Data Science London Panel Discussion: “Data Science as a Game Changer”

A great discussion hosted at @ds_ldn Data Science London 23/04/2012.
Lots of insightful comments and fun.

From left to right:

• Dr. Alex Farquhar, Moderator
•  Bruce Durling, CTO at Mastodon C
• James Governor, Principal Analyst and Founder at RedMonk
• Hilary Mason, Chief Scientist at Bitly
• Mike Ferguson, MD at Intelligent Business Strategies
• Jason McFall, CTO at Causata

“Why Data is Awesome” Hilary Mason, Chief Scientist at Bitly

Hilary Mason, Chief Scientist at Bitly talk at @ds_ldn Data Science London 23/04/12

(note: Because of the style of talks that Hilary gives, the slides alone aren’t useful. The video is a much better representation of the talk)

“Understanding Cause & Effect in Customer Behaviour” Jason McFall, CTO Causata

Jason McFall, CTO at Causata talk at @ds_ldn Data Science London 23/04/2012

“Investigative Analytics – What’s in the Data Scientists’ Toolkit?” Mike Ferguson, MD Intelligent Business Strategies

Mike Ferguson – MD at Intelligent Business Strategies, talk at @ds_ldn Data Science London 23/04/2012

“Practical Magic- Clojure for Data Scientists” Bruce Durling, CTO Mastodon C

Bruce Durling, CTO at Mastodon C talk at @ds_ldn Data Science London 23/04/2012

You can get the code from this talk at GitHub, click here

How I Survived Data Science London Hackathon. Lessons Learned

So in case you didn’t know on April 28th & 29th we run the Data Science Global Hackathon. Fun!

The event was organised by Data Science London, Data Science Global, and Kaggle. EMC/Greenplum provided software tools including: Greenplum Base, Greenplum Hadoop Distribution, MADlib, and Greenplum PL/R. Amazon AWS provided S3 and EC2 cloud services. The venue provided 100Mbps and 12 super high speed Wi-FI routers, and cable access.

212 data scientists from several cities around the world participated in the competition. The event took place at 8 venues in London, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, New York, Canberra, Melbourne, Turku (Helsinki)

Take a look at the map of participants and cities: Data Science Global Hackathon Map

The event in London was hosted at HubWestminster @hubwestminster; a beautiful, spacious, modern startup hub that has everything you may possibly dream of for a hackathon. We love this place and we’ll be doing more events here (Hello Alice!)

We also had delicious quality meals (lunch/dinner/breakfast), unlimited drinks, coffee, and massive amounts of sugary snacks. The catering was delivered by the beautiful young ladies @munchfood (Hello Naomi!)

At certain point during the long night, Data Science London data scientists decided to donate food to several charities and shelters. It was a nasty, windy, and rainy night in London!

Very importantly the event was fun, fun, fun!

Congratulations to the winners!

SPECIAL MENTION to Ben Hamner who finished Top 1 out of 212 contestants, and who is ineligible for the prize since he’s a Kaggle employee.

Global Prize – £1,800: James Petterson

London Prize £1,200: The Londoners Team (Dan Harvey, Ferenc Huszar, Jedidiah Francis, Jose Miguel Fernandez Lobato)

Check out interviews with the winners and the winning solutions

Checkout what some of our community members have written

Lessons Learned from the Data Science Hackathon by Jonny Edwards

My experience at Data Science Hackathon by Neal Lathia

Incompetence borne out of excessive cleverness by Derek Jones

“How to develop a Data Scientist” Brendan Moran, Data Scientist at EMC/Greenplum

Brendan Moran, Data Scientist at EMC/Greenplum talk at @ds_ldn Data Science London 21/03/2012

“A Data Scientist in the Music Industry” Jameel Syed, CTO at Musicmetric

Dr. Jameel Syed CTO at MusicMetric talk at @ds_ldn Data Science London 21/03/2012

“Bootstrapping a Data Science” Paul Lam, Data Scientists at uSwitch

Paul Lam Data Scientist at uSwitch talk at Data Science London 21/03/2012

Hilary Mason Chief Scientist @Bitly to speak at Data Science London on April 23rd, 2012

As part of Big Data Week, we are happy to announce that Hilary Mason will be giving a talk at our @ds_ldn group meeting on April 23rd, 2012. If you are new to data science or an experienced data scientist, this is an opportunity for you to see a great speaker and one of the most respected data scientist in the startup community.

If you haven’t registered for this event, go here to register. Spaces are limited.

Hilary Mason is the Chief Scientist at bit.ly, where she finds sense in vast data sets. Her work involves both pure research and development of product-focused features.

She is a former computer science professor with a background in machine learning and data mining, has published numerous academic papers, and regularly releases code on her personal site, www.hilarymason.com.

She’s also a co-founder of HackNY (hackny.org), a non-profit organization that connects talented student hackers from around the world with startups in NYC.She has discovered two new species, loves to bake cookies, and asks way too many questions.

 Watch Hilary talking at Strata 2011: “What Data Tells Us”