Writing & Speaking

Writing

“If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.” - George Orwell

Some contest that this quote was misattributed to Orwell.

Non-work-related

As a data professional and technologist, I feel responsible for considering the implications of my work on our culture and livelihood; it’s a topic I enjoy reading, writing, and thinking about. In the summer of 2023, I published many of my reflections in a book review for Christianity Today.

Data-related

During my masters, some classmates and I published an applied ML research paper titled, “A Machine Learning Approach to Detecting Low Medication State with Wearable Technologies”, which was presented at the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society Conference 2020, in Montréal, Québec, Canada.

As an extension of our research, we also built a multi-platform medication monitoring system (AppleWatch, iPhone, web) to establish how our research could join doctors and patients in the effort to mitigate medication non-adherence.

Speaking

For SF’s Beer Week (Feb 2020, at Standard Deviant), I gave a talk titled, “MoneyBall is Dead: Why Player Development is the Final Frontier for Baseball Analytics”. This included a high-level overview of what data analysis in MLB organizations has looked like since the turn of the century and why the adoption of new high-frequency data collection devices, like high-speed cameras and radar, is changing how the game of baseball is played.

My primary draw to the data space was how pragmatically valuable it made math skills. Even with the hype surrounding AI, it’s still the core math that is most interesting to me. At the 2018 Big Data Ignite Conference (Grand Rapids, MI), I gave a presentation on “Machine Learning from Scratch”, in which I stepped through the mechanics of support vector machines, and walked through how they could be applied to some open GR car crash data.