The Data Stream

How possible is it to swing an election? Today Tyler Richards comes on the podcast to talk about his past work in election hacking for Protect Democracy, how Covid-19 has created a plethora of data science articles, and how he comes up with his data science projects ideas. Tyler currently works as a data scientist at Facebook.

Rob is a data architect and engineer at Monster. He's also a current (maybe former) business partner of mine. We go over Rob's background in data science (1:00), our past work in using data science to find cheap rental property deals (14:00), and what the future looks like for building a bootstrapped business in data science.

Did you know that real estate isn't publicly accessible in Canada? Today I talk to Ivan. Ivan is a data engineer at Nextdoor. We talk about his past experience working on streaming billions of events into data stores, his interest in the Toronto real estate market and predicting the price of homes, and how coronavirus has affected the rental and housing market in the past few weeks.

Ever wonder if it's possible to train a model to discover whether your friends are assholes or not? Today Elle comes on the show to talk about her project building a classifier to predict the results from reddit's hottest advice community: Am I the Asshole or (AITA or short). We talk about the best words that are a predictor for assholery, the nuances of building an effective NLP model off of reddit data, and the future possibility of what it means to apply data science to psychology and possibly self-awareness. Elle is a data scientist at Iterative.ai making version control easier for data scientists.

Alicia Mergenthaler is a data scientist and Oxford social data science graduate. We go over her thesis in analyzing the marketplace of sexual services in the UK. We talk about how she clustered 90 different sexual services into five specific groups, the ethics in doing this kind of analysis, and how attraction and gender affects the dynamic pricing in the marketplace.

Alicia is now working as a consultant to the World Bank Group. You can reach out to her on linkedin here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alicia-mergenthaler/

Canzhi Ye is a software engineer, data scientist, and basketball enthusiast. We sit down to discuss his work in applying modeling to basketball, talk about how many basketball positions actually exist, how we might want to re-define the assist, and what data is available to analyze now versus back then. Canzhi also previously worked as an intern for the Brooklyn Nets analytics department and we dive into that a bit. Check out Canzhi’s NBA highlights website http://3ball.io and blog here: https://canzhiye.com.