Trends to Watch in 2021 and Best Books of 2020
This edition has 363 words which will take you about 2 minutes to read.
“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” - Herbert Simon.
Data Exchange podcast
Key AI and Data Trends for 2021 Our managing editor Jenn Webb organized a mini-panel composed of myself and my podcast co-organizer, Mikio Braun. We preview our annual free Trends Report to be released in Jan/2021. Go to the episode notes to sign up and we’ll send you a copy.
A Unified Management Model for Successful Data-Focused Teams We speak with Jesse Anderson, Managing Director at the Big Data Institute, about trends in data engineering and about his recent book on Data Teams.
[Image: Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, by Ben Lorica.]
For this end of the year edition I deviate from this newsletter’s standard format. What follows is a collection of books we enjoyed this past year. Many of these titles were featured in previous editions of this newsletter. I hope you enjoy these titles as much as we did and see you in 2021!
Data, Analytics, and Machine Learning
History, Biography and Profiles
Flash Crash: A Trading Savant, A Global Manhunt, And The Most Mysterious Market Crash In History
The Powerful and the Damned: Lionel Barber’s new diary/memoir, spans his tenure (2005-2020) as editor of one of my daily reads - the Financial Times.
In the Dragon's Shadow: Southeast Asia in the Chinese Century A tour de force that covers the relationship between China, the U.S., and the individual countries that comprise the ASEAN.
The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy
Blood and Oil: Mohammed bin Salman's Ruthless Quest for Global Power
[Image: from Hakone Open-Air Museum by Ben Lorica.]
Security and Big Tech
This has been a challenging year and I often found myself perusing photographs and videos I took from past years. Here’s a video from early 2019, taken at Ras Al Khaimah's Jebel Jais, the longest zipline in the world. Bye 2020 and Happy 2021 to all!
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Ben Lorica edits the Gradient Flow newsletter. He is co-chair of the Ray Summit, chair of the NLP Summit, and host of the Data Exchange podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @BigData. This newsletter is produced by Gradient Flow.