As the Head of Data Science at Scouts Consulting Group, Ken Jee spends his work days improving the performance of athletes and teams by analyzing the data collected on them. In his free time, Ken dabbles in entrepreneurship and content creation. He is best known for his YouTube channel focused on data science and machine learning with over 130,000 subscribers. More recently, Ken has turned his focus to project-based learning through Kaggle. He started the #66DaysOfData challenge to help people create the habit of learning and working on projects every day. In the interview, we talk about Ken's personal journey into sports analytics and YouTube, and his advice for data science learners. He also shares his learnings on best practices in sports analytics consulting, and what it takes to break into the field. 

Jean-Yves is the Co-Founder & CEO of Data Mechanics, a serverless platform making Spark easy to use and performant. The mission of Data Mechanics is to make Spark more developer-friendly and cost-effective for data engineering teams. Before Data Mechanics, Jean-Yves was a software engineer at Databricks, where he led the Spark infrastructure team. In this interview, we spoke about the mission of Data Mechanics, the story of how it came to be, Jean-Yves’ recommendations for when it might make sense to bring Spark into your stack, and more.

Hilary Mason is a seasoned practitioner. A former Chief Data Scientist at Bitly and co-founder at Fast Forward Labs, a machine intelligence research company that was acquired by Cloudera in 2017. Hilary was the General Manager of ML at Cloudera. Today, she holds a role as a Data Scientist in Residence at Accel Partners and is a co-founder at Hidden Door. Outside work, Hilary is a blogger, speaker, and author and dedicates her time to talent development as a Board member at the Anita Borg Institute for women in technology and at hackNY. 

Chris Bergh is the founder and CEO of DataKitchen, a DataOps platform. Throughout his career, he experienced the barriers in embracing data opportunities first-hand and translated his insight into advocating for the DataOps movement. In this interview, we spoke about Chris's personal journey, how his experiences lead him to start DataKitchen, the concept of DataOps and why companies should give it a try.

David Venturi is an educator and curator of data science curriculums. After majoring in Chemical Engineering & Economics, he pivoted into programming and data science and fell in love with online education. He created his own Data Science Masters’ curriculum, trying to mimic the experience from top universities. His story went viral and David moved to work as a course lead at Udacity and DataCamp. Today, David is back in online education and is creating a brand new curriculum for 2021 for himself, and those that want to join him on the journey. His mission: create the best data science online curriculum on the Internet.

Jan Carbonell is an engineer, maker, entrepreneur, data scientist, and educator. From starting a study group to improve his own learning experience, today Jan leads the AI program at Strive School, a YC-backed startup raising the next generation of data scientists across Europe.

We've talked about Jan's data science journey, the experiences that inspired him and ultimately led him to create new ways of teaching at akademy.ai, Saturdays.ai, and Strive School today.

Coming January 10th, we will dive into stories of the data science world and talk to makers, founders, researchers and scholars that advance the field. Join us!