Hello World
I'm Derek. I was born in Sichuan, China, which is known for its pandas, mountain ranges, and spicy foods. I moved to the US when I was just under two years old, and grew up in College Station, Denver, and various parts of Houston. Elementary school is interesting when you've attended four of them. My path towards data science was fairly winding and non-traditional.
LOS ANGELES
MUSICIAN
I began learning violin in elementary school then started writing my own music in middle school. It wasn't very good. Fortunately, I got better at composing and received my bachelor's degree in music composition and minor in music recording from the University of Southern California.
Since USC's music school was right next to its film school, I became interested in film scoring and wrote music for dozens of student films, which landed me an internship with Bear McCreary of Battlestar Galactica and The Walking Dead fame as well as a job as Randy Newman's technical assistant on The Princess and the Frog and Toy Story 3. Don't let Randy's chipper Disney tunes fool you; his real music stings.
Things I miss about LA
- The Getty
- The Pacific Ocean
- Only needing to use the air conditioner once each year
Things I don't miss about LA
- Traffic
- High prices
- The "Hollywood bubble"
BEIJING
freelancer
Eager to participate in China's bustling entertainment industries, I moved to Beijing after wrapping up school. I started out as an in-house composer at the Beijing Dance Drama & Opera composing music for various ballets, then later transitioned to television, providing music for China Central Television's English news channel, CCTV News.
The Chinese film industry is much like Hollywood in the 1940's; it's the wild west where any newcomer can have their shot. I took mine and eventually graduated to freelancing full-time once I could maintain a steady pace of film and commercial projects. The work was sometimes glamorous (luxury car commercials) and sometimes not (state propaganda films), but it was always unpredictable.
Between projects, I volunteered time performing data analysis for friends at film studios. It was nothing fancy, but it opened my eyes to the powerful notion that music was not the only means by which I could tell stories. I taught myself some calculus and C++ and put that notion to the test...
Things I miss about Beijing
- Tibetan food
- Modern and historical architecture
- The Beijing International Community Orchestra
Things I don't miss about Beijing
- Smog
- Car horns
- People packed like sardines
HOUSTON
A Pivot
To catch up on mathematics, statistics, and computer science, I moved back to the US in 2016 and spent a year as a post-baccalaureate student at the University of Houston. While studying at UH, I served as a data science intern at a mid-sized software company called Open iT. They specialize in tracking and optimizing corporate software license usage. As Open iT's first data-science-anything, I learned firsthand how challenging it can be just to find appropriate applications of machine learning given heaps of uncooperative data and how important it is to consider the business impact of proposed data products. I eventually developed an anomaly detection system to alert Open iT customers of abnormal behavior on their licensing servers and explored the use of unsupervised learning to provide pre-configured product settings to different customer segments.
Things I don't miss about Houston
Overwhelming heat and humidity
Urban sprawl
Tailgaters
Things I miss about Houston
Family
Low prices
Easy parking
NEW YORK
NEW Adventures
The University of Houston helped me confirm my interests for statistics and programming, and Columbia University showed me how I could combine both into an even more potent passion. As part of the 2017-2018 class in Columbia’s M.S. in Data Science program, I was surrounded by brilliant minds, peers, and professors alike and had amazing opportunities to collaborate on awesome projects.
A particular course highlight was studying Applied Machine Learning and scikit-learn with the library's core developer himself, Andreas Mueller. And while I always knew I would enjoy classes with a more practical focus, I was especially surprised to discover that my favorite course was John Paisley's exclusively theoretical Machine Learning.
I also opened a door for David Blei once.
Things I'll miss about New York
The Manhattan skyline
Subway wildlife
The Thai food truck next to Columbia University
Things I won't miss about New York
Wall Street
Old subways
Snow that turns to slush that camouflages puddles
SPACE
The Final Frontier
In the summer of 2018, I had the incredible opportunity to intern at NASA Langley Research Center's Autonomy Incubator and work on computer vision and XAI (explainable artificial intelligence) projects. My mentor, Loc Tran, and I leveraged recent innovations in VAE (variational autoencoder) research to generate disentangled representations of faces, build a user interface for exploring different VAE models, and apply VAE's to anomaly detection.
The combination of great people, engaging work, and a fun environment couldn't have created a more perfect experience. The office was a beautiful smorgasbord of corporate-looking cubicles, an electrician's garage, and swarms of drones ready to cover the planet. From robotic arms to quadcopters to hovercrafts to rovers, there was always something interesting happening just a few steps away. It was usually a fellow intern's super-cool project.
Things I learned at NASA
A great work family matters
Pitch, roll, and yaw
Aerospace engineers make A+ paper airplanes
Things I miss about NASA
Awesome nerds
The cartoon wall
Drones catching on fire
Watching F-22's overhead
SAN FRANCISCO
Going Corporate
Fresh out of school and eager to learn how deep learning is applied in industrial settings, I joined an oil and gas energy company, Baker Hughes GE. I was part of a small scrappy team tasked with building predictive maintenance solutions for the company’s energy-producing clients. Even though we were part of a 50,000+ workforce, our team felt like a startup…right down to happily burning the midnight oil to meet customer deadlines. Nothing brings people closer quite like putting them in a pressure cooker together.
Add new player
Despite not being much of a gamer, I joined Electronic Arts at the end of 2019, much too enticed by the chance to analyze in-game player data. The people and the work have been as colorful as the offices, and I’ve been fortunate to work on projects involving Battlefield V, Apex Legends, FIFA 21, and Madden 21. If Baker Hughes GE taught me how to understand data about machines, then EA taught me how to understand data about people.
Things I learned at EA
There’s a separate button for aiming before you shoot
Always PTFO
Zoom-ing your way through a pandemic
Things I’ll miss about EA
Playing games for research
Jamming in the music corner
The largest gym I’ve ever seen
