Data Brew
Let’s talk data
Welcome to Data Brew by Databricks with Denny and Brooke!
In this series, we explore various topics in the data and AI community and interview experts in data engineering and data science. So join us with your morning brew in hand and get ready to dive deep into data and AI.
Season 2
For our second season, we will be focusing on machine learning, from research to production. We will interview folks in academia and industry to discuss topics such as data ethics, production-grade infrastructure for ML, hyperparameter tuning, AutoML, and many more.
Miss Season 1?
You can still catch Season 1 on Data Lakehouses here, on YouTube, and on your favorite podcast service like Spotify and Apple Music.
Episodes
Adam Oliner discusses how to design your infrastructure to support ML, from integration tests to glue code, the importance of iteration, and centralized vs decentralized data science teams. He provides valuable advice for companies investing in ML and crucial lessons he’s learned from founding two companies.
Liam Li is a leading researcher in the fields of hyperparameter optimization and neural architecture search, and is the author of the seminal Hyperband paper. In this session, Liam discusses the evolution of hyperparameter optimization techniques and illustrates how every data scientist can benefit from neural architecture search.
We branch, version, and test our code, but what if we treated data like code? Tim Hunter joins us to discuss the open-source Data-Driven Software (DDS) package and how it leads to immense gains in collaboration and decreased runtime for data scientists at any organization.
About the hosts

Brooke Wenig is a Director of the Machine Learning Practice at Databricks. She leads a team of data scientists who develop large-scale machine learning pipelines for customers, as well as teach courses on distributed machine learning best practices. Previously, she was a Principal Data Science Consultant at Databricks. She received an M.S. in Computer Science from UCLA with a focus on distributed machine learning. She speaks Mandarin Chinese fluently and enjoys cycling.

Denny Lee is a Developer Advocate at Databricks. He is a hands-on distributed systems and data sciences engineer with extensive experience developing internet-scale infrastructure, data platforms, and predictive analytics systems for both on-premises and cloud environments. He has a Master’s of Biomedical Informatics from Oregon Health and Sciences University and has architected and implemented powerful data solutions for enterprise healthcare customers. His current technical focuses include distributed systems, Apache Spark, deep learning, machine learning and genomics.
Brooke and Denny are two of the co-authors of Learning Spark, 2nd edition.
Contact the Data Brew team on Twitter: @databrew_db or on LinkedIn