events/meetups – Becoming A Data Scientist

Tom Tom Fest Applied Machine Learning Conference 2019

Renee — Sun, 10 Mar 2019 19:39:28 +0000

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 there!

Hi #DemystifyDS Attendees!

Renee — Wed, 27 Sep 2017 15:07:24 +0000

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.

If you haven’t signed up for the conference yet, it’s free online, going on now (10am to 10pm 9/27/2017) and you can sign up at this link. Everyone who registers will get access to the videos afterward.

Here’s some stuff to help you on your data science journey!

Becoming a Data Scientist Podcast

Audio on iTunes (or other “podcatcher” apps – just search “Becoming a Data Scientist”)
Video on YouTube
Twitter list of podcast guests

Data Science Learning Club

DataSciGuide Data Science Learning Resource Directory

@becomingdatasci (me!) on twitter

My Flipboard Magazines – Becoming a Data Scientist, Data Science Tutorials, and Bias in Data Science

Twitter list of over 1200 Women in Data Science and related disciplines to follow!

And some blog posts from this blog I’d like to highlight:

PyData DC “Becoming a Data Scientist – Advice from my Podcast Guests” Talk (Longer version of the talk I gave today)
A Challenge to Data Scientists – on bias in machine learning
Introductory Machine Learning Terminology with Food
Summer of Data Science (Southern Hemisphere edition coming soon!)
Boosting as a Metaphor for Diverse Teams

Thanks to Metis for hosting the Demystifying Data Science conference today! If we’re able to post the videos of our talks publicly in the future, i’ll post it here.

Thanks for dropping by! Connect with me on twitter for any follow-up questions!

Becoming a Data Scientist Podcast Special Episode

Renee — Mon, 14 Nov 2016 03:59:06 +0000

The hosts of 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!

Episode Audio (mp3) – also available on iTunes, Stitcher, etc.
(note, there is no video for this episode)

On the panel:

Chris Albon (Twitter) (Website)
Joel Grus (Twitter) (Website)
Natalie Jackson (Twitter) (Website)
Jonathon Morgan (Twitter) (Website)
Andrew Musselman (Twitter)
Mark Stephenson (Twitter) (Website)
Renee Teate (Twitter) (Website)
Andrew Therriault (Twitter) (Website)

PyData DC 2016 Talk

Renee — Tue, 11 Oct 2016 05:00:36 +0000

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 DC!

“Becoming a Data Scientist” Learning Club?

Renee — Mon, 09 Nov 2015 02:12:37 +0000

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!

I’m imagining picking a topic/project, finding resources showing how to do it, and introducing it to the club at the end of a podcast episode. Then, everyone that wants to participate in learning how to do that particular thing will go off for maybe 2 weeks, work on it and learn what they can, ask questions to each other in a common area like a blog post comment thread, create things and post them to a shared space, then at the end of the period post comments about what they learned and how it went. People could write blog posts about their projects and I would collect those and link to all of them from the original post. Anyone that already knows how to do it could help answer questions if they wanted to participate, too. I might invite some of the participants to talk about their learning experience on a follow-up episode, then the notes and results would be posted for future learners to find.

I think learning together would be fun and valuable, and this type of experience would fall somewhere between learning on your own and taking a class. It would include the pros of learning on your own and exploring, while offsetting some of the cons of going at it alone. It would be a significant time commitment on my part, so I want to make sure other people would join in before I commit. What do you think? Would you join a “data science learning club” and participate in something like this and find it valuable? It’s kind of like the Summer of Data Science, but we’d be learning the same things simultaneously and sharing our results. No one would be “teaching” the group necessarily, but we’d share resources and answer each other’s questions based on what we did individually.

Let me know in the comments or on twitter if you would find this valuable and if you want me to lead it!

Girl Develop It! Meetup

Renee — Tue, 03 Mar 2015 03:35:25 +0000

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 week!

Charlottesville Data Science Internships

Renee — Sat, 07 Feb 2015 19:56:13 +0000

There is going to be a meetup on February 23rd in Charlottesville, VA where local companies will present their data science internship opportunities and talk about data science work in general. This will be my first time going to a C’ville Data Science meetup, and I hope to bring some JMU students with me to check it out! I’m especially interested to see what local companies are doing in this field.

Here is a link for the meetup RSVP:
http://93c8bd6327df765cc17b343e7a.doorkeeper.jp/events/20668

I have heard that these companies will be there:
Arqball
CCRi
Elder Research
MDA
timbr.io

Post below if you plan to go. JMU students, contact me if you need a ride from Harrisonburg!