A New York Hackthon

I was asked to be a replacement judge for The FinTech City that Never Sleeps hackathon! This two day hackathon took place on Friday to Saturday in New York . It was brought by a startup accelator Startupbootcamp FinTech New York (@sbcFinTech) and sponsored by Byte Academy

 (Blogger conflict of interest disclaimer- I briefly advised one of the startups at Startupbootcamp for two weeks in data science and I gave a couple of free talks at meetups organized by Byte Academy)

Overall the theme of this hackathon was how to use innovation in technology for the biggest industry in New York (finance). Ergo the curious but rather catchy term fintech. Technology in Finance! Wall Street for the good of main street! One curious and common refrain was how millennials trust their mobile and Uber more than Banks or financial advisors.

My observations were- engineering talent in New York continues to lag behind California. Access to both money and design  makes New York a serious contender for usurping Silicon Valley’s mountain glory.

A serious advantage New York has over California is water. A serious advantage California has over New York is the sunlight.

The hacking kids in this hackathon were bright and innovative. Hacking is both a social experiment as well as practical need to think and innovate in stagnant industries like Finance, Fashion , Theatre, Social Empowerment and Entertainment. A healthy dose of reality shall ensure hackathons become the new more productive passtime of the children of America.  Star Trek Next Generation!

This one man team /guy won the best technical award and took all his prizes.

IMG_7998

The judges pose

IMG_8003

These guys (ideal karma !) won the overall hackathon

Screenshot from 2016-06-16 12:47:53

 

For details see http://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-fintech-city-that-never-sleeps-hackathon-tickets-25550744966 or more tweets me at https://twitter.com/holydatascience

 

I really enjoyed judging the hackthon in New York, which ironically is still my favourite city because of the libraries, trees and well pretty people besides the lovely Hudson in the summer.  It was nice to be back in New York since 2009 when I came over for the first Big Data meeting ( by AsterData later acquired by Teradata).

Afterthought- What is built by a human can be and should be hacked by another human. That is the only way we are going to be continuously improving as a species and as one world. Hacking is important to simplify a complex world where resources are precious and the costs of error huge 

 

 

Hack for Change #hackforchange

As part of National Day of Hacking, I took part in the hackathon in New York. Here were some insights

A few teams had come prepared reading the challenge questions. These teams had an advantage on time

Creating something in time was a big challenge ( how do you make a product in a single day)

Hackathon consists of 1) organizer giving challenge questions 2) people coming to venue 3) making teams 4) working together as team 5) presenting results (usually one person per team)

The idea is the most important in how relevant and closely aligned to the questions in hackthon you were. Creativity rules

The next important thing was making a balanced team in which everyone gels well, and have skill sets that are complementary ( one front end, one back end, one data scientist in Python, one person who is good at presentation etc)

The next important thing was not getting intimidated by other teams and working on your team idea till last moment

The presentation should be given to a person who is best at expressing 1) what you did 2) how the solution is innovative 3) how it is relevant and useful to challenge

Lastly have fun hacking. People who have fun hacking generally tend to be better hackers.

Screenshot from 2016-06-10 06:40:04

Thanking Yoga

So I made an update on LinkedIn where I am lucky to find 12000 connections to talk about Yoga and get 1100 likes.. Connect with me on LinkedIn here 🙂

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ajayohri

The post

Screenshot from 2016-06-08 11:54:43

The likes

www.linkedin.com/hp/update/6146066977216610304

Screenshot from 2016-06-10 07:24:02

The profile views

Screenshot from 2016-06-10 07:19:25

LOL. Internet works in a strange way. I just wrote it as a thank you note to myself on my 39 birthday.

Related- Inspired by my favourite American hacker

sergey

 

 

Rise of ISIS surprised CIA: Incompetence as a conspiracy

Some liberals think the CIA stands for Christian Intelligence Agency. Some thing it is a Conspiracy Investigation Agency.

