I may have missed this tidbit in postings from some other folks, and if so I apologize, but I do find it interesting.

In one area Granville lists these accomplishments

Post Doctorate at Cambridge University and U.N.C. Chapel Hill.
Ph.D. in Mathematics, University of Namur, Belgium, 1993, summa cum laude.
Laureate of the Belgian Olympiad of Mathematics.

and specifically states extensive post-doctoral work with Dr. R. L. Smith, both at Cambridge and at U.N.C. Chapel Hill. However, nothing in any of Dr. Smith’s publications or c.v. has any mention of Granville.

Those discrepancies, with his extremely uninformed (and much worse, in regards to women and people with disabilities) views on vaccinations, have led me to advise students to avoid his work and articles.

The commentary inside brackets are mine:

Vincent Granville (AnalyticsBridge, DataScienceCentral)

“Vincent co-founded AnalyticsBridge, DataScienceCentral in 2011 and claims to perform…

[article continues describing both companies and then in the second paragraph, goes to describe his background which ends with…]

“His area of expertise lies in analytics, big data and data science.”

Which I think should be now changed to:

His areas of expertise: lies, analytics, big data and data science.

It turns out, it was another Laetitia Van Cauwenberge post. She could be a real woman, but if she is, she’s just acting as a front/editor for Granville’s writing. Every article she writes (which scrolling through top posts appears to be daily) is basically just quoting VG and linking to his other blog posts and papers.

They posted the author’s photo as if she was writing for DSC (after questioning her approach and analysis). What’s worse? There were actually 6 authors on the original article and it was a tutorial from a coding school. So, it wasn’t even an analysis, it was an example of how to implement kNN. I suspect he just had to call it out because he thought it was a woman writing it. And you know what? It was a good article. I’m going to be sure to share hers on twitter, and let the coding camp know DSC posted it that way.

Original:
http://blog.cambridgecoding.com/2016/01/16/machine-learning-under-the-hood-writing-your-own-k-nearest-neighbour-algorithm/

DSC re-post:
http://www.datasciencecentral.com/profiles/blogs/k-nearest-neighbor-algorithm-using-python

Clicked on a link to this article not knowing it would take me to DSC. Recognized your “female author”. Couldn’t count how many times I rolled my eyes reading the article and and linked articles by the same author.
http://www.datasciencecentral.com/m/blogpost?id=6448529%3ABlogPost%3A374318

LOL

Based on a linkedin account with 1 item under experience, location in Belgium, and 0 connections, plus “contact us at [his email address]” in one of “her” DSC posts, I’m inclined to agree. I see recent usage, too.

http://www.datasciencecentral.com/profile/LaetitiaVanCauwenberge

https://twitter.com/metabrown312/status/680048792305991680

Because I’m a pretty evil person. :)

https://www.quora.com/Is-vincent-granville-a-fraud?

I would consider this confirmation that she was indeed a made-up person, and also say this is a step in the right direction for Data Science Central. I hope they did the same with any other faked accounts.

Here is some documentation about offering to pay for reviews:
http://motionpub.com/publishing/bad-idea-paying-amazon-reviews/

He posted an apology. (I am so tempted to put “apology” in quotes, but I’m still thinking about how to best respond.)
https://twitter.com/analyticbridge/status/618529569771945984

I wanted to make sure I had permission to thank him publicly before posting, but now I can: Thanks Gerard de Melo for alerting me to this post on Facebook!

(which has since been deleted, so see the screenshots)

Seems like this post resonated with a lot of people. My tweet about it got 47 RTs overnight: https://twitter.com/BecomingDataSci/status/618233743522852865

It’s super unfortunate that he moderates the very popular LI group: Advanced Business Analytics, Data Mining and Predictive Modeling

As soon as you challenge his ideas – comment or thread deleted.

I’m not going to add any comment other than to say that we hadn’t heard a response from Vincent Granville about all this (except for suspending my Data Science Central account), until now…

thanks to a reader for telling me about this facebook comment he saw by Vincent Granville (on his Analytic Bridge account) about me:
https://www.facebook.com/burton.lee/posts/10153315598360971?comment_id=10153316728250971&offset=0&total_comments=5&comment_tracking=%7B%22tn%22%3A%22R1%22%7D

and in case it gets edited/deleted, here is a screenshot:
https://www.becomingadatascientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/vincent_granville_data_science_renee_comment_single.jpg
in context:
https://www.becomingadatascientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/vincent_granville_data_science_renee_comment.png

PS. I have worked with Alesia, and confirm that she is a bona fide female person.

Wow, that is disturbing!!

https://www.linkedin.com/pub/amy-sangrene/73/b78/b97

Did that today and it was a post by “Amy”. Apparently her handle on DSC is now “Data Science Girl”. Ugh.

Well, maybe Mr. Granville saw us calling him out for the fake LinkedIN profiles and such and decided to anonymize “Amy”.

Hi Alesia!

The fact that you’re real doesn’t “disappoint” me (unlike Amy, your LinkedIN profile looks believable). I’m curious, have you ever interacted with “Amy”? What’s your take on that account?

Are you on twitter? I’d like to add you to my Women in Data Science list.

