Podcasts Technology Datacast Episode 10: Linguist turned Data Scientist with Matthias Raess

Episode 10: Linguist turned Data Scientist with Matthias Raess

Published: Feb. 22, 2019, 4:30 p.m.

Show Notes:

  • (2:22) Matthias recalled his experience getting a Master’s Degree in English, History, and Political Science from the University of Regensburg in Germany.
  • (3:19) Matthias discussed his Master’s Thesis looking at the formation and transformation of 9/11-memory in American news weeklies as well as the importance of project management skills.
  • (6:00) Matthias talked about his 2 years with the Professional Teacher Training Program working for the Bavarian Government.
  • (7:48) Matthias extracted the most useful skills obtained from his experience as an academic high school teacher.
  • (9:33) Matthias went over his decision to pursue a Ph.D. in Linguistics at Ball State University in 2013.
  • (12:04) Matthias explained why he chose to study Linguistics.
  • (13:01) For his Ph.D. dissertation, Matthias did an in-depth analysis of German tweets, where he investigated the interaction between language, demographics, and personality of German users on Twitter.
  • (15:52) Matthias discussed in detail his end-to-end data science approach towards his Ph.D. thesis project.
  • (22:38) Matthias provided insights on the challenges in dealing with linguistic data.
  • (25:35) Matthias talked about the benefits of getting a certificate in statistical modeling, including learning about Generalized Linear Models.
  • (29:15) Matthias mentioned his work as a data science consultant at Ball State’s Digital Scholarship Lab.
  • (31:20) Matthias gave out resources to learn data science using the R statistical language, including DataCamp, Udemy, Coursera, and Lynda.
  • (35:26) Matthias reflected on his job search experience for a data science role after finishing his Ph.D. degree coming from a non-traditional background.
  • (42:30) Matthias went over interesting projects that he has involved with at LiveIntent, his current employer.
  • (45:18) Matthias talked about his recent move from a Data Analyst role to a Data Analytics Manager role.
  • (47:10) Matthias emphasized the value of communication skills as a data science leader.
  • (49:55) Matthias identified the single biggest difference between doing data science in the industry versus in academia.
  • (53:09) Matthias briefly talked about the data science community in New York (check out New York R User Group Meetup).
  • (54:13) Closing segments.

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