What I've been up to

When I was working at Discovia as Director of Innovation, one area I wanted to look at but just didn't have time for was data science. This, like big data, is one of the big industry catchphrases, and essentially means digging through sets of data and figuring out answers to questions, answers that can be used to help people (or to help the company). When I was laid off, I started poking around on Coursera, a MOOC as they're called, which is a site that offers online courses that tens of thousands of people around the world can take at the same time. These courses are offered by universities around the world, and are made up of video lectures, quizzes, peer-graded projects, and forums for discussion.

One set of courses caught my eye, the Data Science Specialization offered by Johns Hopkins University. You can not only take the classes for free, for a small fee you can take the classes in the Signature Track, where Coursera verifies that you are the one taking the quizzes and turning in the projects, which is what I did. Now, after about a year of courses, including all of the Data Science Specialization plus a Machine Learning course and a very good statistics course, I've passed all the Data Science courses (including the Capstone project), and as soon as the paperwork is complete I'll have my Certificate.

I'm a Data Scientist now.

And these are some of my projects:

My Capstone project prediction app
My Capstone project slides about the app

and, for those really interested, is

My machine learning project