Jake Mannix on Recommendation Systems, Physics, and the Best Answer to Our Questions Yet

Summary: In this episode, Frank and Andy talk to Jake Mannix, an accomplished data engineer who has had an amazing career.<br> Links<br> Sponsor: Audible.com - Get a free audio book when you sign up for a free trial!<br> Notable Quotes<br> Frank heartily recommends Head Strong (00:50)<br> It takes a lot of time to fly from Farmville to India... (2:40)<br> Audible is a sponsor! (04:00)<br> Jake is a Chief Data Engineer for LucidWorks (06:15)<br> Jake describes a cool Systems Development Cycle... (10:00)<br> ... and compares and contrasts with Customer Service and Product Engineering. (12:00)<br> Sometimes this cycle works "too good!" (13:10)<br> Learn more about Lucene. (15:00)<br> We now search by typing questions. Not terms. (15:40)<br> More about Query-Intent Classification... (17:10)<br> "How Do I Do Brain Surgery" - Google Search (18:25)<br> Smart search is based on closed loop analysis of "who clicks on what." (19:30)<br> One example of public search datasets: Google Trends. (21:30)<br> What is a garage-door opener? (22:00)<br> "We expect a lot from search these days." (26:10)<br> Searching Amazon for garage door. (26:40)<br> "Data is their foundation." (28:00)<br> "I'm a data engineer." (31:00)<br> "Math is fun but it's 5% of the work." What is most of the work? Data cleansing. (31:20)<br> On tensors... (31:40)<br> Jake likes to run long distances over mountains! (33:10)<br> Jake thinks self-driving cars will be cool. (37:30)<br> Jake shares his encounter with the Moonies, which wins the Something Different About Yourself segment (to date). (39:35)<br> Jake and his daughter like to listen to audio books. (43:20)<br> Learn more about Jake on LinkedIn! (44:00)<br> Jak helped build LinkedIn's search engine! (44:44)<br> Check out the LucidWorks blog. (45:00)