Leland McInnes has spent his career building tools a lot data scientists take for granted (UMAP, HDBSCAN), and amusingly the applications of those tools keep getting stranger. On this episode of The Test Set, he tells Michael, Hadley, and Wes about teams tracking laundered gold through mineral impurities, and the time he helped casinos optimize slot machine layouts. Also, why nobody's intuition survives contact with high-dimensional space. On this episode of The Test Set, we hit all that, plus imposter syndrome, AI as a sounding board, and the case for asking better questions instead of chasing answers.
What's inside
Wild UMAP use cases, e.g., catching laundered gold
Why casinos pay mathematicians to rearrange slot machines
High-dimensional space and how it defies human intuition
Neural embeddings for people who aren't AI researchers
Imposter syndrome — across two disciplines
Leland’s take on AI as a rubber-duck testing partner
“Look at your data" because it legit beats guessing
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