Tonight’s guest lecturer is Cathy O’Neil. She’ll be teaching us about time series, advanced regression and ethics. Most of you know Cathy’s been attending class each week and writing clear, thoughtful summaries of lectures on her popular blog, mathbabe.org. In addition to being our in-house data journalist, Cathy earned a Ph.D. in math from Harvard, was a postdoc at the MIT math department, and a professor at Barnard College where she published a number of research papers in arithmetic algebraic geometry. She then chucked it and switched over to the private sector. She worked as a quant for the hedge fund D.E. Shaw in the middle of the credit crisis, and then for RiskMetrics, a risk software company that assesses risk for the holdings of hedge funds and banks. She is currently a data scientist on the New York start-up scene, writes a blog at mathbabe.org, and is involved with Occupy Wall Street.

Prior to Cathy’s lecture, we’ll have two special guests from GetGlue: the CEO, Alex Iskold and the Lead Scientist, Kyle Teague. GetGlue was the 2011 Mashable Breakout Startup Winner. They’ll be telling us about their company, their data and we’ll get to observe the interesting dynamic between CEO and data scientist, and how they each think and talk about data.

Homework #2 is due tonight. I love the healthy debate you’re having on the “End of Theory” post. Keep up the good work! Homework #3 will be assigned tonight.