Administered, monitored, and tuned multiple complex databases. Designed, implemented, and verified database maintenance, backup, and recovery plans. Set up and maintained replication. Managed all MS AS databases. Designed, modified, and maintained multiple data marts along with ETL processes.

An insightful person once said, "Prediction is like driving your car forward by looking only at the rearview mirror!". If the road is dead-straight, you are good . . . UNLESS there is a stalled vehicle ahead in the middle of the road. We should consider short-term and long-term prediction separately. Long-term prediction is nearly a lost cause. In the 80's and 90's, chaos and complexity theorists showed us that things can spin out of control even when we have perfect past and present information (predicting weather beyond 3 weeks is a major challenge, if not impossible).

There are about 2.5 million drones in the US and not one has collided with a piloted aircraft – yet. With nearly 600 close-calls reported from August 2015 to January 2016, the Federal Aviation Administration worries it is only a matter of time before there are disastrous incidents. This data shows an urgency for effective anti-drone systems to deal with rogue UAVs, as more unmanned vehicles take the sky. More than 406,000 drone owners have registered their vehicle with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) since late December. There are about 2.5 million drones in the US and not one has hit with a piloted aircraft – yet.

Large-scale data has great advantages in terms of finding natural experiments (to take a trivial example, if you want to measure how a July 15 price change affected sales, it's much more powerful to have daily sales data than monthly sales data). But for the most part economists trying to estimate causal models on large-scale data are using traditional methods like fixed effects linear regression. Having some easy to use alternatives would probably make a significant difference in empirical research.

For those of us worried that robots are coming for our jobs, economist Dr. Erik Brynjolfsson offers words of comfort: Bots actually may create new employment opportunities. Brynjolfsson discussed how new technologies may influence future jobs in an interview (above) with Andrew McAfee, co-director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, during the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, earlier this year. McAfee and Brynjolfsson are co-authors of The Second Machine Age. "It's true that robots are taking away some jobs, but at the same time they're creating lots of new jobs," said Brynjolfsson, director of the Initiative. "The thing that's different is whether or not the new job creation is keeping in balance with the old job creation, and there's no economic law that says that's automatically going to happen."

In this article, I compare two approaches (with their advantages and drawbacks) to compute a simple metric: the number of unique visitors ("uniques") per year for a website. I use the word user or visitor interchangeably. The problem seems straightforward at first glance, but it is not. It is a complex big data problem because the naive approach involves sorting hundreds of billions of observations - called transactions or page views here. It is also complicated because there's no 100% sure way to identify and track a user over long time periods: cookies and IP addresses / browser combinations both have drawbacks.

This rudimentary statistics textbook, entitled Statistics: The Art and Science of Learning from Data (3rd Edition), sells on Amazon for 157.79. Not sure if everyone sees the same price as me (maybe prices are user-customized), if price changes over time, but it seems stable. Surprisingly, this book is meant for first-year college students, so there's nothing original in the book. Just basic standard stuff that anyone can find for free on the Internet. Books covering far deeper and broader material, at the research level, filled with new intellectual property that you can directly apply to new-world data, sell at a fraction of the cost. What justifies such a high price?

I believe that adding new methods in statistical packages, to the point that each package now offers hundreds of functions (dozens of regressions, dozens of classifiers, dozens of time series methods and so on), is a bad idea. Most of these functions are never used. It only confuses the high-level user, and makes these packages not suitable for automated or black-box data science by non-statisticians (engineers, economists). If you really need that level of sophistication and fine-tuning, you are better off writing your own code in Perl, Python, or R or some other programming language. Dr Granville is currently working on a new approach to statistical software development. It consists of producing very few, global methods with few parameters (one method per core problem, e.g. one generic clustering technique, one generic regression technique etc.) with focus on automation (algorithms run in batch mode and/or automatically scheduled), streaming data, black-box data processing by non-statisticians, and ability to process large data while avoiding the curse of big data at the same time.

Help with Machine Learning and Elevators project (self.MachineLearning) I am beginning to develop a paper about improving elevators waiting times with machine learning, but i am relatively new on the subject (undergrad). I am thinking on using Reinforcement Learning, perhaps along with TensorFlow?

For years, automakers have rhapsodized about how our cars would become mobile offices and living spaces. And then they botched even the simple stuff, like letting you dial up the Backstreet Boys from your iPod on the car's sound system. The Mercedes-Benz F 015 will be the rolling roost of your dreams. You'll just have to wait at least until 2030, when Mercedes thinks this kind of hydrogen-powered, fully autonomous vehicle will become viable. Bigger than an S-Class, the Benz concept looks like a Clockwork Orange hipster lounge, with its walnut-veneered floor and wall-wrapping touch and gesture displays.