“How’d you get started with machine learning and data science?” [Interview]

I trained my first model in 2017 on my friend's lounge room floor.

Daniel Bourke
Towards Data Science
10 min readJul 23, 2020

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2020 requirements for state of the art machine learning: mullet. That’s it. Photo by Sam Bourke.

The other day, the absolute and complete living legend, Head of Data Science and creator of incredible data science-related YouTube videos, Ken Jee reached out to me asking if I wanted to collaborate on a video (or two).

I said sure.

We decided question and answer, back and forth type videos would be best.

So he sent me a few questions he’d probably ask me and to prepare, I wrote out answers to each of them.

And now I’m copying them here.

How did you get interested in data science/machine learning, to begin with?

In 2017, my friends and I were building a web application (very primitive) to link together local gyms in our area. We had the problem of not being able to train with each other whenever we wanted. So we had the idea of making the Airbnb of fitness facilities, somewhere you could go and book time/space and workout with who you wanted.

After a while, we realised many gym’s business models depend on people not showing up. So us trying to add more people through our fancy…

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