What I've been up to

[klwilliams]

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

Comments

[galeni.livejournal.com]

Congratulations!

[aberwyn.livejournal.com]

Whee! Congrats!

[shutt3rg33k.livejournal.com]

Data science is big money right now. The Information School at UCB has added a degree just for data scientists, MIDS.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

This sounds terrific. And congratulations!

[durham-rambler.livejournal.com]

Congratulations too.
Though, as an Englishman, it's clear to me that your training set is American. For example:
I do like to eat fish and ... wildlife?
Is this the end of writer's block?

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Following your lead I tried: I do like to be beside the... point?

Well, not so far off!

Also, now I can tell people I know a real live Data Scientist - how cool is that?

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

We only had four training set options: US English, Russian, Danish, and Finnish. One fun thing to do is to enter a word, then enter that word and its predicted word, and so on just to see what kind of sentence you get. You can do the same thing with a smartphone that predicts words when you type. I saw a video on YouTube of a song made from the "sentences" from an Apple prediction engine. Very funny.

[acanthusleaf.livejournal.com]

Hooray for you! I hope it helps the rest of your illustrious career!

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

Congratulations :)