Practicum Pride: LeanPlum
By: Victoria Suarez
Tags: Students

Hai Vu Le came to the MSDS program with a BA in Economics from Colorado State University and Jon-Ross Presta came to the MSDS program with a BA in Applied Mathematics from UC Berkeley. Continue reading to learn more about their practicum experience at LeanPlum!

Hai (Left) & Jon-Ross (Right) with their mentor, Henry Humadi

Can you tell us a bit about LeanPlum? What is it like working there?

HAI — LeanPlum is an A/B testing and mobile engagement platform so companies can engage with their customers effectively. We make it easy for mobile marketers to send meaningful and relevant messages through different formats, such as push notifications, in-app messages, and emails to the right customers, at the right time, and on the right channel. Mobile marketers can conduct A/B tests using our platform to learn what works best for their customers and by doing so, continuously better their mobile marketing efforts.

Can you describe the project(s) that you are working on?

JON-ROSS — We can’t disclose too much detail, but at a high-level we’re working on an NLP project where we analyze the effect of a message’s content on user engagement.

HAI — Totally agree with Jon-Ross! The details of our projects at LeanPlum are confidential. We can say that we get to work on very interesting problems that contribute to the Objective & Key Results (OKRs) of the Product Development (Prod Dev) team. During our 7 months here, we’ve built 2 dashboards and prototyped a new feature for the product, which uses a model that we’ve trained. As we’ve mentioned, LeanPlum’s platform provides A/B testing and messaging capabilities. The deep learning project we have been working on aims to improve the product on the messaging front.

How are you applying the knowledge gained from the program to your practicum? Is there a particular class that has been the most helpful?

JON-ROSS — A whole lot of what we’ve learned in the program has been useful at practicum. I couldn’t do my job without having learned SQL, but Machine Learning has been incredibly important as well.

HAI — I’ve applied so much of what I’ve learned at school to my projects at LeanPlum! I especially draw the most from the Machine Learning, Deep Learning, SQL, Distributed Computing, and Data Acquisition courses. I’ve been using a Deep Learning model we learned in class and adapting the code I wrote for my homework assignments to my tasks at work. I also share the same sentiment about SQL with Jon-Ross. Working with Google BigQuery is a significant component of our work and the rigorous SQL training we had at school gave me not only the working skills I could use immediately from day one, but also the foundation for me to learn the unique intricacies of the SQL variant of BigQuery on my own. I use Spark to work with data on Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and I am so grateful that we learned about distributed computing in the program.

What is it like working with professional data scientists?

JON-ROSS — It’s nice working with experienced data scientists because more often than not they have run into similar problems to what we’re facing. We have weekly meetings where we talk about our progress and results, and the other data scientists are helpful in brainstorming ways to tackle our problems.

HAI — They said from the beginning of our practicum that they don’t consider us interns, but machine learning practitioners. So they give us the freedom to take the project where we think it should be. At the same time, they are there to provide us with technical support, advice, and feedback when we need it. Working with them helps me better visualize how our customers would experience the feature we are building. This customer-centric approach towards data science is one of the things I appreciate.

What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced at your practicum?

JON-ROSS — I would personally say that the biggest challenge was getting used to the difficulty of accessing data. In most classes, working with the data was as straightforward as downloading a csv and reading it locally. For practicum, the data is stored in several different locations, each with different procedures required to access it, and often we’ve had to work on a virtual machine.

Are there any cool perks?

HAI — Seaweed snack — lotsss of it, which we are both fans of (just kidding) — But, we have unlimited snacks, fruit, and catered lunch every day. I would say that the coolest part is that we were welcomed as part of the team. We are invited to all the team-building activities. We had a good time at the company-wide Christmas party, the kart races within the Prod Dev team, and team lunches with our teammates in our “home team” of Intelligent Engagement (Machine Learning Pod), just to name a few.