”, the role of fantasy sport and several other things.

Show Notes

00:02:50 - How they got into sports analytics

00:13:00 -  The popularity of “matchups” in sports nowadays

00:20:00 - How Roger Federer used analytics to transform his game

00:25:00 - Why performance analytics has limited impact in (association) football

00:30:30 - The importance of buy-in from the management, and evaluating success

00:32:45 - How Kabaddi has evolved in the last few years

00:37:15 - The parallels between Kabaddi and Basketball

00:46:00 - Analytics in Kabaddi

00:47:00 - Data collection for sports like Kabaddi

00:49:40 - Biomechanics studies in Kabaddi

00:51:30 - How to fund analytics in smaller sports?

00:55:10 - The role of betting and fantasy in developing analytics

00:59:20 - “Moneyball” - where is it being underused, where is it being overused etc.

01:01:00 - Convincing CSK that cricketers peak in their 30s

Pradeep Narwal's 8 point raid

On how CSK won IPL 2018 with "dad's army"

Data Chatter is a podcast on all things data. It is a series of conversations with experts and industry leaders in data, and each week we aim to unpack a different compartment of the "data suitcase".

The podcast is hosted by Karthik Shashidhar. He is a blogger, newspaper columnist, book author and a former data and strategy consultant. Karthik currently heads Analytics and Business Intelligence for Delhivery, one of India’s largest logistics companies. 

You can follow him on twitter at @karthiks, and read his blog at noenthuda.com/blog

In business schools in India, there is a misconception that marketing is not quantitative, and that it is for the more “creative” people. However, if you look at its history, marketing has always been a highly quantitative subject.

To know more about data and quant in marketing, we talk to Prithwiraj Mukherjee, an assistant professor of marketing at IIM Bangalore.

Prithwiraj teaches marketing management and marketing research at the MBA and doctoral levels. His MOOC titled Quantitative Marketing Research is available on EdX and Swayam. He research interests include behavioral decision making where he models biases, and digital marketing where he investigates influencer fraud and clickbait.

Prithwiraj has a PhD in marketing from ESSEC in Paris, and degrees in chemical engineering from NITK Surathkal and IISc

He can be found on twitter at @peeleraja

Show Notes:

00:03:40 - Introduction on numbers in marketing
00:08:45 - Customised direct mail coupons
00:15:30 - Why do students in business school think marketing is a “soft subject”?
00:22:00 - Conjoint analysis
00:29:00 - Moving from sample data to population data
00:31:20 - Modelling customer loyalty
00:40:00 - Why has digital marketing evolved disjoint from marketing?
00:43:45 - What Facebook knows about you that Google doesn’t
00:45:00 - How has AI / ML / Big Data changed marketing?

Data Chatter is a podcast on all things data. It is a series of conversations with experts and industry leaders in data, and each week we aim to unpack a different compartment of the "data suitcase".

The podcast is hosted by Karthik Shashidhar. He is a blogger, newspaper columnist, book author and a former data and strategy consultant. Karthik currently heads Analytics and Business Intelligence for Delhivery, one of India’s largest logistics companies. 

You can follow him on twitter at @karthiks, and read his blog at noenthuda.com/blog

Analytics and Data Science have become mainstream career choices for graduating students in India nowadays. Analytics companies are nowadays among the largest recruiters at engineering colleges.

How did we get here? How did data and analytics become so big, and so mainstream in India? In order to understand this, we need to understand the full history of analytics in India, and this is a story that goes back over a hundred years.

Today’s guest is N Dayasindhu, co-founder and CEO of itihaasa Research and Digital. For the past two decades, he has been working on R&D and innovation management especially focused on IT. He is working on the evolution of business and technology focused on IT and related domains in the Indian context. In an earlier avatar, he was a consultant advising MNCs setting up high-performance R&D and IT organizations in India.

He was also a researcher in the R&D arm at Infosys and holds a couple of US patents. His research is published in Technology Forecasting and Social Change, Technovation, ACM SIGMIS, etc. He occasionally writes in The Indian Express, The Hindu,The Economic Times, The Hindu Business Line, Founding Fuel, etc. He has guest lectured in the IIMs, the Wharton School at UPenn, NUS Singapore, etc.

