Data Science Salon Podcast

When people think about The Home Depot, they probably think more about lumber
and tile than they do ML models. Sure, there is plenty of lumber. But machine learning also plays a key role in the business, in places that customers can see as well as the behind-the-scenes operations.Senior Content Advisor Q McCallum met up with Pat Woowong, Director of Data Science at The Home Depot, to explore how the company mixes their very rich dataset with domain knowledge to employ machine learning deep inside the business. To frame this, he walked me through the Falloff model and Lead scoring, two projects that his team deployed to address the unique challenges of a company that handles both retail and services.During our conversation, we discussed: understanding where models fit into the bigger business picture; using expert domain knowledge to drive feature selection and feature engineering; the value of process; and, to top it off, what it's like to work at The Home Depot.Other places to find Pat:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patwoowong/
• "How THD keeps shelves stocked using ML" (the talk he mentioned during our interview): https://twimlai.com/podcast/twimlai/how-ml-keeps-shelves-stocked-home-depot-pat-woowong/
• "The Value Proposition for Using ML in Brick-and-Mortar Retail Stores: Home Depot" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rF8jtdX-hGo

Be part of the conversation and connect with the data science community at DSS Miami Hybrid on September 21, 2022.

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This discussion also explores the context around which we collect data, polysocial reality, design individualism, and contextual integrity. (Yes, we covered a lot of ground in just 45 minutes.)

Because of our tight schedule, Chris and Q had to stop before they could get to their second topic. That’s why Chris will be back in the next episode to talk about communal computing and what that means for AI.

bio: Chris Butler is a product manager, writer, and speaker with over 20 years of product management leadership at Microsoft, Waze, KAYAK, and Facebook Reality Labs. He facilitates critical decision making for teams that build new and innovative products and created techniques like Empathy Mapping for the Machine and Confusion Mapping to create cross-team alignment while building AI products.

He is now Assistant Vice President, Head of Product Operations, at Cognizant where he PM’s the PM experience.Learn more about Chris and his work through his Linkedin, Twitter, by reading some of his articles on Medium or watching some of his past talks on YouTube.

• Article: “Our Favorite Questions”
• Chris’s Product Mindset talk from Cognizant Softvision Product Day
• Chris’s Prototyping for AI/ML at the AI for PMs Summit
• At the end, we mentioned Chris’s articles on communal computing. You can read these to get a head start on our next episode:
• Communal Computing intro
• Communal Computing’s Many Problems
• A Way Forward with Communal Computing
• AIxDesign Communal Computing workshop with animistic design mapping

Q McCallum (Senior Content Advisor at Formulatedby, the company behind Data Science Salon) met up with Marcello La Rocca, someone who compiled his extensive knowledge of algorithms into a rather hefty book on the topic. In this episode, the author of Algorithms and Data Structures in Action talks about the study of algorithms, why they're useful, and how he's applied them to oversized datasets. Marcello closes out with his thoughts on (sometimes, not) using algorithms in tech job interviews.