But why did CIA get caught by surprise when ISIS rose?

Oh Shit happens!

Who benefits (Quo Bono) when ISIS rose?

Why did the current CIA director get his job when the last Director got caught in a affair (General Petreaus ) who knew the area well.

Is John O. Brennan trying to run for Vice President in 2020 ? George H W Bush did that before

Incompetence in a democracy demands answers! Before you invade the wrong country (it has happened before !)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_O._Brennan

Brennan withdrew his name from consideration for Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the first Obama administration over concerns about his support for transferring terror suspects to countries where they may be tortured while serving under President George W. Bush.[3][5] Instead, Brennan was appointed Deputy National Security Advisor, a position which did not require Senate confirmation.[3][5][8]

Brennan’s 25 years with the CIA included work as a Near East and South Asia analyst, as station chief in Saudi Arabia,

After leaving government service in 2005, Brennan became CEO of The Analysis Corporation, a security consulting business, and served as chairman of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, an association of intelligence professionals

His term as CIA Director coincided with revelations that the U.S. government conducted massive levels of global surveillance, that the CIA had hacked into the computers of U.S. Senate employees, and the release of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture.

Living with BiPolar Disorder

A close friend of mine recently discovered that she had bipolar disorder. It is a difficult to diagnose disability, and living in India added to both the complexity of diagnosis and treatment. Given the states of high, low, psychotic episodes that bipolar have, in a pseudo conservative society like India brought me to the still humbling fact that more data scientists chase how to make ad clicks better than how to study brain imaging data and more money is spent making Hollywood movies than chasing climate change, Mars, or brain imaging. As the Joker said, everybody loses their mind if one little surprise is given, even to budgeting and funding across the world for healthcare.

Anyways, my friend is back on her feet and doing well with yoga. Yoga can help aid mental disabilities at lower costs, but lol, wait till you have FDA approval for asanas

Spring Cleaning – What I wrote

 

A partial list of writings by me over the years

 

  • Big Data Initiatives in Developing Nations

 

Can big data, open data, and programs such as the Aadhaar Project enhance lives in underprivileged segments of society? March 2015

http://www.ibmbigdatahub.com/blog/big-data-initiatives-developing-nations

2) Downsides Dampen Open-Source Analytics September 2011 http://www.allanalytics.com/author.asp?section_id=1408&doc_id=233454

 

3) KDNuggets – Articles on Data Science

 

  1. Using Python and R together: 3 main approaches December 2015

 

  1. Interview: Ingo Mierswa, RapidMiner CEO on “Predaction” and Key Turning Points  June 2014
  2. Guide to Data Science Cheat Sheets 2014/05/12
  3. Book Review: Data Just Right 2014/04/03
  4. Exclusive Interview: Richard Socher, founder of etcML, Easy Text Classification Startup 2014/03/31
  5. Trifacta – Tackling Data Wrangling with Automation and Machine Learning 2014/03/17
  6. Paxata automates Data Preparation for Big Data Analytics 2014/03/07
  7. etcML Promises to Make Text Classification Easy  2014/03/05
  8. Wolfram Breakthrough Knowledge-based Programming Language – what it means for Data Science? 2014/03/02

Programmable Web- Articles on APIs

 

