I work
at
SmarterTravel
Media where I analyze the performance of their internet
marketing portfolio and develop solutions to improve yields.
When I'm investigating data, the place I like to start is by
building the right visualization. Looking at the data is the first
step toward being able to understand it. I like to build
visualizations and prototypes in R, although occasionally I've
built some data exploration tools in javascript with javascript
graphing libraries when they were intended for wider use.
Given the quantity of keywords we had, the amount of search data
available was pretty massive. But still, one of the biggest
challenges was accounting for things about which we had very
little or no data at all, or where the data available had no
predictive power.
I studied Cognitve Science
at
MIT. Cognitive
science tries to understand how the brain processes the world
around us and how one basic unit (the neuron) can combine to
create the behavior we see in people. So a cognitive scientist
might study vision, language, morality, the process by which
any of these develop in children, or situations where they fail to
develop. Unlike chemistry or physics, doing new work in cognitive
science doesn't have to include an expensive machine or mastering
laboratory techinques. As an undergrad, I was able to engage with
problems at the "forest" level, not just the "trees," which
involved a lot of thinking about how to read the results of
someone else's work; about how to design an experiment to
test a hypothesis; about how to interpret and visualize data; and
about how to present those results persuasively.
Along the way I spent a lot of time
in
TedLab, where I analyzed
the permissible orderings of sentences/ideas in a text
(
discourse
analysis). My project
with
Michael Frank
looked at cross-situational learning. I
presented
the
paper at the Conference of the Cognitive Science Society in
2009.
I also spent time in neuroscience labs. In 2006, I worked in the
lab
of
Nancy
Hayes at UMDNJ as a SURP student. My project looked at
whether neurogenesis increased in mice who were trained on the
morris water maze. In 2008, I worked with Liora Las in the lab
of
Michale Fee. We were
studying activity in the ventral tegmental area of the songbird. I
learned to do a little brain operation on the birds.
Before 2008, I studied linguistics. I wrote a phonology paper on the
distinction between the vowel sounds in the words "Merry",
"Marry", and "Mary" which I presented at the Cornell Undergrad
Linguistics Colloqium.
Actually I've been doing science even longer than that, just
ask
Prof. Nick Agostino.