From Statecraft to Codebreaking: The Big Data Origin Story with Chris Wiggins, Chief Data Scientist at The New York Times

12/18/24 • 45 min

If you’re a history buff in the data world, you know that there’s a complex interplay between data, statecraft, and machine learning. The history of data visualization is entwined with societal governance and technological advancements, starting from the usage of statistics for statecraft in the 18th century to the transformative innovations during World War II that birthed computation and data science as we know it. And because of the subjective design choices that underpin data gathering and analysis, there’s an inherently political nature of deciding what data to collect and how to utilize it, which is critical in understanding both historical and contemporary data practices.

As we move into the modern applications of data science and the advent of AI technologies, deep reinforcement learning and the integration with generative AI models, these technologies are reshaping the field by enabling computers to process and interact with unstructured data in unprecedented ways. Satyen and Chris discuss his book How Data Happened, the origins of data science and the role of Alan Turing in the creation of digital computing, and the challenges generative AI brings around model interoperability.

*Satyen’s narration was created using AI

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“In the last two years, one of the major techniques for advancing the most eye-popping products has been RLHF, Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback. There's innumerable subjective design choices happening there, which eventually become encoded in a product. But, the presentation of it as though it's somehow unbiased and free from any subjective design choices is illusory.” – Chris Wiggins

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Time Stamps

*(01:36): How did Chris come to write How Data Happened?

*(10:33): World War II as the springboard for data science and digital computing

*(18:37): The tension between objectivity and subjectivity in data today

*(25:36): What is Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF)?

*(36:03): How has Gen AI impacted data science?

*(44:53): Satyen’s takeaways

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Sponsor

This podcast is presented by Alation.

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