The year is coming to an end. The Christmas/Hanukkah/New Years/Holiday season is upon us. Thus, the announcements are pretty slow and will probably continue for the next couple weeks. However, there are still a few cloud data science announcements to highlight.

News

• Microsoft SandDance v2
  This is a very neat tool for visualizing and exploring your data. It is open source and you can try it out in your browser with the demo.
• .Net introduces the DataFrame
  If you are familar with R or Python for data analysis, then you should be familiar with the concept of a DataFrame. Now .Net has a DataFrame object as well.
• Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics now supports Apache Flink 1.8
  Kinesis Data Analytics is for analyzing streaming data.

Videos

• What is SandDance?
  This video demos the awesome new visualization tool from Microsoft.

• A conversation on Machine Learning with Amazon
  A very quick video on how to start a machine learning project. Best quote from the article: “It is an artform to map a business problem to an algorithm.”

• Daphne Koller talks AWS and Machine Learning for Drug Development
  The title says it all. Daphne is a legend in data science. Among other things, she was the co-founder of Coursera and a Stanford Professor.

• Using AutoML Natural Language for custom text classification
  The latest episode of AI Adventures. It provides a good intro to text classification.