One of the things that kept me very busy while at IBM was education. Everyone knew that analytics was important, but surprisingly few people knew exactly what analytics was. (My boss and CTO of IBM Business Analytics, the wonderful Brenda Dietrich, had a great line: Do you remember when “analytics” was just called “math”?) There was a lack of understanding around the basics and foundation of analytics, and yet that knowledge was critical for (say) development teams to understand what was possible and how to truly incorporate analytics into their software.
As a result, my colleague and friend Jean-Francois Puget and I set out to create a series of recorded lectures on the many areas of analytics, from basic descriptive statistics, to predictive models, to optimization, to machine learning, to parallel computation to image and video analytics. We did not want lectures on products or solutions: we wanted people to learn about the science of analytics. At the same time, we did not want things to get too deeply technical or mathematical: our audience, while technical, were developers who really just needed a high level understanding and could then follow up from there.
Internally, our lecture series broke all kinds of attendance records, becoming one of the most well-attended talks ever within IBM. Clearly there was a need for this information assembled together in one place!
I am thrilled that we are now able to make this video lecture series available, at no charge, to anyone who wants it. I’m biased, of course, but I think the content is awesome.
You can read more about the lecture series on Jean-Francois’s blog and on AnalyticsZone. Kudos to the people back at IBM who are continuing to drive this effort while I am on sabbatical — you know who you are. 🙂