My name’s Ben Dykstra. I studied Computational Applied Mathematics and Statistics at The College of William and Mary in Thrilliamsburg VA. That’s a huge mouthful that basically means I want to be a data scientist. I work primarily in Python, however I have done some work with R and will use the best tool for the job. I’m currently interested in automated geocoding using natural language processing, exploring all of sklearn (ambitious), and extending statsmodels for panel data. My git repository for all of my notebooks is here. That repository includes some notebooks not posted here (yet) and various experiments/fiddling. My homebase is Boston, MA. Starting summer 2017 I’m thrilled to be heading to Capital One for their 6 month developers academy. From there I’ll feed in to their wonderful Technology Development program!

Things that I want to learn/continue learning:

  • D3 for awesome visualizations - Here’s a project I worked on that incorporates D3 force graphs
  • SQL
  • Bayesian machine learning
  • More econometric methods
  • Methods for Feature Selection
  • Data science pipelines
  • Ensemble methods

An amazing team and I won a hackathon once. It was really cool and exposed me to what was possible with preparation and a talented team. This is the app that we built.

People/Places/Projects/Companies/Art that are Awesome

  • DataTau - Hacker News for data science. It’s chock full of great web articles, personal projects, general data science news.
  • Unsplash - A gorgeous website with tons of fantastic photographs of everything
  • Roads to Rome - Data Viz/Art of all the roads in Europe that lead to Rome.
  • The culture section of 538. One of the main contributors is Walt Hickey who is a William and Mary Math alum. His daily column Significant digits is hilarious.
  • Major Clarity - A startup founded by a very good friend of mine that guides students college education with experiential learning.
  • dril, Wu-Tang Financial and of course Shea Serrano. I love twitter and it is my only social media outlet
  • Norfolk, VA. I interned here over summer 2016 at ForRent.com with the blossoming data science team. It was a fantastic experience and I highly recommend it.
  • Allen Tate. Give him a search on Spotify and bask in a hot tub of soundwaves.
  • End Rape On Campus (EROC) - An amazing organization that supports survivors of sexual assault.
  • Mr. Robot the TV show - A realistically portrayed show about a hacking collective starring Rami Malek that always keeps you guessing. Makes me want to get more in to cyber security
  • More things that I haven’t discovered yet.

I’ve done some software and android development in Java, which you can check out here.

Drop me a line at bfdykstra@email.wm.edu if you wanna chat.