Active Hours 8:00 AM to 2:00 AM
By: Brandon Griffin
Tags: San Francisco, Machine Learning, Data Analytics, Bootcamp, Data Science

Advanced Photo-Injector Experiment at Berkeley Lab(LBNL): Analyzing millions of images of molecules

World AIDS Day 2019 I blogged about raising money for AIDS/LifeCycle, this year I installed a Linux Virtual Machine running on WSL 2, enabling a GPU-accelerated Docker-ized environment. Both were passion projects, and both are representative of two wildly different yet remarkable adventures of my life. This week I present my Capstone project and graduate from the Data Science Immersive I began last fall. My virtual cohort of only 12 was dispersed across the western United States and while there was little time to talk about much beyond data, it exposed me to some of the brightest, most hardworking, and dedicated minds I have had the pleasure of collaborating with directly. General Assembly runs a tight ship, a thorough program covering a diverse assortment of selected topics from Natural Language Processing (NLP) to Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), and from Structured Query Language (SQL) to cluster computing with Apache Spark. A quick search on my Windows machine will tell you that current active hours are 8:00 AM to 2:00 AM Mon-Thurs, and not much better on the weekends. I may not have slept much or gotten enough exercise, but I found a flow early in the second week of the program and gradually lost track of my physical surroundings. As I took the deep dive into the exhilarating world of Machine Learning, I rediscovered my deep seeded love for facts, problem solving, and quantitative reasoning. At this stage, Data Science feels like the exceptional blend of people and logic I have long sought after.

My data portfolio has grown substantially to include many projects I am quite proud of, as well as many I am excited to improve upon. For example, I look forward to imparting newfound imputation techniques with Scikit-learn, almost certainly launching my position on Kaggle leader boards to the top of the competition everywhere. Additionally, a principal component analysis(PCA) would likely serve well in the regression of the sale price of San Franciscan homes where a number of predictive real-estate features can easily introduce high variance. A six-month Tableau product key, from one of my six friendly instructors, is begging to be put to good use here. Creating an interactive visual demonstration representing the complex and disturbing relationship discovered between 12th Grader SAT performance and California School District equitability is a must. Furthermore, the challenge of distinguishing the language of depression from that of suicidal ideation within hundreds of thousands of Reddit submissions suffers from a frequentist’s approach. Words are not independent within a given sentiment and additional information regarding the context in which they occur is likely to improve classification. Bayesian inference, in combination with unsupervised learning techniques such as clustering algorithms, have the potential to illuminate subtle relationships in NLP yet unseen. Finally deploying my dog breed classifier as an app on Heroku with Streamlit where users can upload images of their own dog could be just the touch I need to move on from the transfer learning project and on to the next phase of my data science journey, the job hunt.

As much as I enjoyed building a self-driving car simulation with two beastly project partners, my ardor for Data Science goes beyond the science and technology. I care a great deal about my local community and feel a calling to make the world a safer place. While I launch my job search I hope to work pro bono with businesses actively benefiting marginalized communities, such as former employers and nonprofit organizations, by developing advanced business strategies with insightful time-series forecasts . With the curfew orders currently imposed surrounding the most recent surge in positive COVID-19 test cases, many small businesses are fighting to stave off permanent closure. This is an unusual time in the world, full of uncertainty, and by placing information in the hands of community leaders I hope to use my powerful bag of data science, analytics, and engineering tricks for good. The time has come for me to graduate from aspiring Data Scientist to junior-level Data Scientist, working with real data, and keeping real problems where they belong, in the forefront of my mind.

Send me a pic of your dog, or a hundred, and I’ll include it in my project! WOOF WOOF

(ZIP file is nice, no cropping, color photos only thanks)

Cheers,

Brandon Griffin