Chris Orwa on iHub Research Training

How did your initial work with iHub R as well as your experience building out the data science lab help to bring you to where you are today? What were important lessons or values that you picked up along the way?

I joined iHub Research as data mining consult to provide machine learning expertise in analyzing large Twitter dataset. Subsequent to the project, my role was changed to junior data scientist and assigned similar roles where I could perform machine learning on large datasets. Part of the lessons learned while working as a data scientist was on pushing the limits and not be afraid to experiment and fail, in addition to being open and doing wide consultation. A lot of things I learnt in data science at iHub was through interactions with other people who had done similar things (mentors), and experimenting. There was room to experiment for purposes of learning, also weekly show and tell to encourage presentation of findings, and a blogging platform to share with the world what you had learned or currently undertaking.