Insight update - December 2020 It’s been an extremely challenging 2020 for Insight. Due to COVID, we’ve had to go all-remote, walk away from all our offices, and adjust our business model rapidly to adapt. In the face of these challenges, the Insight team and alumni community have been simply incredible, helping Insight Fellows find great jobs in the toughest of circumstances. In fact, placement numbers for the recent sessions have been roughly on-par with 2019 pre-COVID levels — an amazing testament to the hard work and hundreds of intros made within our network. Despite this, the s ..read more

Part 2: Mining Cryptocurrency (Part 1: Mental Models for Blockchain) There is currently a lot of hype around cryptocurrencies, blockchain technology, and decentralized consensus systems. There is also a great deal of confusion around why the hype exists, what the unique value of these systems is, and how one might jump into this ecosystem to try their hand at building something. This, in general, makes it difficult for industry professionals to separate signal from noise. This blog series is aimed at describing some of the core businesses and products that have arisen in the tech industr ..read more

Photo by abigail low on Unsplash User engagement is one of many crucial elements to study and understand deeply for both well-established companies and nascent startups throughout the development of a product. A product’s health can be broadly measured from the delicate balance between new user adoption, engagement, retention, and churn, all of which are closely related. With the fierce competition of the mobile app market today, many developers are vying for the attention of large populations of smartphone users around the world. It is not uncommon for the average person to use an app on ..read more

Learning to Think Like a Data Scientist — Part 2 Originally published in The ML Rebellion. In Part 1, I described the planning phase of a data project. The purpose of the planning phase is to identify a business need and develop a roadmap for how to meet it. In this post, I will cover the project execution phase, i.e. putting the plan into action. The goal of this phase is to create a minimum viable product capable of meeting the business need. Project Execution Phase The steps in this phase are not as clear cut as those in the planning phase, because they are more closely related t ..read more

Originally published in The ML Rebellion. Earlier this year I made the transition from academic neuroscientist to applied data scientist. As part of this process, I had to shift out of my familiar research oriented mindset and into a more business-relevant, product-driven kind of thinking. To ease and guide this adjustment, I participated in the Insight Data Science fellowship where I used a business-minded approach to develop a data product. In this blog, I will share what I learned from the experience by walking through the steps I took to complete this project. Part 1 covers the project pl ..read more

My Journey to improve Lazy Lantern’s automated time series anomaly detection model https://medium.com/media/9f9da71554aaebbf2d1bfd92344b1ba5/href As an Insight Data Science Fellow, I had the opportunity to work with Lazy Lantern, a computer software company that uses machine learning to provide autonomous analytics for businesses to make data-driven decisions by better understanding user behaviors. As a consultant, I was tasked with improving the time series anomaly detection models used by Lazy Lantern. In this article, I will walk you through my journey from identifying problems and challeng ..read more

One-Click Ephemeral Test Environment Photo by Kent Pilcher on Unsplash Working with a non-profit company on an Insight DevOps consulting project, I was presented with two challenges to solve: How to prevent new code from breaking a development environment when developers have only one AWS EC2 instance to work on? How to test the impact of database schema changes on their existing codebase? In this blog, I describe the solutions that I developed for each of these challenges. Breaking Down the Problems The first challenge is a classic continuous integration (CI) problem, an ..read more

Insight and Climb Credit partner to lower the barrier to thriving careers At Insight, we want to make sure that everyone with the right skills can participate in our programs, regardless of financial challenges. So, in addition to offering several scholarships to help reduce the barriers that keep you from taking those first steps to launch a thriving career, we are now offering deferred payment loans to Fellows in all of our programs through a partnership with Climb Credit. These loans are offered through Climb Credit’s upfront financing, and are financially backed by Insight to support ..read more

Insight recently completed its first totally remote session. This summer, we hosted more than 350 Fellows from across 33 different U.S. states, Canada, and around the world. As they move on to the post-session experience and continue to interview with hiring companies, we thought we’d share a recap of their first 7-weeks with Insight. The Remote Experience While this was the first session for Insight in which all Fellows participated remotely, we’ve been offering a remote data science program since 2015. We’re happy to report that we successfully adapted what we’ve learned during that tim ..read more

Catching Feels Photo by Devon Divine on Unsplash Originally published in Maslo - Your Virtual Self. This project was completed during the Summer 2020 session of Insight Fellows Program. Humans show a myriad of explicit and implicit emotional signals in our behaviors. Our facial expression, posture, and even the music we listen to are types of expressions that tell the overarching story of how we feel. While most of these signals are implicitly communicated during human-to-human interaction, we do not have a method for quantifying feeling and mood through individual behavioral signals ..read more