Renee

Hi guys,

sorry to disappoint you, but I’m a real woman and I have my profile is real:
http://www.datasciencecentral.com/profile/Alesia

If you don’t believe in it, here is my company (DataDrivenBusiness) “Contact us” page: http://www.datadrivenbiz.com/contact-us.php

I’m running most of our analytics events in HR analytics, Insurance Analytics, Text Analytics, Smart Travel Analytics etc.

Cheers,
Alesia.

It’s hard to imagine someone wouldn’t know that a contact is using their former name to create a public profile… I see her LinkedIN profile is pretty sparse, though, so maybe she just isn’t on the site much and isn’t aware of the other.

She’s actually in my “day job” area of work (development/fundraising), so maybe I’ll contact her and find out whether she knows…

wow…. so this has been going on for quite a while then!

Happy to mention your “Binder”, and I look forward to your upcoming post!

Thanks for your research, everyone. This is… interesting!

I’m seriously considering starting an alternative to DSC… in which case I will be very happy to get millions of followers! I’ll keep you all updated on that front :)

(Not likely to happen until at least May when I finish grad school)

The result of my Sherlocking is:

1) There is a real Amy Cordan. Her present name is Amy Henriques and you can find her on LinkedIn. You can also verify her other surnames with a simple veromi.net search (specify Pennsylvania).

2) Paris Granville is married to Vincent. You can find her on LinkedIn as well, listed as working for the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction. Interestingly, though she does not mention that she is also employed by her husband’s company, she does show that Amy Cordan has endorsed her French and other skillsets.

3) The connection I have discovered is that both Amy and Paris studied French at the University of Northern Iowa at the same time (1994 – 1998). There are other nuances involving the French connection, but that one grabs me best.

So what do we have here, folks? Did Amy have her name appropriated by Vincent or Paris? Or does Amy have a second, hidden identity? I doubt the latter given that Amy’s entire formal education is in the foreign language arts.

It is all almost as intriguing as it is stupid. I feel my interest waning as my mattress beckons.

I’ll check back to see if anyone contributes an epilogue… or epitaph… or even some epinephrine if you have any.

Years ago, I was surfing Craigslist (w4m) and came upon a posting that had a photo of a luscious babe – self-described as a “fractal expert”. Fractals were big in the nineties.

I wrote to the poster, and received a reply from “Amy Cordan”. However, I was never able to raise up a subsequent response from “her”. I did some web surfing and came up with a link of some sort indicating that “Amy” worked for one Vincent Granville….

Soooo… being slightly psychotic, I found Vincent’s home phone number up there in the northwest, and I called him to inquire about Amy. He became instantly and intensely agitated, and yelled into the phone “Don’t ever mention her name again to me!” and hung up.

This was all a long time ago, maybe ten years or so…

I still have a copy of the fractal, and a sexy photo of Amy in my Temp directory…

Write to me if you want to see them.

I also count both Vincent and “Amy” among my LinkedIn contacts. I wonder if Vincent will figure out which one I am. I know that, if he does, Amy will too.

With odds of .002%, the exercise will prove just how sharp he is.

I also looked into the patents he lists. Now, I *know* I’m no good at reading patent documents. I can see the application dates on the patents and “publication date” – 18 months after the application, the US Patent Bureau “publishes” patents – prior to that, the contents are secret. I don’t see any evidence that any of the patents were granted but maybe I just know how or where to look.

I’m going to produce a list of fake data science profiles. Please contact me at rstanzach@datascience.stanford.edu, I would be happy to read your thoughts about Vincent Ganville, Amy Cordon and a few others. Claiming to have a PhD when you don’t even have a college degree is very unethical. These people should be barred from ever earning a college degree.

Best regards,
Ronald

So why don’t we use real data science to beat him. For now, we are just a little group of complainers, who claim me know better than VG, but what about applying our data science knowledge to make Renee’s blog followed by one million people, rather than a couple dozens. That’s the only way to discredit him, Amy and all the fakes. Though making a business out of trashing someone else is not the best way to become successful, but what else can we do?

Sounds like word is starting to get around as more and more people get suspicious of Data Science Central’s content.

Thanks for posting a link to this discussion. Your info on “Amy” combined with the questions in the LinkedIN discussion cast even more doubt and appear to confirm some of my suspicions. So sketchy…

Also, I agree with Alton’s comment on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/10altoids/status/540249639992041473

+1 I am happy to see that I am not the only one to think that of him.

Here is another LinkedIn group that practices censorship: ‘Statistics And Analytics Consultants Group.’

Reneee,
I put a link to this discussion about Data Science Central into the middle of our discussion about same.
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/Data-science-versus-statistics-solve-8156839.S.5932985228309069826?trk=groups_items_see_more-0-b-cmr
By Diego Kuonen

RE: Amy Cordon
RESP: We noticed that Amy never answered our emails. Then we found that she has at least three completely different pictures. One is from an Obamacare ad and that girl was named in the media—her name is not Amy.

See below.

I’ll check it out – thanks!

Renee,

Please consider joining our LinkedIn Group: About Data Analysis, as a prelude to your introducing your alternative.

A number of us met on blogs like Data Science Central. What we saw led us to found our own group, About Data Analysis. There are so many founders watching everything that systematic fraud is unlikely. We are open to more founders/managers too.