Luigi in Production, Luigi in Production Part 2
Luigi Patruno is a Data Scientist focused on helping companies utilize machine learning to create competitive advantages for their business. As the Director of Data Science at 2U, Luigi leads the development of machine learning models and MLOps infrastructure for predicting student success outcomes across 2U’s portfolio of university partners. As the Founder of MLinProduction.com, Luigi creates and curates content to educate machine learning practitioners about best practices for running resilient machine learning systems in production. Luigi has consulted on data science and machine learning at Fortune 500 companies and start-ups and has taught graduate level courses in Statistics and Big Data Engineering. He has a M.S. in Computer Science and a B.S. in Mathematics.
At the moment Demetrios is immersing himself in Machine Learning by interviewing experts from around the world in the weekly MLOps.community meetups. Demetrios is constantly learning and engaging in new activities to get uncomfortable and learn from his mistakes. He tries to bring creativity into every aspect of his life, whether that be analyzing the best paths forward, overcoming obstacles, or building lego houses with his daughter.
Vishnu Rachakonda is the operations lead for the MLOps Community and co-hosts the MLOps Coffee Sessions podcast. He is a machine learning engineer at Tesseract Health, a 4Catalyzer company focused on retinal imaging. In this role, he builds machine learning models for clinical workflow augmentation and diagnostics in on-device and cloud use cases. Since studying bioengineering at Penn, Vishnu has been actively working in the fields of computational biomedicine and MLOps. In his spare time, Vishnu enjoys suspending all logic to watch Indian action movies, playing chess, and writing.
Luigi shares with us why he started ML in Production - he saw a lot of irrelevant content; a lot of clickbait with low standards of quality.
He had an entrepreneurial itch and the solution was to start a weekly newsletter. From there he started creating blog posts and now teamed up with Sam Charrington of TWIML to create courses on SagMaker ML. , Learning Voraciously: We talk a lot in the community about how to learn and upskill in an efficient way. Luigi provided great insight into how he applies certain principles to his learning practices.
One tip he shared is to rigorously read and digest books. Luigi himself has used books to address his knowledge gaps in areas like product, finance, etc. I appreciated the emphasis on books. A lot of the reason we feel inundated by new learning resources is that they are online. Emphasizing books, which are often far higher-quality than blog posts, can slow things down and focus our learning. Leadership Patience: Lately, Luigi has been spending more time managing projects and the data science team at 2U. He shared a lot of his insights into how to manage data science and machine learning properly. One of the most important things he emphasized to us was his patient attitude towards solving problems important to leadership.
Turning around organizations is hard work. It's slow, it takes energy, and it is a nonlinear process. As he has course-corrected at various times as a data science leader, Luigi has brought admirable patience to the task, which has helped him be more successful on the things that matter to the entire company. Communication Flows: It's easy to imagine Luigi as a great communicator, given his experience running MLInProduction.com.
In our conversation, he showed us how he puts it to use in his management style. Luigi shared the importance of understanding how communication flows across an organization. Being aware of this is crucial to working on the right, most impactful things. Having a pulse on what different groups and leaders are thinking about can help you evaluate your impact as a team. Definitely check out this episode with Luigi here!