Drew Conway: A Social Scientist's Perspective on Data Science

We're pleased to welcome Drew Conway, co-author of the book Machine Learning for Hackers (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920018483.do)and wearer of many other awesome hats, to the NYC Data Science meetup.

Drew Conway (http://drewconway.com) is Scientist-in-Resident at IA Ventures and a co-founder of DataKind and DataGotham. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science in May 2013 from New York University, where his research focused on computational methods for political science. He is a leading expert in the application of computational methods to social and behavioral problems at large-scale. Drew has been writing and speaking about the role of data — and the discipline of data science — in industry, government, and academia for several years. He has advised and consulted companies across many industries; ranging from fledgling start-ups to Fortune 100 companies, as well as academic institutions and government agencies at all levels. Drew started his career in counter-terrorism as a computational social scientist in the U.S. intelligence community.

In this talk, Drew will examine data science through the lens of the social scientist. He will discuss how the various skills and disciplines combine into data science and will also present a motivating example from his own research on methods for collecting large-scale text coding (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2260437) from non-experts.

Our hosts will be providing pizza and drinks. See you there!