about me

who am i?

a nice pic of me on a sunny day

I am a data scientist located in London, UK. I’m interested in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Topological Data Analysis (TDA) and general programming challenges and patterns.

When it came to choosing a career it was hard to ignore the AI/ML explosion. The modern-day combination of available and varied data and abundant computing power make data science an exciting and promising field. There are new problems and new ways of making decisions that can have a big (hopefully positive) impact on humanity.

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

In 2014 I graduated with an Economics and Econometrics MSc from Trinity Dublin. Thanks to tweets above I quickly realised I had the maths but not the programming skills for a career in ML. I then spent 2 years at IBM as a Tech Consultant where I built Python data pipelining and ETL applications. In 2017 I moved to Parker Fitzgerald, a small financial services consultancy. While there I built NLP apps for text classification, topic modelling, sentiment analysis and entity recognition. I also built Python TDA apps, R time series behavioural risk models and an R-shiny GUI tools for exploring and sampling large datasets.

I recognise that it’s not all plain sailing for data science. There are inherent risks and blind spots to machine learning models e.g. Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math(s) Destruction. Data scientists are responsible for the models they produce and to make their outcomes defensible, explainable and checkable.

Otherwise I like food (coffee is a food right?), bicycles, yoga, pilates, mobility, and basketball.

what can we expect from this blog?

my current posts topic tags: TODO - functionality coming soon
short: posts are <1000 words or ~7 minute read, which seems just right.
practical: embedded code snippets and a couple visual graphics.
accessible and informed writing style: aiming for a style like Francois Chollet, Peter Norvig and Alex Martelli.
content and writing style like the all-brilliant Lilian Weng, Victor Zhou, Christopher Olah, Thomas Wolf and Adrian Colyer.
open: trying to cite my sources and improvements as openly as possible. I see a lot of online posts that clone and tweak. I am going to try and make my value-add clear.