In episode 100 of Not So Standard Deviations, the first ever episode prepared in advance, Hilary and Roger discuss creativity, its role in data science, and how it can be fostered through conversation. Also, follow up on coffee and oat milk.
Hilary Parker is a Data Scientist on the styling recommendations team at Stitch Fix, a personal styling service that uses a combinations of human stylists and algorithmic recommendations to help people find what they love. At Stitch Fix, she focuses on what sorts of data to collect from clients in order to optimize clothing recommendations, as well as building out prototypes of algorithms or entirely new products based on new data sources. She is also a co-founder of the Not So Standard Deviations podcast, a bi-weekly data science podcast with Roger Peng that has over half a million downloads. Their topics of discussion include the R ecosystem, recent developments in the data science and statistics field, reproducibility and the "how" of how data scientists and statisticians work. Hilary recently authored the paper Opinionated Analysis Development based on discussions from the podcast. Prior to her career in the tech field, Hilary received her PhD in Biostatistics from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. She lives at the San Francisco Zen Center with her partner, a Soto Zen Priest. In her free time, she enjoys exploring her home of 2 years, San Francisco.
Roger D. Peng is a Professor of Biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health where his research focuses on the development of statistical methods for addressing environmental health problems. He is the author of the popular book R Programming for Data Science and nine other books on data science and statistics. He is also the co-creator of the Johns Hopkins Data Science Specialization, the Simply Statistics blog where he writes about statistics for the public, the Not So Standard Deviations podcast with Hilary Parker, and The Effort Report podcast with Elizabeth Matsui. Roger is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and is the recipient of the Mortimer Spiegelman Award from the American Public Health Association, which honors a statistician who has made outstanding contributions to public health. He can be found on Twitter and GitHub at @rdpeng.