"Half Stack Data Science" is a podcast by David Asboth and Shaun McGirr about the realities of Data Science in the enterprise business world.
In this episode, we continued our season of talking to data educators and spoke to Laszlo Sragner.
Laszlo runs Hypergolic, a boutique consultancy in London specialising in Machine Learning Product Management.
Formerly, he was Head of Data Science at Arkera, a fintech startup in London, where he built market intelligence products with Natural Language Processing for Tier 1 investment banks and hedge funds.
Before that, Laszlo worked in mobile gaming for King Digital (makers of Candy Crush), specialising in player behaviour and monetisation.
He started his career as a quant researcher implementing trading strategies at multiple investment managers.
We talked to Laszlo about consulting in the area of machine learning, what data scientists can learn from software engineers, how to upskill data scientists to be better programmers and make programming their craft, and of course how AI tools will impact all of this.
You can find Laszlo online:
Continuing our series of conversations with data educators, in this episode we spoke to Valerie Logan.
Founding The Data Lodge in 2019, Valerie is as committed to data literacy as it gets. She believes that in today's digital society, data literacy is not just a work skill- it's a life skill. With advisory services, train-the-trainer bootcamps, an extensive resource library and community services at The Data Lodge, Valerie is certifying the world’s first Data Literacy Program Leads across commercial, nonprofit and public sectors.
In 2022, The Data Lodge was recognized by CDO Magazine as one of the "Top 25 Data Startups to Watch in 2022". Valerie has more than 28 years of experience, including two decades of global consulting across industries, and five years of applied experience in the telecommunications industry at both field and enterprise levels. She holds a B.S. in Math from SUNY College at Buffalo and an M.S. in Applied Math with a concentration in Operations Research from New Mexico State.
We talked to Valerie about how literacy in data is like literacy in any language, how to spread data literacy effectively in a business, what are some obstacles to doing this, how you measure the success of a data literacy program, and of course the effect of the emergence of AI on all of the above. Valerie even made a custom Scrabble board just for this episode, you can see that on our website halfstackdatascience.com
If you enjoy our podcast, please consider rating and reviewing it on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
In this episode of Half Stack Data Science we continue our season 3 all about data science education, with a conversation with Matt Harrison.
Matt stands as a prominent figure in the Python and data science community. A Stanford Computer Science alumnus, he's made significant contributions through his best-selling books, which include titles like "Effective Pandas", "Effective XGBoost", "Machine Learning Pocket Reference", and "Illustrated Guide to Learning Python 3." Beyond authorship, Matt has shared his expertise at major corporations such as Netflix and NASA, as well as academic institutions like Stanford, the University of Utah, and BYU. With a Python journey beginning in 2000, he's equipped thousands with vital skills, both online and in-person. He runs MetaSnake, a Python and Data training company.
We talked to Matt about the pushback he gets whenever he posts code online, what we all think of Excel’s newly announced Python integration, how ChatGPT has affected our work, and whether cooking is a good metaphor for programming.
In this episode of Half Stack Data Science we continue our season 3, all about data science education, with a conversation with Reuven Lerner.
Reuven is a full-time Python trainer with a bachelor's degree in computer science and engineering from MIT, and a PhD in learning sciences from Northwestern University.
In 2020, Reuven published "Python Workout" a collection of Python exercises with extensive explanations, published by Manning. He's currently working on "Pandas workout" a similar collection of exercises using the "pandas" library for data analytics.
Reuven's free, weekly "Better developers" newsletter, about Python and software engineering, is read by more than 30,000 developers around the globe.
Reuven's most recent venture is Bamboo Weekly: Every Wednesday, he presents a problem based on current events, using a public data set. And every Thursday, he shared detailed solutions to those problems using Pandas.
We spoke to Reuven about his love of teaching Python to beginners, what he thinks of notebooks and ChatGPT as educational tools, and how he got banned for life from advertising on Facebook.
