Noon van der Silk is the senior software engineer at Tweag and joins host Wendy on this week's Would You Data Scientist. Join the conversation on machine learning, teaching, how university degrees can give people from some backgrounds a leg up, as well as all the usual chat on ethics and how to best stop an evil super villain. Also find out Noon's thoughts on where the UK stands compared to other countries in terms of diversity in data science.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Noon ended up teaching AI and machine learning with the aim of giving people intuition and motivation. They could find out the details by themselves but he wanted to make sure they were confident to explore the topics on multiple levels.
• Noon had the experience of being turned down for a job because he didn't have a degree, which as you know, Wendy doesn't agree with.
• If a degree is a must have on your job description, then you should re-evaluate that. A degree for a degree's sake doesn't mean anything, it's just an expensive line on your CV.
• University can give some people access to jobs that they would not have had before.
• People who pivot jobs can be exceedingly valuable because they have built up a completely different skillset to the people already in that team.
• When Noon was working in Melbourne, he found that the diversity was heading in the right way but when working in the UK he found that the working group was not very diverse. The excuse seems to be trouble finding the right people.
  
  

BEST MOMENTS

‘I thought there is no way computers can learn anything'

‘Statistics seems easy but when you learn the details you think what is going on here'

‘Don't be afraid to follow that and squish it into AI somehow'

‘How can I be directing this towards positive purposes'

EPISODE RESOURCES

Noon's favourite piece of tech XMonad

Tweag.io

Noon on LinkedIn

R;pple Suicide Prevention Chrome Extension

VALUABLE RESOURCES

linkedin.com/in/ethicalrecruiter

qwerkrecruitment.com

@qwerkrec on socials

ABOUT THE HOST

Wendy Gannon started Qwerk Recruitment in the middle of the Covid Pandemic to disrupt the recruitment sector with ETHICAL data recruitment and treat everyone with love, dignity and respect. Avid Music photographer of 15 years.

PODCAST DESCRIPTION 

Interviewing successful Data Scientists to find out about their journey into Data Science and any struggles they've faced to help next generation Data Scientists from all walks of life to access their dream career.

This show was brought to you by Progressive Media

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.