Our guests Matthew Tamsett and Ravi Upreti join Gabi Ferrara and Aja Hammerly to talk about data science and their project, Qubit. Qubit helps web companies by measuring different user experiences, analyzing that information, and using it to improve the website. They also use the collected data along with ML to predict things, such as which products users will prefer, in order to provide a customized website experience.

Matthew talks a little about his time at CERN and his transition from working in academia to industry. It’s actually fairly common for physicists to branch out into data science and high performance computing, Matthew explains. Later, Ravi and Matthew talk GCP shop with us, explaining how they moved Qubit to GCP and why. Using PubSub, BigQuery, and BigQuery ML, they can provide their customers with real-time solutions, which allows for more reactive personalization. Data can be analyzed and updates can be created and pushed much faster with GCP. Autoscaling and cloud management services provided by GCP have given the data scientists at Qubit back their sleep!

Matthew Tamsett

Matthew was trained in experimental particle physics at Royal Holloway University of London, and did his Ph.D. on the use of leptonic triggers for the detection of super symmetric signals at the ATLAS detector at CERN. Following this, he completed three post doctoral positions at CERN and on the neutrino experiment NOvA at Louisiana Tech University, Brookhaven National Laboratory, New York, and the University of Sussex UK, culminating in a EU Marie Curie fellowship. During this time, Matt co-authored many papers including playing a minor part in the discovery of the Higgs Boson. Since leaving academia in 2016, he’s worked at Qubit as a data scientist and later as lead data scientist where he lead a team working to improve the online shopping experience via the use of personalization, statistics and predictive modeling.

Ravi Upreti

Ravi has been working with Qubit for almost 4 years now and leads the platform engineering team there. He learned distributed computing, parallel algorithms and extreme computing at Edinburgh University. His four year stint at Ocado helped developed a strong domain knowledge for e-commerce, along with deep technical knowledge. Now it has all come together, as he gets to apply all these learnings to Qubit, at scale.

Cool things of the week

• A developer goes to a DevOps conference blog
• Cloud Build brings advanced CI/CD capabilities to GitHub blog
• Cloud Build called out in Forrester Wave twitter
• 6 strategies for scaling your serverless applications blog

Interview

• Qubit site
• Qubit Blog blog
• Pub/Sub site
• BigQuery site
• BigQuery ML site
• Cloud Datastore site
• Cloud Memorystore site
• Cloud Bigtable site
• Cloud SQL site
• Cloud AutoML site
• Goodbye Hadoop. Building a streaming data processing pipeline on Google Cloud blog

Question of the week

How do you deploy a Windows container on GKE?

Where can you find us next?

Gabi will be at the Google Cloud Summit in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Aja will be at Cloud Next London.

Sound Effect Attribution

• “Small Group Laugh 6” by Tim.Kahn of Freesound.org