Upcoming Talks:
ABSA The Evolution as a Data Science Shared Service Team
- The Past: Addressing Absa's legacy way of work
- The Present: key changes that drove shared service success for data science projects
- The Future: how we plan to better integrate ourselves into business unit projects for faster value delivery
Strategy to merge and integrate data from different systems
Currently working at Absa. as a data scientist within a central team. My responsibilites include delivering solutions across the group, consulting into existing data science teams to help solve their problems, and developing a large scale platform for data science within the bank. I have consulted as the data lead on large strategic initiatives across the bank. Previously, I consulted as a business analyst into big corporates (Rand Merchant Bank, Discovery).
. I have half a degree in Data Science. Why half? I believe you don't need a masters degree in data science to do data science within the industry. Data science is part maths, part computer science and part creativity. The former two were covered by my undergraduate education and the third cannot be taught. I wanted to spend more time doing and less time researching. At the end of the day, data science in business is about value.
I obtained my BSc Hons in Physics from the University of Pretoria. My honours dissertation covered General Relativity and the Black Ring Coordinate System.
I am a data scientist with exposure to many languages and open source tools such as (but not limited to) R, Shiny, Python, Scala, Spark, Hadoop, Docker and more!
The majority of my focus is currently directed to reproducible and resilient data science solutions. How do we take software and data engineering principles and implement them in a data science context so that models can be monitored with proper tracking and reliable predictions.
While I'm passionate about model building, part of my passion is dedicated to ethical data science. More and more data scientists are being pushed through online courses and the responsibility of implementing solutions that impact people directly isn't emphasized. We as data scientists have a responsibility to our respective communities that we do our due diligence in creating fair and ethical solutions.
Hobbies of mine include:
- Gym and Fitness - I started training seriously at the beginning of 2017 after losing 26kgs, I hired a coach midway through the same year to help me along this journey.
- Food - I love food. There's nothing more to say.
- Coffee - Ethically sourced, fair trade goodness.
- Space flight & Physics - Two of the disciplines I was obsessed with prior to data science and continue to follow.
Grew up and now live in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Previous Talks:
- Using & Adapting Data Science Products Across the Business Group
- Data Science Modelling & Scaling
- Data Science & Engineering Use Case