Monthly Archives: September 2013
Data products in the wild
Hi Students, Monday’s lecture will focus on Human Factors in Data Science. The class will be an onslaught of needs finding, design, prototyping, and evaluation. It will be intense; brace yourselves. As data scientists, you will ultimately produce a data product, be it a graph or a report or a presentation. This product will affect the […]
Deep Thoughts with the Central Limit Theorem
Each week Ethan Rouen, a student in the class, will post on a topic of his interest based on class lectures. Ethan is a Ph.D. student in accounting at Columbia Business School and a columnist for Fortune.com. A wise man once said, “Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything. Fourteen percent of people […]
Understanding Models: two articles, eight months apart
Hi Students, I wanted to kick off the course blog by talking about two different Wired articles written 8 months apart. They present divergent perspectives about understanding and trusting models. The first article (The End of Theory by Chris Anderson) takes the position that large data triumphs over everything. It talks about how petabyte-scale data and […]
Announcing the Columbia Data Science Society
There is a new student group on campus called the Columbia Data Science Society. They’ve asked me to pass along the following information: Introducing Columbia Data Science Society! Columbia Data Science Society, CDSS, is an interdisciplinary society that promotes data science across Columbia University and the New York City community. Our goal is to understand […]
Introduction to Data Science Version 2.0
I’m teaching Introduction to Data Science for the second year. We just started last week, and here are some of the significant differences between this year and last year: (1) Added another professor: I am team teaching this year with Dr. Kayur Patel who is a computer scientist at Google. Crudely speaking we can think […]
