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 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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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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For those people (or, more likely, 0 or 1 persons) who follow this blog to catch up on my professional thoughts: I’ve been doing a little bit of writing on the Data Community DC blog. Here are all my posts over there: http://datacommunitydc.org/blog/author/harlan/ I’d definitely encourage you to read everyone else’s …

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I recently gave a presentation on communication issues around the terms “Data Science” and “Data Scientist”, based in part on a survey that I did with my Meetup colleagues Marck and Sean. The basic idea is that these new, extremely-broad buzzwords have resulted in confusion, which has impacted the ability of people …

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I just returned from the useR! 2012 conference for developers and users of R. One of the common themes to many of the presentations was integration of R-based statistical systems with other systems, be they other programming languages, web systems, or enterprise data systems. Some highlights for me were an update to …

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As I’ve discussed here before, there is a debate raging (ok, maybe not raging) about terms such as “data science”, “analytics”, “data mining”, and “big data”. What do they mean, how do they overlap, and perhaps most importantly, who are the people who work in these fields? Along with two other DC-area Data Scientists, …

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I’m fond of navel gazing, meta discussions, and so forth. I’ve recently written about inferring navel gazing from link data, and about the meaning of the “Analytics” buzzword. This post will be my second on that other infectious buzzword, “Data Science”. When I moved to Washington DC in July, I was struck by the fact …

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