Data Science Summer 2021 Capstone Project Showcase
Capstone projects are the culmination of the MIDS students’ work in the School of Information’s Master of Information and Data Science program.
Over the course of their final semester, teams of students propose and select project ideas, conduct and communicate their work, receive and provide feedback, and deliver compelling presentations along with a web-based final deliverable.
Join us for an online presentation of these capstone projects. Each team will present for twenty minutes, including Q&A.
A panel of judges will select an outstanding project for the Hal R. Varian MIDS Capstone Award.
Judges
Natarajan Krishnaswami, MIDS ’16
Natarajan Krishnaswami (a.k.a. nk) graduated from the UC Berkeley School of Information Master of Information and Data Science (MIDS) program in 2016. He is an avid skills-based volunteer, most recently with Data for Black Lives to co-lead COVID-19 per-state data scraper development; and with the City of New York, Queens Public Library and non-profit BetaNYC to increase public engagement with open data for Census 2020 in hard-to-count neighborhoods. He has worked at Google as a senior software engineer on public statistics, query understanding and knowledge-based search; and will be joining Twitter as a staff machine learning engineer in the ML ethics, transparency, and accountability group (META) in just under two weeks.
Krista Mar, MIDS ’18
Krista is a MIDS and Barnard College at Columbia University alumna. She is passionate about using data science for social impact. She is a data scientist at Jefferson Health, where she’s worked on a wide array of projects including spearheading analysis to improve COVID-19 testing access for communities of color and other underserved populations. She’s worked in philanthropy at Open Society Foundations, where she funded work on mitigating the harms of algorithmic bias and work on innovative uses of data and technology for civic engagement and human rights advocacy. She is also a data science consultant for non-profit clients. In her spare time, she enjoys wandering through art museums, biking, and making the perfect cup of coffee.
Alex Marrs
Alex is a product manager at Facebook where he owns the video search and music video ranking within the core Facebook app. Prior to that he was a product manager at Quid and holds a certification in computing for data analysis from Coursera.
His most recent publication, “Disruptive technologies: Advances that will transform life, business, and the global economy” (McKinsey Global Institute), focuses on the advances that will transform life, business, and the global economy. The report cuts through the noise and identifies twelve technologies that could drive truly massive economic transformations and disruptions in the coming years. The report also looks at exactly how these technologies could change our world, as well as their benefits and challenges, and offers guidelines to help leaders from businesses and other institutions respond.
David Reiley
David Reiley is a distinguished scientist in the advertising science group at SiriusXM Pandora and an adjunct professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information, where he teaches a course on field experiments in the data science program. He previously spent more than seven years at Google and Yahoo! Research, primarily working on experiments to measure the effects of online advertising. He started his career as an economics professor at Vanderbilt University and at the University of Arizona.
Sohini Roychowdhury
Dr. Sohini Roychowdhury and her team cofounded FourthBrain.ai amidst the COVID-19 crisis in mid 2020. FourthBrain.ai develops specialized educational content to train and weatherproof candidates in the field of machine learning. Their curriculum includes rapid prototyping in Python, along with hands-on software knowledge to enable continuous deployment of ML applications. Dr. Roychowdhury believes in life-long learning and continues to learn every single day through content creation, blogging, YouTube videos and research papers.
Prior to her entrepreneurial experience, Dr. Roychowdhury was at Volvo Cars’ R&D tech office in the Bay Area from May 2017 to August 2020. Her team worked on tackling vision and perception-related problems in autonomous driving, advanced driver assistance systems, and data science. Her specialization includes out-of-the-box AI solutions applied to inter-disciplinary topics. In Spring 2019, she graduated the class of Engineering Leadership at UC Berkeley, following which she launched the “University Relations Program” at Volvo Cars USA, as an extension arm to external research at Volvo Cars Sweden, to actively engage industrial efforts with universities, research labs, and policy governing institutions.
Prior to her industrial experience, Dr. Roychowdhury’s academic experience includes a stint as assistant professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Washington-Bothell from September 2014 to May 2017. She remains affiliated to academia through several industry-led academic projects and as adjunct faculty in the department of computer engineering at Santa Clara University.
Dr. Roychowdhury received her Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in August 2014 and M.S. from Kansas State University in May 2010. She has applied machine learning and AI models on problems ranging from epidemiology, medical imaging, supply chain management, computer vision for autonomous driving modules and e-commerce streamlining. She has over 50 academic research papers and 19 patents to her name and continues to create educational content through blogs in Towards Data Science and her YouTube channel, AI with Sohini.