Benjamin Bengfort

Benjamin Bengfort is a Data Scientist who lives inside the beltway but ignores politics (the normal business of DC) favoring technology instead. As Head Faculty at District Data Labs, Benjamin strives to create an environment that supports innovative research and development to push the envelope of current technological possibility. He is currently working to finish his PhD at the University of Maryland where he studies distributed data systems, particularly those in partition-prone networks outside of data centers. The lab next door does have robots and, much to his chagrin, they seem to constantly arm said robots with knives and tools; presumably to pursue culinary accolades. Having seen a robot attempt to slice a tomato, Benjamin prefers his own adventures in the kitchen where he specializes in fusion French and Guyanese cuisine as well as BBQ of all types. A professional programmer by trade, a Data Scientist by vocation, Benjamin's writing pursues a diverse range of subjects from Natural Language Processing, to Data Science with Python to analytics with Hadoop and Spark. He is the author of Data Analytics with Hadoop and the forthcoming Applied Text Analytics with Python published by O'Reilly Media.