Ken's Nearest Neighbors

Today I had the pleasure of interviewing Ovetta Sampson. I co-teach a grad student course called Designing Ethical AI Sysetms with Ovetta. As a Principal Design Director at Microsoft, she works with a team of talented researchers, data scientists, designers and engineers that work with large-scale customers to visualize a clear path to digital transformation that starts in the now and builds towar...

Christian is a Sr. Business Intelligence (BI) Engineer @ PlayStation. Previous he has worked in BI at Nike, Warner Brothers, USC, and Machinima (Ma-shin-im-ma).  He took the tech world by storm when he joined Clubhouse and quickly grew to 23k followers as of today. He runs rooms around Data Science and Analytics and how to get your first job. He has helped thousands of people on Clubhouse to impro...

This episode of Ken’s Nearest Neighbors is going to be a little different. For this one I had my friend Jeremie Harris back on the show, he was on for episode 15 of the podcast. His company, sharpest minds has collected data on the success rates their mentees have had in the data science job application process. The team was gracious enough to share the findings via a blog post. I highly recommend...

This week I had the pleasure of speaking with Greg Coquillo. Born and raised in Haiti, Greg is an Industrial Engineer with a Master's degree in Engineering Management who's been leveraging data to solve complex business challenges  in operations, supply chain, quality and product management. After 8 years of applying Lean Six Sigma and Continuous Improvement, Greg recently transitioned t...

Brennan has 8 years experience as an analyst in the Finance and Talent Acquisition spaces. Most of his time is spent building SQL queries or visualizing data inside of Power BI. Brennan's love for sports collides with his passion for data on Instagram @Cardboard. Calculus and http://rotogrinders.com/ . When not crunching numbers he his chasing his 16 month old son Grayson around or spending t...

Today I had the pleasure of interviewing Lillian Pierson. Lillian helps data professionals transform into world-class data leaders and entrepreneurs. To date she’s educated over 1 Million data professionals on AI, and over 10% of the data entrepreneurs have landed 6-figure contracts within the first 7-months of working with her. In this episode, Lillian shares the story of her early affinity towar...

This episode is brought to you by Pandio, more on them later! Today I had the pleasure of interviewing Jake and Aaron. These two brothers are on a mission to make advanced analytics accessible to all. This is the first time I’ve had two people on the show, so it should be twice as interesting. Jake, Aaron, and their friend Nate founded Mito, a low code jupyter lab plugin that allows you to use exc...

On this episode I have the opportunity to speak with Joshua Odmark. Josh is the founder and CTO of Pandio. He started his first company at the age of 15, sold his first company at 18, and has been a serial entrepreneur ever since. He is passionate about bringing artificial intelligence to the masses and dreams of a world where AI has a positive impact on the entire world. He is currently building...

Today I had the pleasure of speaking with Keith McCormick. Keith is an independent data miner, trainer, speaker, and author out of North Carolina who’s LinkedIn learning courses have been viewed over 500,000 times. For the last several years, the focus of Keith’s work has been to improve how analytics leadership runs their teams and how they hire and nurture new talent. Keith actually started his...

This week I had the chance to speak with Matthew Edwards. Matthew is the Director of Football Analytics at the University of Virginia (A school that I happen to be an alumni of). Football and math have always been a huge part of his life. While at BYU, he majored in Math and has a master's degree in Public Administration. He also played Tight End on the football team there from 2008-2011. Aft...

On this episode I had the chance to speak with Alex. Alex the analyst is a friend of mine and is currently a data analyst at a Fortune 500 company. He also happens to have a YouTube channel where he talks about his experience as a data analyst and gives advice on how to break into the field. In this episode, you will learn how Alex got his start as a data analyst “coming from a non-traditional bac...

Today I had the pleasure of speaking with Adrien Treuille. He is co-founder and CEO of Streamlit which is pioneering next-generation tools for machine learning engineers. Adrien has been VP of Simulation Zoox, lead a Google X project, and was a Professor of Computer Science and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon. He gives talks around the world, including to the President's Council of Advisors on Sc...

