This post was originally published on Medium

A particularly good way to get a little more out of professional conferences is to blog about your experiences, I think. It makes you focus your thoughts on things like “what’s the big take-away here,” and “what should I be asking people in the hallways?” Rather than just …

This post was originally published on Medium

A particularly good talk at Strata NY last year was by Brett Goldstein, former CIO of Chicago, who talked about accountability and transparency in predictive models that affect people’s lives. This struck a strong chord with me, so I wanted to take some time to write down …

This post was originally published on Medium

When building a complex system, it’s often helpful to think about the design of that system using patterns and abstractions. Architects and software engineers do so frequently, and the experience of implementing predictive modeling pipelines has recently led to a variety of …

This post was originally published on Medium

You’re a data scientist, and you’ve got a predictive model — great work! Now what? In many cases, you need to hook it up to some sort of large, complex software product so that users can get access to the predictions. Think of LinkedIn’s People You May Know, which mines your …

This post was originally published on Medium

View this post on X (josh_wills)

There are different types of data scientists, with different backgrounds and career paths. With Sean Murphy and Marck Vaisman, I wrote an article about this for O’Reilly a few years back, based on survey research we’d …

This post was originally published on Medium

I’m the Director of Data Science at EAB, a firm that provides best-practices research and enterprise software for colleges and universities. My team is responsible for the predictive models and other advanced analytics that are part of the Student Success Collaborative …

Earlier this year, I attended the INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics & Operations Research, in Boston. I was asked beforehand if I wanted to be a conference blogger, and for some reason I said I would. This meant I was able to publish posts on the conference’s WordPress web site, and was also obliged to do …

On Monday, October 28th, 2013, I gave a 5-minute Ignite talk entitled “Why a Data Community is Like a Music Scene” at an event associated with the Strata conference. Here’s the video:

And here are the acknowledgements and references for the talk:

Data Community DC

How Music Works, by David Byrne

my slides for the …

For those people (or, more likely, 0 or 1 persons) who follow this blog to catch up on my professional thoughts: I’ve been doing a little bit of writing on the Data Community DC blog. Here are all my posts over there: http://datacommunitydc.org/blog/author/harlan/ I’d definitely encourage you to read everyone else’s …

I recently gave a presentation on communication issues around the terms “Data Science” and “Data Scientist”, based in part on a survey that I did with my Meetup colleagues Marck and Sean. The basic idea is that these new, extremely-broad buzzwords have resulted in confusion, which has impacted the ability of people …