Category: Summer of Data Science 2017

Posts about my Summer of Data Science projects

Feb 22

Promo for my SCaLE 16x talk

A promo video for my SCaLE 16x talk. This one features Mr. Spock and Flash the Linux Cat. As noted in my comments, pretty much all you need to know is that I named my cats Floppy and Flash.

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Aug 31

National Transportation Data Challenge @ JupyterCon

I was asked to join the team running the National Transportation Data Challenge, not as a data scientist, but as a project manager to help keep all the big data people on track and moving forward. It’s an interesting use of my skillset and after a slow start I’ve been devoting more and more of my time to it. After lots of work behind the scenes, we showcased the Challenge to a more general public last week at JupyterCon in New York.

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Jul 26

Retail: A tale of two charts

… a more careful understanding of the data might suggest that Amazon is a lot more important than it may seem at first glance, and that the lack of benefit from “savings” in other areas can easily be understood when the data is explored more thoroughly. As a data scientist, that’s the kind of thing I need to be able to do in order to tell a story that is not only compelling, but accurate.

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Jul 10

Udacity Deep Learning Nanodegree — Part 3

I found TensorFlow initially confusing but then quite comfortable. It’s odd how after programming in a language like Python for a while, it becomes confusing that you have to declare “placeholders” (variables) and constants up-front, then initialize them.

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Jun 26

Udacity Deep Learning Nanodegree – Part II

I left last week’s PyData Meetup with more questions than answers. Questions like “why does that neural net I just wrote perform the way it does?” So, with a couple of weeks left until the next project is due, I decided to go back and revisit the second half of the neural networks topic before moving forward.

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Jun 21

Udacity Deep Learning Nanodegree – Part I

There is little here that I could not learn on my own. But I find that it’s useful to learn along with others, and the structure that programs like this provide can be useful, so long as it isn’t too expensive. For myself, the structure and ability to discuss issues and problems with others were the key things that made this summer’s effort worth the $600.

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