Trained in statistical physics, Melanie loves to find insightful patterns in data. She helped to model and understand data from biology experiments at Harvard University before joining Booking.com as a data scientist in 2014. At Booking.com, she transforms terabytes of data into recommendations for fun holidays. But no matter whether her data comes from physics, biology, or human behavior - Python is her data wrangling and algorithm tool of choice.
Without a technical background, Bernice may sound like a stranger in our midst. She finished her study Organizational Sciences last summer and just started with her new job as executive search associate. Despite the fact that she has no technical background, she loves the vision behind the open source community and its impact on our daily lives. This is why she decided to contribute to the open source community by offering her organisational talents.
Specialized in distributed computing, Tünde acts as a big data hacker at GoDataDriven. Some of her responsibilities are installing Hadoop clusters on-premise and in the cloud, working with microservices and docker containers and creating data pipelines. According to her one of the nicest things is to discover some data related pattern or issue which can help the customer. She uses bash, scala, python and ansible to get things up and running. She likes to help data scientist to improve the performance of their jobs on large datasets and make sure that algorithms run in production in a reliable way. She also likes to teach people Hadoop development and administration.
Accidentally discovered the fun of programming in a Java course at Utrecht University. With a background in mathematics, Karlijn started using Python when doing image processing on brain MRI scans for her master thesis. After trading brain image data for user generated data at Booking.com, she’s still using Python to do data exploration, finding stories and truths in the data.
It was love at first sight when Marcel got his first computer. From the age of 12 he started programming websites, and numerous programming jobs followed. His entrepreneurial spirit resulted in not only his first company at age 15 with 10-20 fellow students, but also working at start-ups like Phusion, co-organizing conferences, and occasionally organizing meet-up R training sessions with Vincent.
During his BSc. in computer science, programming in different languages like Python, Java, C++, Haskell turned him into a polyglot. While taking courses in Big Data, Machine learning, GPU programming and more, he developed his love for data. During his Master computational science he learned to model complex systems. Currently, he is working full-time at KPMG international as data scientist and just started with his PhD position at the computational finance department of the University of Amsterdam.
A long-time Python user and advocate, Gabriele enjoys using statistical and computational methods to look for patterns in large amounts of data. These days he's back in ad-tech, doing applied research in machine learning for large scale advertising systems. Gabriele is a speaker at both local and international events. He is the co-author of Learning Hadoop 2, published by Packt.
Giovanni arrived at GoDataDriven because the firm, although small at that time, made him an offer he couldn't refuse, stealing him from the Software Quality department of KPMG. A theoretical Physicist by trade (he claims he once received the title Doctor from Leiden University for his outstanding research in that field), he is now active as senior shoe designer.
He was once offered the Chief Science position at the Nutella R&D department, but as he realised that the answer to all Nutella R&D projects was "Make more Nutella", he politely passed on the opportunity.
In his spare time he wonders what spare time looked like before he had five kids, reads, travels, smokes the pipe, and makes limoncello.
Vincent taught himself programming four years ago and now he is a founding co-chair of PyData Amsterdam, preferred Rstudio training partner and organiser of the Applied Machine Learning Meetup in Amsterdam. He advises anybody to never let their school get in the way of their education.
He has a blog about less obvious aspects in the world of data science over at koaning.io and he’s known for giving free lectures in data science around Europe. He’s especially keen to give one in Lisbon, Ljubljana, Split or Belfast. Feel free to notify Vincent if you’ve got a venue in any of these places or other awesome place to visit. He’ll most likely show up.
Vincent solves data problems, ask him anything.