The Moore-Sloan Data Science Environment Summit is an annual meeting between the data science centers at New York University, the University of California at Berkley and the University of Washington. We spoke with Daniela Huppenkothen, a Data Science Fellow at NYU’s Center for Data Science about her experience at the 2015 summit.
Can you tell us about your work and experience as a Data Science Fellow at NYU?
I spend my time working at the Center for Data Science and the Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics, where I’ve been studying statistical and machine learning methods in Astronomy. At NYU, I found a combination of experts in data science methodologies, and domain experts in Astronomy and Physics.
What other activities or events are you involved with in the data science community?
A while back, we organized a workshop called Astro Hack Week, where we had tutorials from a wide range of domain specialists. One of those presentations was actually from another CDS Fellow, Andreas Mueller, who gave a presentation on Scikit Learn. These lectures were focused on teaching the essential skills for working on large astronomical data sets.
Can you talk about your involvement in the Moore-Sloan Data Science Environment Summit?
The summit is an annual gathering of data scientists from the three universities within the Moore-Sloan initiative. There were talks about people’s research, discussion sessions, tutorials, and mixer events where people discussed each other’s work.
Did you present something at the summit last year?
I gave a presentation on a tool Brian McFee and I came up with for Astro Hack Week. We had to select the participants from a huge number of applications, so Brian and I came up with a tool that would select applicants based on a certain criteria. This was a complex optimization problem to solve because of the varied criteria we had to include. This seemed to be an interesting project to present and it also gave us an opportunity to get some feedback on our work.
What were some of the highlights from the summit?
There was a big data tutorial, which helped me clarify my perspective on the subject.
Also, it was great to meet and talk personally with people who were doing such interesting work and research. There were quite a few astronomers, in fact some of them were those who came to the Astro Hack Week.
Was the summit mostly attended by data scientists? Or were some of the attendees domain experts?
Actually, most of the people were domain experts from different areas of research, and all of the researchers have some domain specific questions in mind. So basically, everyone there was a Data Scientist, while many of them being experts in their domain.
Interview conducted by Rishabh Jain