Half Stack Data Science

First of all, David's book Solve Any Data Analysis Problem is available in Manning's Early Access Program! You can read more about it here: https://www.manning.com/books/solve-any-data-analysis-problem (if it's not on offer when you're there, you can get 35% off with the code au35asb). ----------------------------------------------- In this episode, we talked to James Cotton, co-founder of iO-Sphere. Canadian originally, James has been working in the UK for the last 10 years, always in analytics, pricing, and data science. After a short stint in insurance he was at hotels.com for 3.5 years always working in customer analytics and marketing analytics. He then went to worldremit – a large uk fintech company that’s sort of like a digital western union. There he built out a team, growing it significantly. Over the past 7 or 8 years he’s hired dozens and dozens of data professionals of all levels – clearly seeing the gap between existing data training programmes and courses and the real need in industry. James is one of the founders of iO-Sphere, which was created in order to close that gap with actually useful, practical, training. They also fund all the training of everyone that comes onto the programme – helping to lower financial barriers to accessing high quality training and these careers. We talked to James about the skill gap between training and the real world, why no one has thought to close that gap in the way io-Sphere have, whether standardisation makes sense for the analytics industry, and of course where AI fits into all this. Find out more about iO-Sphere here: https://io-sphere.io You can find James on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jccotton

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 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.

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 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 "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".

In the first episode of season 2, "The Orthogonals", Shaun and David speak to Andrea Jones-Rooy. Andrea is a social scientist specializing in complexity.  She has written a book and several research papers on complex systems, and regularly contributes articles to media outlets on (you guessed it!) complexity — plus data science, international relations, diversity, and uncertainty. She is also a standup comedian and circus performer. The whole thing is confusing, but basically she’ll do whatever it takes to get people to pay attention to social science & complexity. Andrea earned her Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. We discussed why you shouldn't do a political science PhD to become a data scientist, how a political science PhD will benefit you in data science if you happen to have one, finishing a PhD thesis in a Thai restaurant, and what skills are missing from most data science courses and what to do about it.