DataOps
DataOps is an automated, process-oriented methodology, used by analytic and data teams, to improve the quality and reduce the cycle time of data analytics. While DataOps began as a set of best practices, it has now matured to become a new and independent approach to data analytics. DataOps applies to the entire data lifecycle from data preparation to reporting, and recognizes the interconnected nature of the data analytics team and information technology operations. From a process and methodology perspective, DataOps applies Agile software development, DevOps software development practices and the statistical process control used in lean manufacturing, to data analytics. In DataOps, development of new analytics is streamlined using Agile software development, an iterative project management methodology that replaces the traditional Waterfall sequential methodology. Studies show that software development projects complete significantly faster and with far fewer defects when Agile Development is used. The Agile methodology is particularly effective in environments where requirements are quickly evolving – a situation well known to data analytics professionals. DevOps focuses on continuous delivery by leveraging on-demand IT resources and by automating test and deployment of analytics. This merging of software development and IT operations has improved velocity, quality, predictability and scale of software engineering and deployment. Borrowing methods from DevOps, DataOps seeks to bring these same improvements to data analytics. Like lean manufacturing, DataOps utilizes statistical process control (SPC) to monitor and control the data analytics pipeline. With SPC in place, the data flowing through an operational system is constantly monitored and verified to be working. If an anomaly occurs, the data analytics team can be notified through an automated alert. DataOps is not tied to a particular technology, architecture, tool, language or framework. Tools that support DataOps promote collaboration, orchestration, agility, quality, security, access and ease of use. …

CoSegNet
We introduce CoSegNet, a deep neural network architecture for co-segmentation of a set of 3D shapes represented as point clouds. CoSegNet takes as input a set of unsegmented shapes, proposes per-shape parts, and then jointly optimizes the part labelings across the set subjected to a novel group consistency loss expressed via matrix rank estimates. The proposals are refined in each iteration by an auxiliary network that acts as a weak regularizing prior, pre-trained to denoise noisy, unlabeled parts from a large collection of segmented 3D shapes, where the part compositions within the same object category can be highly inconsistent. The output is a consistent part labeling for the input set, with each shape segmented into up to K (a user-specified hyperparameter) parts. The overall pipeline is thus weakly supervised, producing consistent segmentations tailored to the test set, without consistent ground-truth segmentations. We show qualitative and quantitative results from CoSegNet and evaluate it via ablation studies and comparisons to state-of-the-art co-segmentation methods. …

Stochastic Computation Graph (SCG)
Stochastic computation graphs are directed acyclic graphs that encode the dependency structure of computation to be performed. The graphical notation generalizes directed graphical models. …

Smooth Density Spatial Quantile Regression
We derive the properties and demonstrate the desirability of a model-based method for estimating the spatially-varying effects of covariates on the quantile function. By modeling the quantile function as a combination of I-spline basis functions and Pareto tail distributions, we allow for flexible parametric modeling of the extremes while preserving non-parametric flexibility in the center of the distribution. We further establish that the model guarantees the desired degree of differentiability in the density function and enables the estimation of non-stationary covariance functions dependent on the predictors. We demonstrate through a simulation study that the proposed method produces more efficient estimates of the effects of predictors than other methods, particularly in distributions with heavy tails. To illustrate the utility of the model we apply it to measurements of benzene collected around an oil refinery to determine the effect of an emission source within the refinery on the distribution of the fence line measurements. …