| Story Views | |
| Now: | |
| Last Hour: | |
| Last 24 Hours: | |
| Total: | |
Why I joined Channel 4
On the first of this month I joined Channel 4 as a Senior Data Scientist. I’ve not had much time to do any Data Science, but I’ll speak a bit about my projects over the next few months.
Picture: My new workplace
As a data scientist I’ve spent some time at Amazon and Vodafone. And I chatted to my friends in the community about where I’d go next. Ian mentioned that he was doing some coaching with the data science team at Channel 4.
Firstly, I didn’t know they had a team. Channel 4 is a company that is famous for innovation in the creative arts, and I wasn’t aware they were doing things with data.
I went through the process and found the team interesting to speak to, and after they gave me a few tricky interview questions, I was given an offer.
I was initially a bit scared, I was based in Luxembourg at the time, where I’d spent several years of my life there, and my life was there. And as we all know any change or move is a hard decision to make.
After speaking to my friends and family, and my future colleagues. I eventually agreed to move cities and come.
So why work on data challenges in media? Well firstly as part of Channel 4’s strategy we have data on about 14 million 16-34 year olds in the UK. As a data geek that’s tremendously exciting. Over the past few years the teams at Channel 4 have invested heavily in their data infrastructure, leveraging Spark, Hadoop, and all sorts of other tools. This is one of the better set ups I’ve seen in a mature company. This tech stack will evolve and I’ll be working on driving that too.
I’m fascinated by human behaviour, and helping a organization that brought me content I love like IT Crowd and Father Ted, become a more data-driven organization was too big an opportunity to miss.
My team has already worked on some powerful data driven products including a new show recommendation engine, customer classifiers for ad serving and customer segmentations.
I’m looking forward to working on these projects, helping the team grow and seeing what other cool things there are in the media world. On my first day I was already being asked questions by my colleague Will on HiveQL, was listening to Thomas talk about topic modelling and participated in a standup meeting where I heard about the different projects ongoing.
We’re sponsoring the PyData conference in May, which makes me very proud as a data scientist that my employer is involved in such an amazing event. I’ll be speaking about Machine Learning and Statistical models, what their differences are and how to debug both frequentist and Bayesian models.
I’m extremely excited about my next steps, and I look forward to tackling those challenges, particularly in regards personalisation and recommendations. I’ll be undoubtedly speaking about some of the cool stuff we get up to at Channel 4.
If tackling big data challenges in media interests you – we’re hiring. So reach out to me if that would interest you
. Here is an example job ad with the details.
Source: https://peadarcoyle.wordpress.com/2016/04/03/why-i-joined-channel-4/