  1. Keen IO Helps Developers Solve Custom Analytics Needs 06-09-2014
  2. Scoreoid Aims to Gamify the World Using APIs 01-27-2014
  3. Plot.ly’s Plot to Visualize More Data 01-22-2014
  4. LumenData’s Acquisition of Algorithms.io is a Win-Win 01-08-2014
  5. Yactraq API Sees Huge Growth in 2013 01-06-2014
  6. Scrape.it Describes a Better Way to Extract Data12-20-2013
  7. Exclusive Interview: App Store Analytics API 12-04-2013
  8. APIs Enter 3d Printing Industry 11-29-2013
  9. PW Interview: José Luis Martinez of Textalytics 11-06-2013
  10. PW Interview Simon Chan PredictionIO 11-05-2013
  11. PW Interview: Scott Gimpel Founder and CEO FantasyData.com 10-23-2013
  12. PW Interview Brandon Levy, cofounder and CEO of Stitch Labs 10-08-2013
  13. PW Interview: Jolo Balbin Co-Founder Text Teaser 09-18-2013
  14. PW Interview:Bob Bickel CoFounder Redline13 07-29-2013
  15. PW Interview : Brandon Wirtz CTO Stremor.com 07-04-2013
  16. PW Interview: Andy Bartley, CEO Algorithms.io 06-04-2013
  17. PW Interview: Francisco J Martin, CEO BigML.com 05-30-2013
  18. PW Interview: Tal Rotbart Founder- CTO, SpringSense 05-28-2013
  19. PW Interview: Jeh Daruwala CEO Yactraq API, Behavorial Targeting for videos 05-13-2013
  20. PW Interview: Michael Schonfeld of Dwolla API on Innovation Meeting the Payment Web 05-02-2013
  21. PW Interview: Stephen Balaban of Lamda Labs on the Face Recognition API 04-29-2013
  22. PW Interview: Amber Feng, Stripe API, The Payment Web 04-24-2013
  23. PW Interview: Greg Lamp and Austin Ogilvie of Yhat on Shipping Predictive Models via API 04-22-2013
  24. Google Mirror API documentation is open for developers 04-18-2013
  25. PW Interview: Ricky Robinett, Ordr.in API, Ordering Food meets API 04-16-2013
  26. PW Interview: Jacob Perkins, Text Processing API, NLP meets API 04-10-2013
  27. Amazon EC2 On Demand Windows Instances -Prices reduced by 20% 04-08-2013
  28. Amazon S3 API Requests prices slashed by half 04-03-2013
  29. PW Interview: Stuart Battersby, Chatterbox API, Machine Learning meets Social 04-02-2013
  30. PW Interview: Karthik Ram, rOpenSci, Wrapping all science APIs 03-20-2013
  31. Viralheat Human Intent API- To buy or not to buy 03-13-2013
  32. Interview Tammer Kamel CEO and Founder Quandl 03-07-2013
  33. YHatHQ API: Calling Hosted Statistical Models 03-04-2013
  34. Quandl API: A Wikipedia for Numerical Data 02-25-2013
  35. Amazon Redshift API is out of limited preview and available! 02-18-2013
  36. Windows Azure Media Services REST API 02-14-2013
  37. Data Science Toolkit Wraps Many Data Services in One API 02-11-2013
  38. Diving into Codeacademy’s API Lessons 01-31-2013
  39. Google APIs finetuning Cloud Storage JSON API 01-29-2013
  40. Interview Hilary Mason Chief Scientist bitly 01-28-2013
  41. Interview: Viralheat CEO Raj Kadam on API Growth 01-22-2013
  42. Google Compute API – Affordable Computing at Google Scale 01-17-2013
  43. Ergast API Puts Car Racing Fans in the Driver’s Seat12-05-2012
  44. Springer APIs- Fostering Innovation via API Contests 11-20-2012
  45. Statistically programming the web – Shiny,HttR and RevoDeploy API 11-19-2012
  46. Google Cloud SQL API- Bigger ,Faster and now Free 11-12-2012
  47. A Look at the Web’s Most Popular API -Google Maps API 10-09-2012
  48. Cloud Storage APIs for the next generation Enterprise 09-26-2012
  49. Last.fm API: Sultan of Musical APIs 09-12-2012
  50. Socrata Data API: Keeping Government Open 08-29-2012
  51. BigML API Gets Bigger 08-22-2012
  52. Bing APIs: the Empire Strikes Back 08-15-2012
  53. Google Cloud SQL: Relational Database on the Cloud 08-13-2012
  54. Google BigQuery API Makes Big Data Analytics Easy 08-07-2012
  55. Your Store in The Cloud -Google Cloud Storage API 08-01-2012
  56. Predict the future with Google Prediction API 07-30-2012
  57. The Romney vs Obama API 07-27-2012

