Google has quietly come up with a service that some of its employees worked on called CoLaboratory. Once the Google Chrome app is downloaded, the user instantly gets the IPython open-source software for interactive computing, and multiple Python libraries; multiple people can access and process data in a browser tab in a way that’s integrated with Google Drive.
“This provides a big improvement over ad-hoc workflows involving emailing documents back and forth,” wrote Corinna Cortes, Kayur Patel, Mark Sandler Kester Tong of Google Research in the Google Research blog post.
Josh Bloom, co-founder and chief technology officer of machine learning startup Wise.io., said,
“I believe the marriage of Jupyter notebooks, the real-time collaboration of Google Docs, and in-browser computation will be most impactful in a teaching and education setting. There, the computation needs are usually minimal (and parallel compute resources are easily mixed in when needed) and the data are rarely sensitive. Gone will be the days of on-laptop language distribution installations, significantly lowering the barrier to entry.”
Enterprises looking to hire more than one data scientist to explore historical or new data on performance, usage, and other qualities and dream up smarter services or provide recommendations for their colleagues, would find applications such as CoLaboratory and the likes (such as, software from Sense, Domino Data Labs, Plotly, Mode Analytics, and Adatao) quite convenient to work with.
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(Image credit: Google Chrome App Store)
