Dear reader,
Last week I had the honour to speak and lead a data science hackathon at the I-com conference in Malaga. I have never been surrounded by so many brilliant people in my life. What fascinated me was how much behavioural designers and data-scientist have in common, and yet, how little both disciplines know about each other, or even collaborate with each other.
Why I fell in love with data-science
What data-scientists do is they look at data sets, look for patterns in that data and use that understanding to build a model that could predict behaviour. Their models predict things like: "What products will new mums buy more or less?" or "when will you watch what kind of content on which device?", or "in which region can you stop distributing product catalogues, without hurting sales?". I saw teams in the 24-hours hackathon come up with mindblowing predictions. And I felt really stupid for not understanding a single bit of how they build their models. But the thing is: I don't need to because the computer simply calculates the predictive power of the model, so there's no cheating or bullshitting possible. Fascinating stuff.
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