The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 13 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Ancestry embeds data scientists into software teams to ensure production readiness
“What we've found, at least at Ancestry, is that we have to embed our data science Scientists into the actual engineering teams and make them talk every day. It improves the feature engineering, improves the domain knowledge, improves the likelihood that engine…”
Predictive machine learning models are useless if they cannot inform interventions
“One of the key learnings was that just because something's predictive doesn't mean that it's actionable.”
Entity extraction elevated Ancestry's worst-performing data collections into its top 10
“It took what was some of our worst performing collections out of our 30,000, ah, collections, and put some of those collections into our top 10 best, ah, best collections.”
Technical architecture mirrors organizational structure, requiring coordinated team and system decoupling
“It's uncanny how technical architecture follows an organization, and so if you want to decouple systems, you have to decouple the organization. If you want tightly, ah, integrated, if you want something tightly integrated, you have to tightly integrate the org…”
Granting academics access to large datasets creates a data science recruiting pipeline
“If you have a large data set and can make it available for academic research, then you could create yourself a pipeline of potentially good data science candidates because they know how to deal with large amounts of data, but they also know your data pretty we…”
Ancestry has 2.7 million paying subscribers and leads online family history
“So, ah, at Ancestry.com, we're the largest online resource for family history, and, ah, we've got 2.7 million paying subscribers.”
Ancestry generated $480 million in 2012 revenue across eight countries
“We had, we did, ah, four hundred and eighty million dollars in revenue last year, and we've got offices in eight countries.”
Ancestry holds over 12 billion records and 10 petabytes of data
“We have over twelve billion records and images, 10 petabytes of data, and we've worked with government agencies to collect this institutional content.”
Ancestry users built over 50 million family trees containing 5 billion profiles
“We have our customers who have built over fifty million family trees with more than five billion people in these family trees and many, many of these trees have stories and photos uploaded to these trees.”
Ancestry uses user family tree attachments to train information retrieval algorithms
“Every time that a user associates some content with somebody in their family tree, they're making a judgment that we can use for training data in order to train our information retrieval algorithms.”
Adding social features shifted Ancestry family trees from deep to broad
“Initially we didn't have a lot of social features on our site, and our trees were very deep, and they were, ah, very balanced. But as we added social features to our site, it made it easier for our customers to collaborate with cousins. Ah, then they started b…”