I come from a small farming town called Warwick in the state of New York (USA). I attended the State University of New York (SUNY) Geneseo where I majored in Physics with a minor in Mathematics. I actually wanted to double-minor in Chemistry, but that was a short-lived endeavour after encountering Organic Chemistry…
During my time studying physics, I maintained my passion for software development, taking every opportunity I could to contributed useful software solutions for my classes and research. After an eye-opening research experience in Taiwan, I decided to go for my Masters degree abroad.
I moved to Paris, France in 2014 after receiving my Bachelor’s degree to attend the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in hopes of attaining a Masters in Computational Physics. As part of finishing my M1 degree in the field, I began working as an intern at Business & Decision Group in October 2017. During that time, I designed a state-of-the-art interior positioning system that uses Deep Learning techniques to localize entities in indoor environments. I was hired as a full-time Data Scientist and R&D Software Engineer immediately upon completion of the internship.
I got to continue my work on the Indoor Geolocation project I had started, and I also got to work on some very cool data science consulting projects; I worked on things like fraud detection and rare-event prediction, as well the more traditional classification tasks. I really got to cut my teeth on the harder parts of being a data scientist (data cleansing, model cross validation, unbalanced data sets, sampling techniques, etc.), and learned very quickly that there is more to it than the simple examples online.
I also chose to pursue a Master’s degree in Data Science & Digital Marketing at HETIC Grand Ecole in Paris; I finished a MSc. curriuclum in one year, and am expecting a my degree with honors. My thesis was a group project where I worked in a team of two technical students (data scientists) and three MBA students to create a lean technology startup. We ended up getting a client using our platform! Unfortunately, our 1-customer revenue was exactly offset by the AWS infrastructure costs of the product. We broke even.
Today, machine learning, deep learning, and developing software in the cloud (with AWS) are what I dedicate most of my time to learning about. I hope to use this page as a place to blog about new experiences, new avenues of research, and even tutorials for fellow software developers.
Contact me
doneill612@gmail.com for all inquiries