Author: Renee

Last night, my husband and I watched The Imitation Game. First of all, it’s a great movie and you should see it. Secondly, there was a moment that got me thinking about the human element of machine learning.

[Spoiler Alerts – but you probably already know much of the story, and the movie is still good even if you know the historical outcome.]

I thought a moment like this may be coming when Alan Turing was first applying to work at Bletchley Park, and Denniston can’t believe he’s applying to be a Nazi codebreaker without even knowing how to speak German. Alan emphasizes that he is masterful at games and solving puzzles, and that the Nazi Enigma machine is a puzzle he wants to solve. He starts designing and building a machine that will theoretically be able to decode the Nazi radio transmissions, but the decoder settings change every day at 12am, so the machine must solve for the settings before the stroke of midnight every day in order for the day’s messages to be decoded in time to be useful and not interfere with the next day’s decoding process. Turing can’t prove his machine will work, simply because it is simply taking too long to solve the daily puzzle. In the meantime, people are dying in the war, and the Nazis are going on transmitting their messages over normal radio waves believing the code is “unbreakable”.

Between an interview from a local TV station about my job and going through the process of hiring someone onto our team, I’ve been thinking about what would be the bare minimum skills someone would need to have a chance at being hired as a data analyst. Maybe this would be a helpful list for… Continue reading Entry Level Data Analyst Skills