Data science
Applied data science in banking, telecoms, research and higher education, and writing on building the capability around the models.
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21 results for “Science”
Data science platform at a bank: telematics and MLOps
At Absa Group: architected the data engineering capability data science runs on, with Ubunye Engine at 100M+ events a day for 10+ products.
How to Build a Data Science Function From Scratch: A Roadmap
A five stage roadmap for building a data science, data engineering or AI function from scratch: what you will find, what to do first, what pushback to expect, and how to know when to move on.
Building a Data Team
A five stage roadmap for building a data science, data engineering or AI function from scratch, in plain language, from real experience.
Career Development in Data and AI
Career development in data science and AI: becoming a data scientist, then building and leading a team. Practical, from real experience in South Africa.
Follow me Turtle Bot Project
Our follow me turtle bot project, used python and ROS to design turtle-bot that follows an object. This was done at the Witwatersrand University school of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics.
Decision support systems for municipalities at the CSIR
Django based predictive analytics and decision support systems serving 17 municipalities, including the City of Cape Town, built at the CSIR.
Frenzy Interview Preview: "We talked all things Space"
In this interview with Frenzy, we discussed all things space, including the latest discoveries, the future of space exploration, and how AI is being used to analyze space data.
Scientists have discovered 300,000 new galaxies
Scientists have discovered 300,000 new galaxies in a recent study. This discovery has significant implications for our understanding of the universe.
Stage 1: Find Out What Is True
The first stage of building a data function is not technology. Write down what you have and create a rhythm. When we did, we found models that were simply wrong.
Stage 2: Give Your Data One Safe Home
A model can only be as good as the data it learns from. How we brought scattered data into one checked and controlled home, and made security part of normal work.
Stage 3: Give the Work a Clear Path
It used to take about a year to get a model into use. Now it fits in a two week sprint. The change came from a shared workspace and one agreed path, not from cleverer people.
Stage 4: When People Push Back, Show Them
The technology was not the hardest part. People were. How we got through pushback and red tape, by showing value in action, and how a crisis became our best argument.
Stage 5: Trust Your People, Then Let Go
The last step is the hardest: stop being the person everything depends on. How trust moved us from waiting for things to break to stopping problems early, with a 90 day plan.
Student success analytics and recommendations at Wits
Analytics and a clustering based recommendation system for student success at Wits, with over R2 million a year in subsidy impact attributed to it.
The Modern Data Scientist: A Roadmap for the Age of AI Agents
The job hasn't disappeared. The mental model has changed. Here's what the roadmap looks like for data scientists and engineers entering (or navigating) the AI agent era, with a South African lens.
The Practical Roadmap to Building With AI Agents, Part 5: Making Agents Reliable Enough to Ship
Generation gives you code. Feedback loops turn it into engineering. Part five of six: the failures on this site where a green build was exactly the wrong goal, and how a bug becomes a permanent check nobody has to remember.
We Don't Have Rockets. We Have Towers. A Case for Building Africa's Data Centres
Google, SpaceX and others are putting computers in orbit because power and cooling on Earth have run out of room. Africa has no space programme, but it has tens of thousands of cell towers that already have power, batteries, cooling, a fence and a link to the network. This post asks whether those towers can be a data centre spread across the land, and answers with the same graph and scoring method I used to send generators to towers during load shedding.
What the Road Makes Possible
Why walk this road at all? Once the foundations are in place, one team can help a business know its customers, keep them, price fairly, understand big risks and work faster.
Where the Towers Are. A Map of What Africa Already Has
Part one argued that Africa's cell towers could be a data centre spread across the land. This part asks the obvious next question: where are they? Using open, crowdsourced data on 565,000 mobile cells, it maps South Africa and the continent, finds that the towers follow the people and the roads, and shows why a map of people and a map of land tell two very different stories.
Who You Need on the Team
Who belongs on a data team, who to hire first, what to do when the budget runs out, why graduates matter, and where the team should report.