Thank you!

Thank you for being a member of the Project Botticelli learning community in 2015. All of us, including the content authors, appreciate it, very much.

20% off: our best-ever promotion

We reserve our best promotion, 20% off all memberships, for these last few days of December. It is once-a-year only, and I will not offer it again until the end of 2016. If you are thinking of renewing, or joining us as a Full Access Member, please take advantage of it before the year ends, as the code will expire on 1 January 2016. It is valid on all memberships, including group memberships. Use code

HAPPYHOLIDAYS2015

at checkout. If you have an existing membership, this will extend it by a full year. So, if you have a training budget that needs spending, now is the time... And thanks!

Plans

This is a reproduction of one of my older silver-gelatin prints, from a negative which I took in the Tioga Pass area of Yosemite National Park in California, a few winters ago. I am hoping to devote more time to my photographic avocation in the next few weeks because I know that the following few months will be very busy with data science and advanced analytics. Microsoft have asked me to deliver a roadshow focused on Cortana, and SQL Server 2016, and their R advanced analytics services in several countries around the world, and my data mining work has never been busier. Even though I have been focusing on it for almost a full decade, the last year took me by surprise with the renewed interest in this technology. Above all, there is a business readiness for the kind of solutions we can now deliver using predictive technologies that was absent even three years ago.

I have managed to train some 130 new data scientists this year. These classroom courses have been popular, so I will be adding new dates throughout 2016. I will announce them in this newsletter. I will be recording this course to offer it as videos, too. This will take most of the year, but I will be offering new modules as they become available. I held back on this project waiting for the UI of Azure ML to stabilise, but I am not sure I can wait much longer, even though the UI will be changing, again!...

In the meantime, you may want to have a look at my most recent data science PPTs, which I have presented in November and December.

We will be refreshing the web site over the next few months, no doubt some of you may get a survey to complete. Thank you for your feedback, also by email: just hit reply. I mean it: all ideas are very welcome! We will be introducing a new pricing scheme, in which you buy individual courses, as opposed to having to buy a membership-based access to everything. However, anyone who is a Full Access Member will retain their full privileges until your membership runs out. We will also provide upgrade paths for all existing members—I am very grateful to you, some of you have been loyally supporting us for a long time, since we started four years ago.

Happy Holidays!

May I wish you a lovely, restful time with your family and friends, perhaps away from analytics for a while. Merry Christmas, New Year, Las Posadas, Hogmanay, Sylwester, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa or perhaps Festivus! Happy holidays, everyone!

See you in 2016,

Rafal