8. George Hayward: comedian, lawyer and data scientist
Towards Data Science
10/08/19
•51m
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Each week, I have dozens of conversations with people who are trying to break into data science. The main topic of the conversations varies, but it’s rare that I walk away without getting a question like, “Do you think I have a shot in data science given my unusual background in [finance/physics/stats/economics/etc]?”.
From now on, my answer to that question will be to point them to today’s guest, George John Jordan Thomas Aquinas Hayward.
George [names omitted] Hayward’s data science career is a testament to the power of branding and storytelling. After completing a JD/MBA at Stanford and reaching top-ranked status in Hackerrank’s SQL challenges, he went on to work on contract for a startup at Google, and subsequently for a number of other companies. Now, you might be tempted to ask how comedy and law could possibly lead to a data science career.
Previous Episode
For today’s podcast, we spoke with someone who is laser-focused on considering this second possibility: the idea that data science is becoming an engineer’s game. Serkan Piantino served as the Director of Engineering for Facebook AI Research, and now runs machine learning infrastructure startup Spell. Their goal is to make dev tools for data scientists that make it as easy to train models on the cloud as it is to train them locally. That experience, combined with his time at Facebook, have given him a unique perspective on the engineering best practices that data scientists should use, and the future of the field as a whole.
Next Episode
The trend towards model deployment, engineering and just generally building “stuff that works” is just the latest step in the evolution of the now-maturing world of data science. It’s almost guaranteed not to be the last one though, and staying ahead of the data science curve means keeping an eye on what trends might be just around the corner. That’s why we asked Ben Lorica, O’Reilly Media’s Chief Data Scientist, to join us on the podcast.
Not only does Ben have a mile-high view of the data science world (he advises about a dozen startups and organizes multiple world-class conferences), but he also has a perspective that spans two decades of data science evolution.
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