Computing Alumni

Hey all,

I just graduated January(ish) this year which means I get to post on the blog. For My div 3 I worked with Lee Spector and Neil Stillings on using people’s Facebook data to try and predict their score on a personality test using probabilistic inference. Basically I got a bunch of people to take a personality test on Facebook, then used their Facebook data as a jumping off point to make a bunch of inferences about them. I incorporated a bunch of  external data sources like last.fm data and census data to help make those inferences. Then I used a Bayesian Network to generate a model which used Facebook data and those external data sources to predict peoples personality test scores. When I get some of my results uploaded online I’ll throw a link on here.

So now, like a lot of grads, I’ve moved to Noho. I’m planning on staying around town till the summer when I’ll try to get a “real” data science job. Until that happens, I’m basically trying to submit versions of my Div 3 to various conferences. So far I’ve gotten a grant to travel to and present at the useR conference in Coventry, England, which I’m pretty psyched about. I was hoping to travel abroad after graduation and conference-hopping seems like a fun alternative.(If anybody knows of any conference that might solicit submissions on machine learning applications in the social sciences, I’d love to hear about them.)

Reading about other alums has been fun and I hope to hear about more stuff people go on to do with their post-hampshire lives.

This entry was posted on April 4, 2011 at 4:14 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.