Alpine Data Makes Machine Learning Real for Business Execs

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Machine learning algorithms may be all the rage these days in IT circles but for most business executives it remains an esoteric concept. To help make it real for those executives, Alpine Data this week released an update to its Chorus analytics software that adds collaboration and project management capabilities designed to bring IT and business executives together around a machine learning project.

Josh Lewis, vice president of industry applications with Alpine Data, says one of the biggest challenges IT organizations routinely face beyond getting the machine learning algorithms right in the first place is getting business executives to fund the project. Chorus 6 now provides tools that make it possible for those executives to examine and discern the impact any machine learning project will have on a specific business process.

Chorus uses Jupyter Notebooks to make it possible to explore data. Written in Python, Chorus also sports an application programming interface (API) that makes it possible to pull data from both relational databases and Hadoop.

Lewis says that unless IT organizations find a way to make machine learning real for business executives, the majority of these projects stand a good chance of becoming orphans. Most business executives have heard of buzzwords such as machine learning and cognitive computing, but most are either too busy or intellectually lazy to investigate what these technologies may mean for the business, says Lewis.

Chorus 6, adds Lewis, makes it possible to include these executives in the front end of a machine learning project where their input is likely to have the most value.

It’s unclear what impact machine learning will ultimately have on the business. But the last organizations in any given vertical industry to figure it out may not be around to see how it all turns out.