This post was originally published on Medium A particularly good talk at Strata NY last year was by Brett Goldstein, former CIO of Chicago, who talked about accountability and transparency in predictive models that affect people’s lives. This struck a strong chord with me, so I wanted to take some time to write down …

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I, Harlan D. Harris, hereby commit to the neveragain.tech pledge. Please stand with me and hold me to it. It starts: We, the undersigned, are employees of tech organizations and companies based in the United States. We are engineers, designers, business executives, and others whose jobs include managing or processing …

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This post was originally published on Medium When building a complex system, it’s often helpful to think about the design of that system using patterns and abstractions. Architects and software engineers do so frequently, and the experience of implementing predictive modeling pipelines has recently led to a variety of …

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This post was originally published on Medium You’re a data scientist, and you’ve got a predictive model — great work! Now what? In many cases, you need to hook it up to some sort of large, complex software product so that users can get access to the predictions. Think of LinkedIn’s People You May Know, which mines your …

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This post was originally published on Medium Yesterday was the 2016 National Day of Civic Hacking, a Code for America event that encourages people with technology and related skills to explore projects related to civil society and government. My friend Josh Tauberer wrote a thoughtful post earlier about the event …

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This post was originally published on Medium Data Scientist (n.): Person who is better at statistics than any software engineer and better at software engineering than any statistician. — Josh Wills (@josh_wills) May 3, 2012 There are different types of data scientists, with different backgrounds and career …

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This post was originally published on Medium I’m the Director of Data Science at EAB, a firm that provides best-practices research and enterprise software for colleges and universities. My team is responsible for the predictive models and other advanced analytics that are part of the Student Success Collaborative …

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The below is a public version of a post originally posted on an internal blog at the Education Advisory Board (EAB), my current employer. We don’t yet have a public tech blog, but I got permission to edit and post it here, along with the referenced code. 

Data Science teams get asked to do a lot of different sorts …
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Earlier this year, I attended the INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics & Operations Research, in Boston. I was asked beforehand if I wanted to be a conference blogger, and for some reason I said I would. This meant I was able to publish posts on the conference’s WordPress web site, and was also obliged to do …

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On Monday, October 28th, 2013, I gave a 5-minute Ignite talk entitled “Why a Data Community is Like a Music Scene” at an event associated with the Strata conference. Here’s the video: And here are the acknowledgements and references for the talk: Data Community DC How Music Works, by David Byrne my slides for the …

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