 

StatisticsViews

http://www.statisticsviews.com/details/feature/8868901/A-Tutorial-on-Python.html

 

CONFERENCES AND TALKS

1) Big Data Big Analytics – http://krishnarajpm.com/bigdata/abstract.pdf Workshop on  Statistical Machine Learning and Game Theory  Approaches for Large Scale Data Analysis  9 July 2012 – 14 July 2012  Sponsored by Mathematical Sciences, Division of Science and Engineering  Research Board at Bangalore India

Department of Science & Technology Government of India. (sponsored airfare-hotel accomodation-honorium)

SLIDES Big data Big Analytics

2) Data Analytics using the Cloud- Challenges and Opportunities for India at 1st International Symposium on Big Data and Cloud Computing Challenges(ISBCC-2014) March 27-28, 2014 VIT University, Chennai, India Sponsored by BRNS (flight)

http://chennai.vit.ac.in/isbcc/

SLIDES Data analytics using the cloud challenges and opportunities for india from Ajay Ohri

3) Open Source Analytics at OSSCamp 2014 http://osscamp.in/

http://osscamp.in/events/6/open-source-analytics-overview-r-python-and-others

SLIDES- Open source analytics from Ajay Ohri

4) Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics- Delhi Technological University Evolute 2015 : Annual Symposium Speaker

5) Talk on Analytics as a profession at Indian Institute of Technology Delhi

Learning R and Teaching R from Ajay Ohri

Workshops

Pre-Placement training workshop for Economics Students, Delhi School of Economics.

A Workshop on R from Ajay Ohri

Books

R for Business Analytics http://www.springer.com/us/book/9781461443421

R for Cloud Computing : A Data Science Approach http://www.springer.com/us/book/9781493917013

Revolution Analytics ( Microsoft) Corporate Blog

http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2011/08/9-more-ways-to-bring-data-into-r.html

http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2012/11/using-r-in-the-human-resources-department.html

 

Journal Articles

Journal of Statistical Software

https://www.jstatsoft.org/article/view/v066b04

Technometrics

Technometrics, Vol. 55 (3), August, 2013

http://amstat.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00401706.2013.822219

 

Major Media

been cited by Wired Magazine and ReadWriteWeb for espousing a marketplace for algorithms.

http://www.wired.com/2014/08/algorithmia/

http://readwrite.com/2011/06/01/an-app-store-for-algorithms/

 

Interviews (of Ajay Ohri)

  1. Big Step Interview July 2015  Expert Interview with Ajay Ohri on the Importance of Big Data http://blog.bigstep.com/big-data-experts-interviews/expert-interview-with-ajay-ohri-on-the-importance-of-big-data/
  2. AnalyticsVidhya Feb 2015 Interview with Industry expert – Ajay Ohri, Founder, decisionstats.com http://www.analyticsvidhya.com/blog/2015/02/interview-expert-ajay-ohri-founder-decisionstats-com/
  3. AnalyticsIndia Magazine Nov 2012 Interview – Ajay Ohri, Author “R for Business Analytics” http://analyticsindiamag.com/interview-ajay-ohri-author-r-for-business-analytics/
  4. HRTechEurope More R in HR Nov 2012 http://blog.hrtecheurope.com/more-r-in-hr/
  5. Data Mining Research Jan 2011 Interview Data Mining Research interview: Ajay Ohrihttp://www.dataminingblog.com/data-mining-research-interview-ajay-ohri/

AnalyticBridge Apr 2008 Interview with Ajay Ohri, Data Mining Consultant from India http://www.analyticbridge.com/group/interviews/forum/topics/2004291:Topic:11703