Have you used Google search today? Or listened to music recommended to you? The results and suggestions you receive from these types of services are powered by Data Science. In today’s world, big data and insights are the new currency. While it's the machines that ultimately do the number crunching and provide the data, it's the human touch behind the scenes that make it all possible. In today’s episode we explore the field of Data Science and Machine Learning and how it permeates every walk of life and the endless possibilities it provides.

Our guest today, Ryan Valenza, is a scientist through and through. He earned his Bachelor of Science in Physics and Math from University of Maryland Baltimore County and his Master of Science in Physics from the University of Washington (PhD). He has held roles as a Data Engineer and Data Analyst at the Allen Institute for Brain Science and as Chief Data Scientist at Stackline, an e-commerce startup. He recently began a new job as the Director of Machine Learning at Bungie. If Bungie rings a bell it should, they created the gaming franchises of Halo, Destiny and Marathon to name a few.

When he is not teaching machines how to interpret data he is a big gamer himself with origins in Donkey Kong Country, a runner and an adventure planner for his three year old daughter.

Connect with Ryan:

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Twitch

Show notes and helpful resources:

• Condensed matter physics
• Random forest and gradient descent algorithms
• Converting sound to image using Sonographic Sound Processing
• Convolutional Neural Network -  a series of mathematical transformations
• Google deep mind
• AlphaGo - the computer program that defeated the Go grand master
• AlphaStar - the computer that plays StarCraft II
• Words to live by - “You should never bring someone else down to bring to yourself up”
• Ryan’s intro to machine learning will cover supervised learning , unsupervised learning and reinforcement learning
• Data Science at UMBC

Building something cool or solving interesting problems? Want to be on this show? Send me an email at jointhepodcast@unfilteredbuild.com

Podcast produced by Unfiltered Build - dream.design.develop.