Dear Students, There is a new Kaggle Visualization Competition in our honor! I encourage you all to enter it! I received this email from Will Cukierski from Kaggle. This email was sent to me and Chris Mulligan. (See the p.s. for the Legend of Chris Mulligan.) Yours, Rachel Chris and Rachel, Thanks to your blog […]

This is another part of the students’ final project. A small group designed a survey to assess their classmates on different dimensions that capture the skills of a data scientist, and administered the survey to their classmates. The questions were of the form “Do you know what ___ means?”, or “Have you ever implemented ____?”. The students were well aware of potential biases in their questions, the limitations of self-reporting, etc. The survey was a great first pass.

This is an innovative way of describing and visualizing Data Scientists — it captures the variablity among data scientists, and allows for the potential for effective Data Science teams to be constructed by creating “constellations” of these stars, or overlaying the stars on top of each other to create “complete” data science teams. The visualization and survey represented an improvement over the data science profiles I gave them at the beginning of the semester. This was a collaborative effort among many students including Adam Obeng, Eurry Kim, Christina Gutierrez, Kaz Sakamoto, and Vaibhav Bhandari. Full report of last lecture still to come.

Last night the students gave their guest lecture. It was awesome! We’ll have a more detailed report tomorrow, but this image was already posted on twitter, so I thought I’d get it up here as a sneak preview for the rest of the lecture. Part of the students’ design concept was constellations and stars, so they have another nice visualization of “data science profiles” as stars. It will make more sense when you see it. Kaz Sakamoto, Eurry Kim and Vaibhav Bhandari created this as part of a larger class collaboration.