This week I had the chance to talk with Andrew Jones. Andrew has spent over 13 years in Analytics & Data Science at companies including Amazon & more recently Sony PlayStation where he developed and prototyped Machine Learning based features for the PlayStation 5 - several of which have been patented by Sony.  Throughout his career he has interviewed & screened hundreds of Data Science...

This episode I had the pleasure of speaking with Will Ramey. Will is a senior director at NVIDIA, where he leads global teams responsible for the NVIDIA Developer Program and Deep Learning Institute. Since joining the company in 2003 he has served in several technical and leadership roles, including several years as the first product manager for CUDA and NVIDIA's developer tools. Prior to joi...

In this episode I have the chance to speak with Christina Stathopoulos. Christina is originally from the US but has been based in Madrid, Spain since 2012. Working as an expat and dedicated to the world of data, she has followed a unique path to make a name for herself in the field on a global level. She is currently working as an Analytical Consultant at Google, Adjunct Faculty at IE Business Sch...

On this episode I have the chance to speak with Michael Galarnyk. Michael is a Python and Machine Learning Instructor for Stanford Continuing Studies, LinkedIn Learning, and more. You can find him on Twitter @GalarnykMichael, through his blog on Medium, or through his Youtube channel. In this conversation, I spoke with Michael about his philosophy on formal vs informal education, how he teaches/le...

On this episode I have the chance to speak with Jacob Amaral. Jacob is the co-founder of WeTradeHQ, an online marketplace of day traders and investors. He also builds automated trading bots that invest his own money into market automatically and for his clients as well. Jacob loves to automate everything and has found a passion with combining software with finance. Hope you enjoy!

On this episode I am speaking with Forrest Knight. Forrest graduated with a Computer Science degree and worked as a full-stack software engineer. He documented his journey along the way and continues to do so while sharing what he's learned on YouTube. In this podcast we talk about how Forrest built his lifestyle from programing and the differences between data science and software engineerin...

On this episode I have the chance to speak with Josh Starmer. Josh is the founder and CEO of StatQuest (https://www.youtube.com/user/joshstarmer), a YouTube channel that teaches Data Science topics like Statistics and Machine Learning. Prior to StatQuest, Josh was an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill. At StatQuest, Josh makes Data Science topics clearly e...

In this episode I got to speak with Keith Galli. Keith is a data science YouTuber who focuses on in-depth library tutorials & real-world projects. Outside of YouTube, Keith works at conversational AI start-up Posh Technologies where he has worked in roles from NLP to project management. Keith holds his bachelor’s & master’s degrees in computer science from MIT. Enjoy!

On this episode I got to speak with Greg Jacobs. Greg recently made the transition into the data science industry after spending over 10 years in private practice as a business attorney. Greg is a self-taught programmer who took the bootcamp route into landing his first data science role. He is passionate about the field and currently is in the process of integrating himself into the data science...

On this week's episode I am speaking with Mike Kelly. Mike got his degree in Aeronautical Engineering, but found his passion in technical training. He has spent the last 6 years in the healthcare industry working for Optum, a large analytics and technology provider owned by UnitedHealth group. He is a principal data scientist working on machine learning projects and training UnitedHealth empl...

On this episode I had the pleasure of speaking with Jeff Li. Jeff is currently a senior data scientist at Spotify focused on forecasting problems surrounding ads. He got into data science, initially, by trying to earn a living playing poker and previously spent two years at Doordash on the core ML team, working on a wide variety of problems such as improving experimentation power, personalization,...

In this episode I have the pleasure of speaking with a friend of mine from high school, Gleb Drobkov. Gleb is a senior data scientist at BCG Gamma, the advanced analytics practice of the Boston Consulting Group. His career spans consulting and the financial services industry, and these days, he typically focuses on using data and machine learning to help brands and retailers connect with consumers...

On this episode I had the please of speaking with Richmond Alake. Richmond is a Computer Vision Engineer based in London. He has a MSc in Computer Vision, Machine Learning and Space Robotics. Richmond believes in sharing of knowledge, and you can find some of his Machine Learning based articles on Medium where he's been a top writer in Artificial Intelligence for the majority of 2020. When he...