Becoming a Data Scientist Episode 17: Andrew Therriault

May 29, 2019

In the first episode of the Becoming a Data Scientist podcast recorded in front of a live audience, Renee interviews Andrew Therriault – formerly the Director of Data Science for the Democratic National Committee & Chief Data Officer for the City of Boston, and currently Data Science Manager at Facebook – about how he learned data science, what advice he has for people who want to learn data science and apply for data science jobs, and about his career path as a Data Scientist and leader in the field.

Episode 17 Audio

Read More

Tom Tom Fest Applied Machine Learning Conference 2019

March 10, 2019

The 2019 iteration of Tom Tom Fest (named after Thomas Jefferson) starts in under a month, and the Applied Machine Learning Conference (AMLC) is just over a month away, on April 11, in Charlottesville, VA! This is a conference I’ve helped plan since the beginning, and it’s grown in 3 years from a single theater with a partial day of talks to 4 theaters with non-stop presentations all day, plus keynotes in an even larger venue! An exciting announcement from me is that I will be recording a short episode of my Becoming a Data Scientist Podcast in front of a live audience for the first time at the AMLC! I’ll be interviewing Andrew Therriault, one of our keynote speakers, about how he became an Infrastructure Data Science Manager at Facebook, after starting out with degrees in politics, and working as the Director of Data Science for the Democratic National Committee, and the Chief Data Officer for the City of Boston, among other roles. I am featuring an AMLC speaker each day with the #AMLCville hashtag on twitter. You can learn more about all of our speakers (still more to be added!) and get tickets on the conference website. Hope to see you...

Read More

Becoming a Data Scientist Podcast Episode 16: Randy Olson

March 22, 2017


Renee interviews Randal S. Olson, Senior Data Scientist in the Institute for Biomedial Informatics at UPenn, about his path to becoming a data scientist, his interesting data science blog posts, and his work with non-data-scientists and students.

Podcast Audio Links:
Link to podcast Episode 16 audio
Podcast’s RSS feed for podcast subscription apps

Read More

Becoming a Data Scientist Podcast Episode 15: David Meza

January 29, 2017


David Meza is Chief Knowledge Architect at NASA, and talks to Renee in this episode about his educational background, his early work at NASA, and examples of his work with multidisciplinary teams. He also describes a project involving a graph database that improved search capabilities so NASA engineers could more easily find “lessons learned”.


Podcast Audio Links:
Link to podcast Episode 15 audio
Podcast’s RSS feed for podcast subscription apps

Read More

Becoming a Data Scientist Podcast Episode 14: Jasmine Dumas

January 10, 2017


In this first episode of “Season 2” of Becoming a Data Scientist podcast, we meet Jasmine Dumas, a new data scientist who tells us about going from biomedical engineering into a data science project experience and then finding her first job as a data scientist.


Podcast Audio Links:
Link to podcast Episode 14 audio
Podcast’s RSS feed for podcast subscription apps

Read More

Podcast Special Episode 2 – The Future of AI with Dr. Ed Felten

December 29, 2016

In this audio-only special Becoming a Data Scientist Podcast episode, I interview Dr. Ed Felten, Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer, about the Future of Artificial Intelligence (from The White House!).

Read More