Data Science from the Trenches: Member Talks

In this new series of meetups, Houston Data Science members will give presentations on different data science topics/projects they have worked on during their career. This will be an opportunity to have an up close look of how our community members have successfully (or unsuccessfully!) applied data science.

Each of the presenters will give a 10-20 minute 'lightning talk'. Get to know the presenters below:

David Jones

David Jones will discuss his use of data science and machine learning in predicting the stock market. Traditional financial engineering combines applied mathematics, finance, statistics, computer science, and economic theory, along with borrowed concepts developed in physics to predict the future price of economic assets like stocks, bonds, and commodities. Advancements in computer speed and software now allow Data Science to be applied to the prediction of the stock prices by filtering through massive amounts of historical price data to determine predictable relationships that until now were unknown.

David has Bachelors and Masters in Mechanical Engineering from Mississippi State University where he became interested in the stock market during the 1990's DotCom Boom. He then obtained a Masters of Finance from Texas A&M University before working for Halliburton for 10+years in research and design of oilfield service equipment, processes, and tools. In 2014, he got the "Stock Market" Bug again and obtained a Masters of Quantitative Financial Economics from Oklahoma State University. For the past two years he has been perfecting his trading technique utilizing data science to guide his investment decisions.

Micah Miller (https://www.linkedin.com/in/micah-miller-102b9635/)

Micah Miller will discuss his transition to the Google Cloud Platform and how its vast array of tools support a data science workflow.

Micah Miller is a petrophysicist turned data scientist at Schlumberger. He is passionate about building to end-to-end applications involving data collection, processing, modeling, and visualization.

Paige Bailey (https://twitter.com/DynamicWebPaige)

The talk will be on Predicting Houston Hub Electricity Prices using historic ERCOT and weather data.

Paige Bailey is a geophysicist by background (Rice University '13) and is pursuing a Master's in Computer Science at the University of Houston. She currently works as a Data Scientist at Chevron, specializing in drilling and completions optimization in the Permian - and is always down for a jam session about R, Python, or data visualization.

Roy Keyes (https://www.linkedin.com/in/roy-k-213127128/)

Roy Keyes will showcase his work on the Python library slots (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/slots) he built used for building multi-armed bandits, an indispensable tool for UX design.

Roy Keyes is a senior data scientist at Arundo Analytics and the co-organizer of the Houston Data Science Meetup group. He started in data science in 2012 and has worked with a number of tech startups as a consultant or employee. Before data science, Roy received a PhD focused on computational radiation physics applications in medicine.

Finding Station Houston (http://stationhouston.com/contact/): Located at the corner of Polk and Fannin St. on the 24th floor. There is usually one door open past 6 p.m. If you are locked outside, leave a message below and someone will let you in.