We write and speak about the intersection of data science research, practice, and leadership.

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I was delighted to be invited to give a talk at the inaugural spaCy IRL conference in Berlin, Germany. My talk highlighted one of my group's projects — using natural language processing and active learning to collect data about companies' environmental, social, and governance practices. Josh Poduska, Chief Data Scientist at Domino Data Lab, and I teamed up to talk about how to manage data science as an organizational capability, the data science project lifecycle, common organization structures for data science teams, and more at the Strata Data Conference in New York. I joined Elena Grewal, Head of Data Science at Airbnb, Sivan Aldor-Noiman, Head of Data Science and Data Engineering at Wellio, and moderator Nancy Hersh to talk about ideas for accelerating data science progress at startups, tech companies, and established enterprises. This talk provides a clear explanation from first principles about how neural networks learn rich vector representations for words. Along the way, we get a "minimum viable introduction" to the basic concepts of how neural networks work. This 90-minute PyData tutorial provides an overview of powerful tools and modeling techniques used for natural language processing in Python.