Podcasts Technology Datacast Episode 46: From Building Recommendation Systems To Teaching Online Courses with Frank Kane

Episode 46: From Building Recommendation Systems To Teaching Online Courses with Frank Kane

Published: Oct. 29, 2020, 1 p.m.

Show Notes

  • (2:05) Frank reflected on his undergraduate experience studying Electrical Engineering at the University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth.
  • (3:33) Frank commented on his experience working in the game industry after school.
  • (6:28) Frank went over the opportunity to work as a software engineer at Amazon, where he contributed to the personalization system that recommends products to customers at a scale of tens of thousands of requests per second.
  • (8:44) Frank brought up the challenges of building Amazon’s recommendation systems back in the early days.
  • (10:14) Frank discussed how Amazon’s recommendations and content optimization technology evolved incrementally during his time as a Senior Manager.
  • (12:05) Frank touched on the core engineering challenges during his time as a Senior Manager of Technology at IMDB.
  • (14:19) Frank spoke about his proudest accomplishments at Amazon, both from the technical and the management perspectives.
  • (18:19) Frank shared the story behind his professional transition into self-employment (check out his book “Self-Employment: Building an Internet Business of One”).
  • (24:07) Frank shared a brief overview of his business (Sundog Software)'s virtual reality products.
  • (25:15) Frank shared how he came to be an online instructor, discussed the pros/cons, and gave advice for aspiring ones.
  • (29:38) Frank has created various courses that focus on Apache Spark, ranging from Python and Scala support to Spark Streaming capability.
  • (31:34) Frank discussed how the Hadoop ecosystem has fallen out of favor (check out his popular Udemy courses titled “The Ultimate Hands-On Hadoop”).
  • (33:20) Frank touched on ElasticSearch - an industry-standard open-source search engine (check out his Manning live videos on ElasticSearch 6 and ElasticSearch 7).
  • (37:08) Frank provided his perspectives on the current landscape of recommendation systems research and applications.
  • (42:17) Frank advised scientists and engineers on how to communicate with non-technical colleagues effectively.
  • (43:25) Closing segment.

His Contact Info

His Recommended Resources

Use the codes below to get a discount from Frank's live video course on Manning called "Machine Learning, Data Science and Deep Learning with Python":

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