For this edition of My Journey In Data Science column, Analytics India Magazine got in touch with a data scientist, influencer and blogger. Rahul Agrawal, Data Scientist at Walmart Labs, shared his exciting journey in data science, and also offered advice on best practices for aspirants to thrive in the ever-changing data science landscape. Rahul is a mechanical engineer from IIT Delhi, who started his job in a steel company in 2010, but quit the job since it was not interesting enough. Then he joined Fractal Analytics in 2011 as a business analyst. "Initially, I wrote a lot of SQL and made dashboards – most of the work revolved around reporting. And it was not a love-at-first-sight for me," says Rahul.

When we create our machine learning models, a common task that falls on us is how to tune them. People end up taking different manual approaches. Some of them work, and some don't, and a lot of time is spent in anticipation and running the code again and again. So that brings us to the quintessential question: Can we automate this process? A while back, I was working on an in-class competition from the "How to win a data science competition" Coursera course.

From enhancing in-store customer experiences to streamlining back-end supply chain operations, AI is revolutionizing the retail industry. Attendees at this year's GPU Technology Conference in Silicon Valley can learn how AI improves loss prevention and powers shopper tracking and autonomous checkout for more personalized customer experience and cost-effective business. Here are six can't-miss retail-focused sessions at GTC to attend: How Walmart Improves Forecast Accuracy with NVIDIA GPUs -- John Bowman, director of data science at Walmart Labs, shows how GPU computing has enabled the retailing giant to significantly improve forecast accuracy while remaining within execution time windows -- using RAPIDS open source data science and machine learning libraries. Semantic Understanding for E-Commerce Search -- Learn how deep learning-fueled semantic understanding is helping solve the problem of e-commerce search, with Somnath Banerjee, director of machine learning at Walmart Labs. What Every Industry Can Learn About AI from Retail -- A panel of experts from GOAT, Focal Systems, Fellow Robots and NVIDIA outline the success criteria that any industry can apply to its strategy -- from supply chain optimization to better customer experience.

Walmart Labs, the technology unit of retail firm Walmart, has acqui-hired its third Indian startup, Dataturks, a Bengaluru-based Machine Learning (ML) -based Data Annotation Platform that do image bounding, document annotation, NLP and text annotations. The acquisition will help Walmart to use Dataturk's machine learning capabilities for content enrichment. Post acquisition, the 5-member team of Dataturks will be part of Wamart's merchant technology team for catalogue enrichment. Founded in last year, by Gajendra Dadheech and Mohan Gupta, Dataturks makes ML data annotations super easy by allowing teams to upload data, invite other team member to upload and build training/evaluation dataset in hours and find labeled datasets. In December 2018, Walmart Labs had acqui-hired Int.AI, a Bangalore-based mobile analytics aka MicroApps startup and in September last year it acquired Appsfly, a Bangalore-based micro-app startup.

If artificial intelligence lives up to the hype and becomes the most important aspect of cloud computing over the next several years, Walmart wants to make sure it's prepared. The retailer is planning to build a neural network cluster based on Nvidia's AI chips over the rest of the year, according to Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdry, as reported by Barron's. The cluster will allow Walmart's OneOps team, which builds and maintains the company's internal application development system, to build a series of neural networks in order to train AI systems within current and future applications. AI could become a huge differentiating factor in the retail stores of the future, and it's one big reason why Amazon bought Whole Foods for $13.7 billion this year. Whole Foods gives Amazon Web Services' artificial intelligence team reams of data on shopper behavior to study and train its own AI systems, and AWS will be able to use Whole Foods stores to test drive AI-related services that could eventually become part of the core AWS product lineup.