Friday, April 18, 2014

Week 12 : Zipfian Academy - And That's All folks....

And so, all great things must come to an end. This is the final week for the bootcamp program. We continued interview prep, white boarding and code reviews. Apparently interviewing feels like having a full time job. Towards the end of the week, we continued with project one on ones, some more white boarding and interview prep, runtime and complexity analysis.

At the end of the week, we had a get together to celebrate the past the 12 weeks. A handful of alums from the last cohort attended and it's kind of cool to see what past alums are doing now.. some are at stealth startups and startups while others are working at some very impressive companies.

Highlights of the week:
  • We had a guest lecture from former cosmologist and Data Scientist @datamusing on using topic models to understand restaurant reviews. The topics were learned from the review corpus using LDA and NNMF. He also had a pretty cool d3 + flask visualization to show the results
  • We spent a day at the Big Data Innovation Summit. The morning talks mostly felt like business sales pitches. The afternoon talks were a lot more interesting as there were breakouts for Data Science, Machine Learning, Hadoop, etc  
  • In the Data Science breakouts, there were a lot of LDA related talks including using topic modeling in Health Care and using LDA to extract features for matches in a dating website. 
  • Lots of interview prep and white boarding 

And so this is it. My hope is that someone actually finds my ramblings over the past 12 weeks somewhat helpful in forging their own path into Data Science......signing off.

1 comment:

  1. Ikechukwu...Congratulations! I have been following your 12 week journey at Zipfian Academy. Your posts has been very useful to me. I am new in data science. I have been reading your blog posts and other blogs to get myself educated in this field. I learned about Zipfian through your blog. I had a chance to chat with Ryan and Jonathan on Google hangout last week. My background has been in instructional and web design. I am taking some classes to prep myself in the data science field. I am very determined to get in this field. I really like data science. Your blog post has been very helpful. Please do say hello to Ryan Obran. Good luck and I am sure you will do well.....Jaya

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