Lessons learned
Data Science in Latin America
John Alexis Guerra Gómez
@duto_guerra
https://johnguerra.co/viz/dataScienceLatam
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My journey
PhD
Silicon Valley
Lessons Learned
A new field
What car should I buy?
Normal procedure
Ask friends and family
Problem
That's inferring statistics from a sample n=1
Better approach
Data based decisions
https://tucarro.com
Need for open data
How to name my brother's new baby?
Colombian National Registry
- Me: Hey, do you have data of Colombians' names?
- CNR: Sure of course!
- Me: Great, can I have all of them
- CNR: Of course, it is just $0.40 per name
- Me: 🤦♂️
Choosing schools for my nephew
- National exam results
- Is open data!
- 3 hrs later
Data Literacy
Presidential Election
Shiny packaged black boxes
How is Rappi doing on Twitter?
- 30k tweets in a week of 2019
😡😠😒😐😏😃🥰?
- Machine learning 🎩! ???
- Detects sentiment ! ???
I looked at 180 of these tweets
Here are some of them
😐 -10%
😡 -80%
🥰 80%
😐 -10%
😐 -20%
🥰 90%
😒 -40%
😒 -30%
Well, actually
- It wasn't just any computer
- It was ML as a service by Google
- It costs $$$
Other lessons
- Self appointed data scientists
- Everyone wants a piece of it
- Lack of focus on insights
Data science is an inter-disciplinary field that uses scientific methods, processes, algorithms and systems to extract knowledge and insights from structured and unstructured data
Wikipedia
The purpose of visualization is insight, not pictures
Our work: Navio
What's the first thing you do with a new dataset?
MLExplore.js
- Interpret and interact with TSNE+Kmeans
Lessons Learned
- Open data
- 👉🏼 Insights! 👈🏼
- ML is just another tool
- Visual Analytics empowers users