This document discusses the author's experience over the last decade working in data science and data engineering roles. It describes how technology problems were initially focused on identifying patterns in data to solve problems like fraud detection. However, over time policy concerns have become more prominent as models have grown more complex. The author notes that as technology problems shrink, product and policy challenges around topics like algorithmic transparency and collective action have become increasingly important to address at scale.

1. Josh Wills
June 17, 2017
1
I Build The Black Box:
Grappling With Product and Policy

2. About Me
● Cloudera’s (Former)
Director of Data Science
● Slack’s (Former)
Director of Data
Engineering
● SLI Engineer @ Slack

3. Agenda
Technology
Product Policy

4. My Last Decade
Technology

5. Historical Perspective
● The Product Problem Was a Given
○ Identify fraud/spam; predict clicks on ads
● Policy Concerns Were Limited
○ Either already well-defined or essentially nonexistent
● Everything Was About the Data and the Tech
○ Basic algorithmic choices followed by an endless cycle of
feature engineering and experimentation

6. My First Day Back

7. Embeddings

8. A Seismic Shift

9. Keeping Up With The arXiv

10. Deep Architectures as Custom Hardware

11. AutoML as Cross-Platform Compiler

12. The Incredible Shrinking Technology Problems
Technology
Product Policy

13. The Data Product Problem

14. One Approach

15. Understanding Black Boxes

16. Black Boxes and Black Hats

17. Caring The Least At Scale

18. The Logic of Collective Action

19. Starting Small

20. Scaling Up

21. Scaling Way Up

22. Thank You!
22
slack.com/jobs