Madonna M Dodd
Principal Data Engineer at Microsoft
Madonna considers her passion in data engineering as sort of an accident. Though her early career was in IT Service Operations, Madonna unknowingly built a data team from scratch! What started out as producing simple Excel reports eventually turned into big data experience as she discovered a knack for data transformation and representation. With her background, Madonna is now leading her team as the data engineer/architect responsible for end-to-end reporting solutions.
Watch live: March 7, 2023 @ 4:55 – 5:25 pm ET
Adopting a Data-First Approach in ML Teams for Increased Impact
“Data is food for AI” – Andew Ng. According to Forbes, Data Scientists spend approximately 80% of their time collecting, cleaning and organizing data before even starting the exploratory analysis phase. This particular task could be mundane and often frustrating but is critical. Producing data that is consistent, reliable, available, and of high quality is crucial to the success of Machine Learning projects. The consequences of not investing enough into data and analytics engineering could result in feeding incomplete (or worse, incorrect) training data into models. In this talk, we’ll discuss the process of building a “data muscle” and how to incorporate engineering principles such as Scalability, User Privacy, Maintainability, Code Modularity, and Redundancy in order to create a well-functioning and impactful data team.