Designing Data Governance from the Ground Up

Chapter 2Select Data Stewards

Andrew Ng is a machine learning (ML) pioneer. He co-founded and served as Head of Google Brain, built the Artificial Intelligence group at Baidu, and co-founded Coursera, alongside his work as an adjunct professor at Stanford. When Ng gives advice on the state of ML, people listen. And his assessment of the industry’s future shows some gaps to fill.^[9]

“When a system isn’t performing well, many teams instinctually try to improve the Code,” Ng writes. “But for many practical applications, it’s more effective instead to focus on improving the Data.” Ng elaborates that historically, ML progressed through efforts to improve code while researchers held the data fixed in benchmark datasets. To see significant progress ...