A collection of my thoughts and experiences,
blogs, and other media discussing topics surrouding analytics, machine learning, and AI.
Scroll down to view each post, and click the button underneath to read the articles.
In March of 2024, I was lucky enough to be able to attend a Microsoft Power BI event at the Microsoft offices in Leopardstown, Dublin. It was a fantastic day that began with a morning workshop consisting of an interactive Power BI demonstration, a panel of distinguished employees in the field of analytics, and a socialising event where I was able to ask questions to professionals in the field of analytics. After the workshop, we were given a tour of the Microsoft offices, I would be very interested in applying to work there if the right job was available. The highlight of the tour was getting to see the view from the rooftop, I was very grateful to my classmate who made the experience happen.
In November of 2022, thanks to my manager during my internship, I was able to attend the Dublin Analytics Summit hosted by the Analytics Institute. Myself and my manager were allowed to take the day off and travel to the convention centre along the quays to attend. The event opened my eyes to the vast scale of ‘Big Data’ and how every single industry is using data to drive their businesses forward. One panel that particularly interested me was about how the Leinster rugby team use analytics to improve their play. Sensors in jerseys during the match and wearable bib-like devices during training allow the coaches to analyse a player’s vitals during training to help them improve and recover.
From my work over the last few months, I’ve gained a keen interest in Machine Learning. In the beginning, I found it a very difficult concept to understand as it has so many different elements to it, but completing projects and assessments on different types of Machine Learning algorithms has made me realise how powerful it can be. During my time at DCU, I have applied unsupervised, supervised, and natural language processing models to different datasets to gain predictive and sentimental insights. The thing I find most fascinating about these models is how quickly you can gain such a valuable understanding of the data by applying them. Before I was using Machine Learning it would take me a significant amount of time to get the same insights.
One topic that wasn’t part of my analytics module this year was AI prompting. I understand that using Generative AI to do coding work for you is counterproductive to learning, but I think it’s important to understand how to ask the likes of Chat GPT questions to get a good and accurate response. I have heard the phrase: ‘AI won’t replace you, a person using it will’ several times since its widespread adoption and I agree with people. The only negative I have found about using it is that it makes you much less of a critical thinker. We no longer need to think about essay structures or use trial and error to fix code, it can simply do it for us in a matter of seconds.
In the third year of my undergraduate degree, I had the opportunity to do an internship and gain professional experience. I was eager to get a role that involved analytics and held out for the right one in a pharmaceutical company, BioMarin. My official role was ‘Global Process Transformation Intern’ and I worked closely with the financial team in the organisation. I got incredible exposure to life as an analyst and primarily worked developing Power BI dashboards with automation. Microsoft has a great ecosystem with their products and I was able to use Power Automate to create dashboards that had consistent live data. Working with Power Automate is very challenging and although I haven’t used it since, I hope as I progress throughout my career I’ll be able to use it again.
During a module related to Enterprise Development that I take as part of my business degree, we had a guest speaker attend who spoke to us about his new business. He began his career as a software engineer and built many businesses but his most recent one was called eDesk. This company used Generative AI to act as customer service agents and respond to customer issues or complaints. I thought this was a brilliant idea, as customer service is massively important for businesses, but many fail to get it right. I can think of countless times I have been on hold with Virgin Media for example trying to fix issues with my service. He noted that when they began testing only one year ago, the AI was operating at a 60% success rate, and now it’s up at over 95%.
Having used Power BI for data visualisation, I wanted to read more on alternative BI softwares.
I've always had an interest in the security issues around data and transactions.
A great academic article on Unsupervised Machine Learning, with visualisations to help with understaning.
This blog covers a broad range of topics around data analytics, with a good section on use cases.
Although there's some self promotion, this post discusses the unnacceptable practices around AI & ADM.
A great blog that helped with my (very basic) understanding of topic modelling and LDA.
This is a great article about different types of risks associated with Machine Learning Algorithms.
A really cool blog about starting your data analytics journey - not unlike my own.
This blog (along with the course) helped me with my knowledge before I completed my R project.
This article was a great help for me when I was learning about Supervised Machine Learning.