Institute to Host 3/20 DSI Event with Math Department

6:00 PM – 8:00 PM on Monday, March 20, 2017
Refreshments will be provided.
Hariri Institute for Computing, Seminar Room
111 Cummington Mall, Room 180

Join the Math & Statistics Department and the Data Science Initiative at the Hariri Institute for Computing for a co-hosted DSI event focused on the theoretical and practical approaches to data science.

Data Science in Practice with Elliott Bartsch
Data science has received a considerable amount of hype in recent years and many businesses are hiring to data scientists to solve their most challenging problems. However, since data science is such a new field, the role of a data scientist is not standardized between companies and not exactly what one might expect coming from academia. Unlike Kaggle competitions and problem sets, data science does not live in isolation. Instead, data science touches almost every part of a business. Applied data science requires a significant amount of collaboration and data scientists who can put ideas into practice. This often requires data scientists to align their goals with those of the engineering and product development teams and to spend the majority of their time on work other than quantitative analysis including data pipeline management, data cleaning, and software development.

Elliott Bartsch is the Director of Data Science at Firecracker, an adaptive education platform used by medical students across the US. He joined Firecracker in 2013 shortly after it was founded. At Firecracker, Elliott builds data driven tools to better assess student performance and improve learning outcomes. He also teaches Data Science through General Assembly in Boston. Elliott received a Bachelor’s Degree from Harvard University in Statistics in 2015.
Elliott will discuss the skills and tools required to be an effective data scientist outside of an academic setting. He will talk about his experiences and challenges building data driven features at Firecracker and the lessons he’s learned along the way.