James Donahue
Raised in Nashville, Tennessee, USA, I have bounced around the world, finally settling in Hamburg, Germany. My professional background reflects my vagabond nature. I taught English in Asia, Latin America, and online (full-time remote work before Covid!), worked in adventure tourism in Appalachia (USA) and Chile, and did my masters in Economics in Hamburg. Somewhere along the way, I gathered a few stories and soft skills.
I met Python during my masters, but stuck with Matlab through the my PhD coursework, until I decided that academia is not my forever home. Currently I am occupying myself with ensemble methods such as XGBoost, as well as expanding into computer vision with PyTorch and toying with more advanced data visualizations. Naturally, NumPy will always hold a special place in my heart, along with the Cython package to sample everything a Bayesian needs.
Sessions
Statisticians and machine learning specialists have a lot to learn from each other (even if they don't think so). This talk lightheartedly awards points to both classical statistics and machine learning, with an attempt not to offend anyone (but to annoy everyone). Topics include: Are confidence intervals worth it? What is bias, anyway? Can I just code it in Python?
We have heard a lot about LLMs from tech experts, but what do an economist, an English teacher, and a tourism manager have to say about it? Fortunately, I've been all three and would love to share my experience!