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...

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Hi #DemystifyDS Attendees!

September 27, 2017

I’m assuming that some people who see my talk at Demystifying Data Science conference will be dropping by here, so I wanted to put up a quick post summarizing some of the resources I have made available to data science learners!

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Becoming a Data Scientist Podcast Special Episode

November 13, 2016

Becoming a Data Scientist podcast, Partially Derivative podcast, Adversarial Learning podcast, and some other awesome data people that do elections forecasting for their day jobs joined together for this talk about the US election and the subsequent major questions surrounding the predictions, since basically all of them heavily leaned toward a different overall outcome than we got. If you’re interested at all in data science surrounding political campaigns, this episode is a must-listen!

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PyData DC 2016 Talk

October 11, 2016

I just got back from PydataDC, where I learned a lot, had fun, and met a bunch of awesome people! I’ll definitely write about it more later, but I wanted to share my slides here since I told the attendees they could find them on my website. I got good feedback on the talk, and I’m so glad that my message resonated with some people! The talk was recorded and video should be out within a few weeks! Here are the slides: Becoming a Data Scientist – Advice from my Podcast Guests and the slide notes. Update 10/26: Here is the recording of my talk, with a playlist of other talks from PyData...

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“Becoming a Data Scientist” Learning Club?

November 8, 2015

I have been thinking about doing a “Becoming a Data Scientist” podcast for a long time, at least since April. The podcast would include interviews focused on how people working in various data-science-related jobs got to where they are today (how did they “become a data scientist”?). I’m getting closer to taking the dive and getting it started.

I had an idea today that would take it a step further. Imagine how book clubs work where you pick a book, go off and read it, then gather occasionally to discuss and record your thoughts. Except instead of a book club, it’s a data science learning club!

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Girl Develop It! Meetup

March 2, 2015

In the past, I’ve been “semi-anonymous” on this blog, not advertising my real name or employment. However, if I’m going to start doing “appearances”, I might as well make it easy for people to match up my blog with my name! So hello, I’m Renee Marie Parilak Teate, and I’m becoming a data scientist :) I’m about to give a talk/Q&A for our local Girl Develop It! Central Virginia chapter via Google Hangout on March 18 at 7pm EST as part of their “Day in the Life of” series featuring women in technical roles. Here’s the link: Day in the Life of a Data Analyst PLUS “What is Data Science?” with Renee Teate I would love for any ladies following this blog to attend and say hi! Update I think the meetup went well! (Other than issues with Google Hangouts On Air not allowing as many people as I read it would allow… I need to figure out how to include “viewers” that aren’t in the limited set of “video participants” for the future.) I was nervous and ad-libbing a lot of it, trying to balance between making it understandable for beginners, but including some info for the more advanced viewers. It’s tough giving a talk like this for a general audience. I had fun, though! I’ve gotten good feedback from a few attendees, and we also discussed a future meetup focusing on Geospatial/GIS data, so that was exciting! Here is the powerpoint from the data science part of my talk: What is Data Science? (PDF) The books and some of the courses we talked about are listed here, and there are links to the ones I have reviewed: Learning page For those of you that weren’t able to attend, there is a recording of the meetup here: YouTube I’ll list more links in the comments as I come across them this...

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