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RealScientists | Taka Profile picture
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15 Mar, 6 tweets, 2 min read
Happy Monday!

I’ll share a little bit here about my work day, throughout the day as I find time.

Here’s my “office,” a cramped corner of a bedroom where I’ve been doing all my work for almost a year—including interviewing for and hiring my teammates at the current job.
You will notice that my desk blocks the dresser door. It’s just as well—it’s not like I need blazers, suits, or ties these days!

Also, thank goodness for Zoom backgrounds! (I prefer astro images or Totoro for mine.)
My team starts the week with a 10AM sync on Monday.

How were our weekends? What are we working on this week, and what’s coming up? Anything holding us back? What are we looking forward to? Anyone taking days off?

So let me clean myself up and do that!
So what's happening?

- We're preparing to update CEO tomorrow and other leaders on latest data insights and project progress.
- My team is sharing our latest findings with the entire US side of the company on Friday.
- I have a couple of meetings with other dept leads on different projects this afternoon.
- We also asked each other questions, offered some project feedback & ideas.
- Hoping to find time to code today!
Also reminded teammates: we just lost an hour, and we don't have a national holiday for a while. We're lucky not to have anything super urgent this week, so let's take advantage, have a relaxed week, and try something new/interesting if we have bandwidth.

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RealScientists | Taka Profile picture
16 Mar
Merry Tuesday!

Tuesdays are usually my most eventful days of the week, by design.

I have 9 meetings today, the earliest at 11 AM and the latest ending at 10:30 PM.

And you will ask: "Why, Taka, WHY in the name of reason and science would you do this to yourself?"
1. We have a regular call of all the department leads. That includes people in Korea, US ET + PT. Right now, we have it in the evening my time.

2. To minimize the number of evenings I'm in meetings, I put the rest of my meetings with Korea teams back-to-back with the above.
3. I also put cross-team meetings with stakeholders on Tuesdays, during the US day. These only happen every other week… but why also put them on Tuesdays!?

There are THREE reasons why I do this to myself (and my team, what a monstrous boss!).
Read 12 tweets
RealScientists | Taka Profile picture
15 Mar
Let me tackle this: What am I doing to ensure equity and justice for women in my field (tech / data science)?
Recent data: ~80% of technical roles in the biggest tech companies are held by men.
wired.com/story/five-yea…

Further: ~92% of Fortune 500 CEOs are men, and I have yet to meet a female CTO.
Let me preface my answer to the question with Angela Davis’ famous quote: “In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.”

The point applies not only to racism, but to systemic inequity of all forms.
Read 21 tweets
RealScientists | Taka Profile picture
15 Mar
So what is my job, anyway?

I work at a serialized fiction startup called Radish.

Our core offering is romance fiction, but we have content from all genres.

We had press coverage last summer over our last big funding round.

techcrunch.com/2020/08/04/rad…
Users can read stories for free. For most stories, they'll hit a wall after several chapters. They can wait for the next chapter to unlock in an hour, or you can use in-app currency to read it right away.

Authors can publish their content, and we share the revenue it generates.
We have about 50 employees, about half of whom are in the US and half of whom are in Korea.

The DS team has 5 members, so we're a pretty big fraction of the company.
Read 5 tweets
RealScientists | Taka Profile picture
15 Mar
Okay, naturally you picked the toughest one! 🙂

Let’s start with a hypothetical:
Your friend has never watched the movie Jurassic Park.

You get to ask them up to 10 questions about their movie preferences before recommending whether they should watch it. What are the Qs?
In other words, you’re trying to predict whether they’ll like the movie.

The Qs might go:
1. Do you like sci-fi movies?
2. If yes, are you okay w movies w some violence?
3. If yes, do you like Jeff Goldblum?
4. If you don’t like Goldblum, do you like Laura Dern?



And so on.
After a while, you think you have a questionnaire that at the end, will be able to decide if you should recommend them to try Jurassic Park.



One class of machine learning algorithm, called decision trees, makes “questionnaires” kind of like this.
Read 18 tweets
RealScientists | Taka Profile picture
15 Mar
Okay! I’ll kick off Monday AM with a “What’s machine learning?” thread.

I’ll cap off the weekend with a bonus mini-thread about my previous career in astrophysics!

I used to study the formation and mergers of supermassive black holes (SMBHs).
You might know black holes as what’s left behind when massive stars die.

These are “stellar mass BHs” (10s of solar masses, say).

Every galaxy seems to have a BH that’s millions to billions of solar masses. Those are SMBHs.
This is a series of infrared observations of the Milky Way center.

Using Kepler’s laws from physics 101, we know there’s 4 million solar masses of stuff at the common focus of these orbits.

Dr. Andrea Ghez shared a Nobel prize last year for this work.

images.app.goo.gl/UiJX9gBad4JJ8E…
Read 6 tweets
RealScientists | Taka Profile picture
14 Mar
So let me start with the whether or not to part.

It’s a lot of work and a lot of responsibility to be accountable for the company’s entire DS practice, and for people’s jobs and professional growth. It’s not for everyone! There are weeks when I don’t get to code at all.
You don’t have to be a manager or dept head to grow your career. You can be principal, lead, or senior data scientist, and you can accept some mentoring responsibilities but fight away the managerial and strategic ones.
(Sometimes it isn’t clear you have this choice in small companies. But in my experience, small companies also offer the most flexibility for crafting your role & growth.)
Read 15 tweets

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