In this episode, David & Shaun talk to Lisa Carpenter. Lisa is the lead data science instructor at Digital Futures, with responsibility for the design and delivery of the Data Science programme. Prior to transitioning to teaching, Lisa gained over 10 years of experience in the data industry. Lisa is passionate about empowering people through digital skills and thoroughly enjoys seeing students grow their data careers.
Among many topics, we discussed how chefs are retraining to be data scientists, why Lisa doesn't like the "let me Google that for you" website, and the present and future of data education.
The Half Stack Data Science podcast is back (again)! Season 3 is coming very soon. In the meantime, listen to our teaser episode where we briefly recap our first 2 seasons and introduce the concept behind season 3; a series of interviews with educators who are bringing data science to the people!
In this episode we bring you our talk from the recent Data Science Festival in London. Our talk was titled "Bridging the data science supply-demand gap" and it was all about topics that will be familiar to listeners. We tackled the question "how is it that there is an abundance of junior data scientists and open data science positions yet the job market is unsatisfactory for both sides"? A huge thank you to Data Science Festival for having us, and for allowing us to share the audio with our audience!
In this special episode we did a podcast host swap with the hosts of the AI Today podcast.
Cognilytica's AI Today podcast focuses on relevant information about what's going on today in the world of artificial intelligence. Hosts Kathleen Walch and Ron Schmelzer discuss pressing topics around artificial intelligence with easy to digest content, interview guests and experts on the subject, and cut through the hype and noise to identify what is really happening with adoption and implementation of AI.
We spoke to Ron and Kathleen about what they do, their backgrounds, the realities of AI in industry today, and what they learned from years of speaking to various leaders in the field.
Please enjoy our conversation with Ron and Kathleen! Be sure to check out their podcast here: https://www.cognilytica.com/aitoday/
In this episode of Half Stack Data Science we continue our series "The Orthogonals" with a conversation with Chris Moffitt.
Chris is a Senior Manager Strategic Pricing & Analytics in the medical device industry. He is an active Python user with over 15 years of experience using Python for everything from web development to system administration and most recently data science. He is the author of the popular blog Practical Business Python (pbpython.com) where he describes how to use Python to solve common business problems.
We spoke to Chris about how he has used Python to his benefit at work, how the desire for automation is a mindset, and the future of complex machine learning models in the business world. Chris is entirely self-taught when it comes to using Python and you'll hear him reflect on this when he says "There's no way to learn programming outside of programming".
In this episode of "the orthogonals" we spoke to Joana Wang. Joana is a data aficionado with a passion for education. Her ambition is to help people demystify the world of data and make analytics second nature while having fun.
Having worked both in strategy consulting and industry, she's had projects across retail & wholesale, supply chain and financial services. In her last 8 years of experience, she's spent most of her time doing financial modelling, building bespoke data analytics products and wrangling data - a lot of it! This has required her to not only be able to technically develop solutions but also understand the wider business context and relate to people's needs, which she tries to embed in her teaching style.
We spoke with Joana about a variety of topics including how to incorporate data science into the business world, the state of data science education, what skills you need to be a data scientist and which of those skills are easier to teach or can even be taught at all. To give you a teaser, she summarised this beautifully when she said "No amount of code is going to tell you how to think".
Amanda is a wife. A mother. A blogger. A Christian.
A charming, beautiful, bubbly, young woman who lives life to the fullest.
But Amanda is dying, with a secret she doesn’t want anyone to know.
She starts a blog detailing her cancer journey, and becomes an inspiration, touching and
captivating her local community as well as followers all over the world.
Until one day investigative producer Nancy gets an anonymous tip telling her to look at Amanda’s
blog, setting Nancy on an unimaginable road to uncover Amanda’s secret.
Award winning journalist Charlie Webster explores this unbelievable and bizarre, but
all-too-real tale, of a woman from San Jose, California whose secret ripped a family apart and
left a community in shock.
Scamanda is the true story of a woman whose own words held the key to her secret.
New episodes every Monday.
Follow Scamanda on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
Amanda’s blog posts are read by actor Kendall Horn.