Valley TechCon Slides This week, I gave a talk at Valley TechCon in Harrisonburg, VA (where I live), which is a conference that features tech businesses and practitioners from the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and is in its 2nd year. There were a bunch of cool topics and speakers, and it was great to see what other great tech is being built in my part of the world! I said I’d share my slides on my “SQL for Data Science” talk, so here they are! I only had 40 minutes, so this wasn’t a full tutorial, and I couldn’t really teach many different concepts, but my main goal was to point out a bunch of different stuff you could do with SQL, and how to think about creating an analytical dataset, so attendees would be aware of what was possible and what they should look up if they wanted to start learning about SQL.... Read More

Becoming a Data Scientist Episode 17: Andrew Therriault 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

RVATech Summit Slides I promised the audience at the RVATech Summit yesterday that I’d post the updated slides for my “Can a Machine be Racist or Sexist?” talk, so here they are! Here is the link to the previous post, which has a pdf version of the slides that’s almost identical, and a video from when I gave this talk at Tom Tom Fest Applied Machine Learning Conference in 2018. Here’s the blog post that was the start of researching this topic, for me. Here’s the twitter list of people who talk about Ethics & Law in AI/ML. And here’s the flipboard magazine where I collect articles on this topic.... Read More

Tom Tom Fest Applied Machine Learning Conference 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

APRA Data Analytics Symposium 2018 Hi, #APRADAS2018 Attendees! I plan to come back and add more info here in the future, but for now, here is a PDF version of my slides: My Journey from Advancement Data Analyst to Data Scientist Read More

Summer of Data Science Goal-Setting The purpose of the Summer of Data Science is to learn a specific topic or complete a specific project or read a book or finish a course so you can check something off of your long data science “to learn” list, and have fun achieving goals along with other data science learners during a fixed period of time. The deadline should be motivating, to get you to start and finish something before the summer is over. Week 1 was all about brainstorming ideas and gathering resources – dreaming up what you’d love to learn, and finding content that will help you learn it. Week 2 (which started yesterday, but don’t worry, jump in any time even if you see this a month from now) is all about goal-setting. Read More