Learning, Practicing, and Teaching: A Glimpse Into the Profession of Data Science

Friday, November 14, 2014 - 4:30 pm

Drawing from my experience of transitioning from being a particle physicist to a practicing data scientist, this talk will highlight how different quantitative disciplines lead to different paths to becoming a professional data scientist. Being at a large corporation like AT&T has given me the opportunity to work on a wide variety of problem spaces. I will illustrate some of the problems and the unique skills that can be effective for approaching certain classes of problems. Finally, I will discuss teaching of data science and the principles we need to uphold in the pedagogy of data and informational sciences such that we can build a fruitful and robust discipline of study.

Learning, Practicing, and Teaching: A Glimpse Into Data Science | Data Dialogs 2014

Rishiraj Pravahan

Principal Data Scientist

AT&T Foundry

Rishiraj Pravahan is a Principal Data Scientist working at the AT&T Foundry. Prior to joining AT&T. Rishiraj worked for the ATLAS experiment at CERN as a PhD student and a post doctoral fellow. While at CERN, he worked on constructing, commissioning and calibrating the ATLAS detector as well as on software techniques to analyze the massive dataset from the Large Hadron Collider to search for new physics.

He has also been a passionate teacher and advocate for science through public talks and seminars in the US, Europe, India and Latin America. He has been collaborating with Udacity to produce content toward a nano degree in data science. His current work involves, understanding distributed systems, networks, privacy and security of customer data, collection, storage and analysis of sensor data and making advances in the frontiers of statistics and machine learning.