Grad student descent

On January 24, I attended a 1-day data science symposium at Harvard University with the fun title ‘Weathering the Data Storm‘. I imagine being in a tiny boat on the endless beautiful sea of data, and then a big data storm comes up! Numbers and pieces of text fly through the air… they hit me hard in the face like hail, pile up in my boat… and I’m in dire need of some clever algorithms to take care of all that data, so that I won’t get hurt, my boat won’t sink! 

Flow of machine learning algorithms

Awesome scikit-learn machine learning algorithm cheat sheet, by Andreas Mueller.

Machine learning certificate

Just got my machine learning certificate from coursera  – yay! I got 100% on all review questions and programming assignments,

Big data for librarians

Sands Fish at ‘Big Data & You’ talked about the challenges and new tools for librarians in the age of ‘Big data’

On Jan 14, I attended a Big Data event for librarians, Big Data & You: Preparing Current and Future Information Specialists, organized by NEASIST (New England Chapter of the Association for Information Science & Technology). I hadn’t really thought about it before, but it’s obvious that ‘Big data’ is hitting the field of library science, too.

Machine learning with Andrew Ng @ coursera

I just finished the machine learning class by Andrew Ng at coursera, a provider of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). I finally understand why this class is so famous in the data science community – it’s truly awesome.

Paper published in PNAS

Yeast colonies of 2 types of yeast, labeled in yellow and blue, with different strengths of interactions

Our paper got published in PNAS! Yay!

In this paper we investigate the effect of species interactions when two species have to expand into new territory. Such territorial expansions happen a lot currently, because many species are forced to shift their territories in response to climate change – for example, if it gets too hot for them in their current habitat, they move north.

You don’t know what you don’t know about the database!

On Jan 7, I attended the Critical Data conference at MIT (an event coupled to the Critical data hackathon the weekend before). It was all about big data in healthcare, with speakers from both the medical and the data science communities, and from both academia and industry. Everyone agreed that there is great potential in the enormous amounts of data than can – and are – collected to improve the current healthcare system.