About

Why this blog ?

I created this blog in order to share what I learn through my professional and personal activities. I found that it is not an easy task to find information sources that are serious, complete and accessible at the same time.

I don’t intend to bridge that gap but the least I can do is to make the results of my own tribulations accessible in the hope that it might provide a bit of help to fellow data-scientists in the making like myself, or to anyone for that matter.

Who am I ?

I started by briefly studying history before shifting my interest toward economics. I really liked the framework that this discipline used to described and model human behavior and it was during these courses that I learned about the scientific method and its organized and methodical way of battling with the unknown.

Furthermore, we were told during the first introductory course of statistics that you could use various technique to predict future events. What’s that I thought, I’ve been using statistics to paint a static picture of the world (which was pretty boring), but you’re telling me that I can actually predict its future state ? Well that’s something else ! It led me to spend two years studying economics, while working as a research assistant in order to expand my knowledge.

But university wasn’t really my thing. It is not the place the expand on the commodification of knowledge, but let’s just say that paying for copyrighted and overpriced textbooks, let alone the outdated pedagogy and the monstrously bureaucratic infrastructure of the place itself deterred me from pursuing.

So I dropped out in the hope of finding an activity that would best fit what I wanted to do, and who I wanted to be.

Since I dropped out, I made a simple yet life-changing observation : I could study anything I wanted. No need for mandatory pre-requisites, waiting for the next winter session or any of these shenanigans. And so I started exploring.

I first learned to code through codecademy and was lucky enough to find an internship as a web-developer. After six month of PHP, JS and all their little friends, I received a call from Gameloft for a Data scientist position. I spent 8 months over there and learned a great deal. But again, the sweet breeze of Liberty came whistling to my ear, telling me that being one among 200 developers on the same floor wasn’t my place to be.

So here was I, starting to explorer again. Since then, I’ve made a very interesting attempt at entrepreneurship through the development of a hardware product prototype. I’ve also helped developed several hardware projects, worked with an IoT related organization (Wearhacks) and – my favorite activity by far until now – acted as a teacher assistant in a web development bootcamp called decodeMTL.

My interests of the moment range from artificial intelligence, biology, electronics, neurology and everything in between. In other words, any way of studying systems able to process information in order to act on their environment in the most efficient way according to their goal. My Grand Achievement would be to pierce the mysteries of cognition, and to replicate it in order to participate to the current effort directed to making sentient artificial organisms. I know, it sounds a bit crazy but hey, I have a whole life to get there !

I also have kind of a crush on wearable electronics, especially the idea of developing clothes that would be able to modulate their appearance according to the physiological state of the wearer.

Post Scriptum

English is not my mother tongue so please don’t hesitate to point to me in the comments any mistake or typo.

Oh and I’m based in Montreal. I’m kinda traveling the world on my bike right now. So if you’d like to meet and speak about electronics and stuff, I’ll always be down for it!

Thank you and good reading!