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.
