Data Science & Artificial Intelligence
The art and science of understanding human behaviour through data
No-one knows when data science began; some would say that it is a recent phenomenon born of a confluence of Moore's Law and Chinese manufacturing in the last decade. Others would argue that industry pioneers such as Walmart and Bloomberg can stake a claim to being the first adopters. Yet one thing is unanimous, that this revolution is changing the way that we live and make decisions.
Ever since I wrote my first program (in BASIC) in the early 2000's to extract the signal from a noisy channel in a badly lit physics laboratory I have developed a deep fascination with data, science and data science. I have spent many countless hours wrangling, munging and scraping raw data and transforming ancient SPSS files. I have turned my hand to census data from the Swiss census bureau, social media content, Costa Rican postal records, the text of national constitutions and (anonymised) mobile phone records.
Just like most like-minded theoretical scientists coming of age in the early years of the 21st century, I am intrigued by the current golden age of data; how it came to be, the possibilities, the limitations and what these all mean for society and business. Some of my informal thoughts on the subject can be found below.
Selected writing
- How to Understand Deep Learning (in a Shallow way)
- Getting to Why
- Two Choices for Putting the 'Science' into Computational Social Science