He has an FPM (PhD) from IIM Bangalore, M.Sc. in Physics from IIT Madras and a B.Sc. in Physics from Loyola College, Chennai.

Show Notes:

00:03:20 - PC Mahalanobis returns to India (1910s)

00:12:30 - Using analytics for engineering problems at IISc (1950s) https://ece.iisc.ac.in/index.php/about-us/history

00:23:00 - Analytics in the industry in India (1960s)

00:33:00 - Big tech coming into India (1980s)

00:35:30 - GE sets up captive in India (1990s)

00:39:45 - Analytics services startups; IT firms get into analytics (ealrly 2000s)

00:49:30 - Analytics training institutes in India (2010s)

00:52:00 - How to characterise analytics professionals in India

Links

Dayasindhu on Twitter

Dayasindhu’s interview with L^2, the alumni magazine of IIM Bangalore

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Data Chatter is a podcast on all things data. It is a series of conversations with experts and industry leaders in data, and each week we aim to unpack a different compartment of the "data suitcase".

The podcast is hosted by Karthik Shashidhar. He is a blogger, newspaper columnist, book author and a former data and strategy consultant. Karthik currently heads Analytics and Business Intelligence for Delhivery, one of India’s largest logistics companies. 

You can follow him on twitter at @karthiks, and read his blog at noenthuda.com/blog

“Business intelligence” has become a rather unfashionable term in the world of data and analytics. From generating buisness insights from intelligent use of data, it has largely devolved to become a software engineering function - to connect databases to front end tools.

However, there is far more to business intelligence than just writing queries. In this episode, Karthik talks to another BI professional - Balaji Kuppuswamy, director of BI products at Youtube. They talk about what BI really is, the skills involved in BI, where it sits in an organisation, and how it can truly add value.

Show Notes:

00:03:30 -  What is the definition of Business Intelligence?

00:07:20 - BI’s marketing and branding problem

00:12:50 - The role of science in BI

00:15:20 - Interactive dashboards

00:19:00 - What’s it like being a data scientist in BI?

00:27:30 - How Balaji got into BI

00:32:00 - Using BI tools

00:36:00 - Integrating intelligence into BI tools

00:39:00 - Building up a BI team.

00:48:00 - Agile in BI

Links:

Kaiser Fung’s article on BI and data science

Avinash Kaushik on “datapukes"

Data Chatter is a podcast on all things data. It is a series of conversations with experts and industry leaders in data, and each week we aim to unpack a different compartment of the "data suitcase".

The podcast is hosted by Karthik Shashidhar. He is a blogger, newspaper columnist, book author and a former data and strategy consultant. Karthik currently heads Analytics and Business Intelligence for Delhivery, one of India’s largest logistics companies. 

You can follow him on twitter at @karthiks, and read his blog at noenthuda.com/blog

Around a decade ago, “big data” became fashionable. There were lots of jokes and memes created around “big data”. Everyone wanted to do big data.

Now, in 2021, the hype around big data may have died down, but how to roganise and store data remains an important problem for organistions to solve.

Today’s guest is Rangarajan Vasudevan, founder and CEO of TheDataTeam, which builds AI solutions for customer intelligence. We talk about the history of big data, what companies look for when they want to organise their data, technolgies and all such.

Show Notes:

00:03:00 -  What is Big Data?
00:10:10 -  Why do we need to store data?
00:14:00 -  Principles of data architecture
00:20:00 -  How does data evolve as companies evolve?
00:24:30 -  Data warehouse and data lake and data marts and other jargons
00:34:00 -  How to avoid silos, and whether to centralise data engineering, analytics, etc.
00:42:40 -  More on Hadoop
00:50:30 -  How should a startup architect its data team (no pun intended)?

Ranga on Twitter

TheDataTeam 

Data Chatter is a podcast on all things data. It is a series of conversations with experts and industry leaders in data, and each week we aim to unpack a different compartment of the "data suitcase".

The podcast is hosted by Karthik Shashidhar. He is a blogger, newspaper columnist, book author and a former data and strategy consultant. Karthik currently heads Analytics and Business Intelligence for Delhivery, one of India’s largest logistics companies. 

