A Kamerican Blog

Last Fall, I interviewed at, I'm going to call it Company W, for a second co-op. The position was for a Data Scientist co-op which, before I went in for the interview, I felt confident about. I had taken statistics in high school and was currently taking another course in college. I had also been asked to bring in a project where I had worked with 'big data' to present to my interviewers. I had just completed a project for a hackathon which I thought would be perfect. Company W was gonna be blown away. Stat Hacks  uses annual college crime statistics to create graphs to compare schools and provide statistics about the data set. The information in total came to about 4 years of about 19 statistics for 1,000 schools. Not very 'big' at all. But at the time, it felt like a massive amount as each year and school had to be scraped from an Excel document, scanned from a PDF, or manually entered (ouch...). When I finished my presentation, one interviewer asked what lan...

IBM Watson. A name that is quickly becoming recognized by more and more people thanks to an onslaught of media attention. This article about  Watson in Medicine  currently has 17,000+ shares. A cute store about  Project Havyn  made its way around the web a few months back. The stories that caught my attention were the ones about  Cyber Security. The reason that Watson became an interest of mine is that I was working at Recorded Future at the time whose product is very similar but way better. Watson advertises consuming a million documents - most of which have to be manually picked and fed in ( Manual Feeding ). Recorded Future is an automated system that pulls documents from all over the Internet and consumes them. And while Watson seems like this magical being, Recorded Future is a straightforward web application. If this is the case, why is Watson so popular? Yes - Watson does some amazing stuff leveraging cutting edge techniques in machine learning and n...