Date: Friday, January 31, 2014

Location: Maxwell-Dworkin G115, 33 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

Speaker: Bo Peng, Data Scope Analytics

Time: Informal lunch with speaker, 12:30pm. Talk, 1:00pm

Title: Data Science and Design: Fickleness and How We Solve it

Abstract:
When solving problems, data scientists often encounter added layers of complexity when the problems to be solved are not well defined, and their solutions unclear. In these cases, standard, more straightforward approaches fall short, as they are not amenable to vague problems, and are thus not guaranteed to reliably produce useful results. At Datascope Analytics, we adopt methodologies from the design community and use a "continuous feedback loop" to iteratively improve dashboards, algorithms, and data sources to ensure that the resulting tool will be useful and well received. During this talk, I will illustrate our approach by sharing a detailed example from one of our projects with Procter & Gamble. I will end by showing a live demo version of our final visualization tool, using movie data from the Internet Movie Database (IMDB).

Speaker bio:
Bo Peng has been a Data Scientist at Datascope Analytics since 2012. She has contributed to a variety of in-house apps such as Lunch? and Cheating Commish, in addition to projects for clients such as P&G, Thomson Reuters, and other well-known companies. She is passionate about exploring the root issues behind relevant problems, then using data to find solutions that ultimately improve the way people work and think. Bo received a BS in mathematics and a MS in statistics, both from The University of Chicago.

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UPCOMING SEMINARS

2/14 Leslie Greengard (NYU)

2/28 Stratos Idreos (Harvard)

3/7 Johan Bollen (Indiana University)

3/14 Raul Jimenez (University of Barcelona)

3/28 Devavrat Shah (MIT)

4/4 Yaron Singer (Harvard)

4/11 Hadley Wickham (RStudio & Rice)

4/25 Spiros Mancoridis (Drexel)

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