You can follow him on twitter at @karthiks, and read his blog at noenthuda.com/blog

When we read or talk about “data science”, most of the talk is around modelling - the maths behind it, the “cool” modelling techniques, what kind of CPUs or GPUs are required, and all that. What we normally talk less about is how data science interacts with business.

In this inaugural episode of Data Chatter, I talk to S Anand, co-founder and CEO of Gramener, about this so-called “interaction layer”. Our conversation is almost completely focussed on two such interfaces - Microsoft Excel, and data visualisation. We talk about various aspects of what it takes to communicate data to business, and pros and cons of different tools.

Anand is a co-founder of Gramener, a data science company. He leads a team that automates insights from data and narrates these as visual data stories. He is recognized as one of India's top 10 data scientists, and is a regular TEDx speaker.

Show Notes:

00:03:40 -  On how Anand was “always a data guy”
00:12:01 -  Anand’s first tryst automated infographics
00:15:30 -  What visualisations work best for whom?
00:22:00 -  Visual Basic and Python
00:27:15 -  “Gymnastics in Excel”
00:32:00 -  Creating choropleths using Excel
00:41:20 -  Google Sheets
00:45:30 -  Business Intelligence Tools, such as Tableau, Power BI, etc.
00:52:09 -  Pie charts

Links:

Gramener: https://gramener.com
Anand’s website: http://www.s-anand.net
Tufte’s seminal book: https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi

Data Chatter is a podcast on all things data. It is a series of conversations with experts and industry leaders in data, and each week we aim to unpack a different compartment of the "data suitcase".

The podcast is hosted by Karthik Shashidhar. He is a blogger, newspaper columnist, book author and a former data and strategy consultant. Karthik currently heads Analytics and Business Intelligence for Delhivery, one of India’s largest logistics companies. 

You can follow him on twitter at @karthiks, and read his blog at noenthuda.com/blog

This is the trailer of "data chatter", a new podcast on all things data. 

Data Chatter is a series of conversations with experts and industry leaders in data, and each week we aim to unpack a different compartment of the "data suitcase".

The podcast is hosted by Karthik Shashidhar. He is a blogger, newspaper columnist, book author and a former data and strategy consultant. Karthik currently heads Analytics and Business Intelligence for Delhivery, one of India’s largest logistics companies. 

You can follow him on twitter at @karthiks

There are two dominant programming languages used for data science nowadays - R and Python, each having its own set of loyal users. Both have their own strengths and weaknesses. In this episode, we look at what each langauge is good and bad at, what kind of people are more likely to use each, and how being able to program in both and switch seamlessly can indeed be a superpower.

Today’s guest is Abdul Majed Raja RS, a Data Scientist at Atlassian. Abdul Majed likes to call himself an Analytics Consultant with over a decade of experience helping organisations solve their business problems. He's also a Content Creator trying to help newcomers navigate the Data Science space easily and learn continuously. You can find him on Twitter and on Youtube at 1littlecoder. 

Show Notes: 

00:03:00: How Abdul got into analytics
00:05:30: MS Excel in data science
00:07:45: When to use R and when to use Python
00:17:00: What data scientists can learn from software engineers
00:24:30: Graphics and visualisations in R and Python
00:26:45: Machine learning in R and Python
00:29:15: Why the Indian market in Data Science leans towards Python
00:34:45: Working with databases
00:37:30: Building dashboards in R and Python
00:47:00: Working with R *and* Python at the same time
00:51:30: What about Excel and Julia?

Links

I don't like Notebooks - Joel Grus  - 

Interface between R and Python - reticulate.

Julia Silge Youtube Channel for latest Tidymodels tutorials

Advantages of Using R Notebooks For Data Analysis Instead of Jupyter Notebooks - Max Woolf

Data Chatter is a podcast on all things data. It is a series of conversations with experts and industry leaders in data, and each week we aim to unpack a different compartment of the "data suitcase".

The podcast is hosted by Karthik Shashidhar. He is a blogger, newspaper columnist, book author and a former data and strategy consultant. Karthik currently heads Analytics and Business Intelligence for Delhivery, one of India’s largest logistics companies.

You can follow him on twitter at @karthiks, and read his blog at noenthuda.com