This was the question asked of us by Paul O’Connor last Friday, at the first of our weekly lunch speaker series. O’Connor is an urban strategist at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill who formerly headed a business development nonprofit called World Business Chicago. On top of that, he’s a native Chicagoan as well as a local [...]
Our goals for the fellowship are to train more data scientists and to get them working on problems that really matter. Lots of folks have been asking about how we're doing that. Data scientists are a hybrid group with computer science, statistics, machine learning, data mining, and database skills. These skills take years to learn [...]
They're here! Despite canceled flights, eleventh hour visas, stolen laptops, hellish final exams, and a last minute internet installation, our inaugural fellows poured into our new office this morning. We spent our first day getting to know the program, and each other. Program director Rayid Ghani kicked things off by welcoming mentors, staff, and fellows. [...]
The data deluge As technology penetrates further into everyday life, we're creating lots of data. (We could quote all the Gartner and Forrester made-up numbers, but we'll spare you.) Businesses are scrambling to find data scientists - a hybrid of computer scientist, statistician, and domain expert - to make sense of all this data and [...]
