Real NU MSiA Newsletter

SUMMER 2019
MSIA TIMES
INSIDE:
Interview: Seminar Series Speaker, Patrick Boueri
Alumni Spotlight: Julia Greenberger
Upcoming Events
Reinforcement Learning Videos
MSiA Hackathon made the McCormick news!
Extra-Curricular Projects
Gaming Analytics
Meet the MSiA Staff
Get MSiA famous! Selfies on social media

WELCOME TO MSIA TIMES!
Welcome to the inaugural edition of MSiA
Times, the alumni-exclusive newsletter that
offers up-to-date happenings among the MSiA
family. MSiA knows life after graduation gets
busy and classmates may not be as close by
as before, so we present you with a place to
share stories, upcoming MSiA events, industry
news, and much more.
We would love to hear from you! Send your
news to analytics@northwestern.edu.

TO JOIN THE MSIA ALUMNI COMMUNITY ARE
SOON
ETAS, CLASS OF '19. CLICK HERE TO FIND OUT
THE
MSIA CLASS OF 2018
ZETAS
MORE ABOUT THE ETAS.

A N I N T E R V I E W W I T H
P A T R I C K B O U E R I
Patrick Boueri, senior data science
manager at Uptake, took some time
to speak with Naomi Kaduwela
(MSiA '19) before his presentation
on challenges in machine learning
serving as part of MSiA's quarterly
seminar series.
Naomi: What is your favorite part about being a
data scientist?
Patrick: My favorite is definitely the team. It is
composed of people from different walks of life
that have strong passionate technical interests,
which speaks to me. It’s interesting to see the
confluence of those across social sciences, math,
and hard sciences. They are willing to share
knowledge and experience across domains which
fosters creativity and fun discussions. Also, when
you get into data work, you can answer your own
questions, which is very cool to me. If you want to
be able to measure something, you can go out
and do the empirical work yourself. You’re
constantly uncovering new things.
Naomi: What has been your favorite project?
It was fun to do because you get into the guts of
the algorithm. Practically, it’s hard to come up
with rules that transcend any data set.
Naomi: What are the challenges to getting to
more productionized AI solutions?
Patrick: It’s a confluence of things: expertise, right
data, right system.
Getting the right consumers is also important,
which is why UI/UX initiatives are key to ensure it
drives actions downstream and the right behavior
down the road.
Marquee products like Google were built for ad
and web search so they have phenomenal ML in
that space.
Patrick: Favorite project was an error analysis
where we trained a tree and then some error
accumulates. So we took the tree’s leaves,
terminal nodes as a feature vector and clustered
the terminal predictions to do error analysis on
that. It was a way to introspect on the tree and
find out where the errors occur.
Most companies sell products or services, and
analytics is an offering or optimization on a
business process. For many companies, analytics is
not their core. However, if they have good
analytics on their products, they can get increases
in margin. But it’s harder to do for them because
it’s more spread out and distributed.

AN INTERVIEW WITH PATRICK BOUERI, continued
Naomi: Is it possible that there is much
abstraction with programming languages and
libraries?
Patrick: Too much abstraction is only a bad thing if
they are leaky abstractions. For example, you
don’t care about the low level details of what
your compiler is doing because it’s a very hermetic
abstraction. But data is leaky, and that’s where
you get results that make you question every
move, because you don’t have a solid foundation.
I worry if they are used incorrectly, in the sense
that decisions are being made off of them. But, I’m
not sure we are at that point yet, where so many
machine learning algorithms are being
productionized effectively.
But it’s cool! I wouldn’t want to write a Stochastic
gradient descent model every time I train a model.
Naomi: What are your thoughts on the future of
data science tool sets? I also see a lot of
customization within each domain with regard to
the data science packages.
Patrick: Even with the abstractions, we get to
grapple with the domain. And I think that’s where
the future is going to go - to get more productive.
You can throw as much machine learning as you
want at it, but the way to narrow the search
space to get things that are useful, without infinite
compute and memory is to bundle domains into
ML libraries.
I think we'll see a lot of specialized domains.
What we see growing in audio, natural
language processing, will expand, for example,
to CRM.
You’ll see providers that have specific domain -
like speech to text - with an API built on top of
it so plug and play is easy for businesses. We
have a lot of disparate tools, so to be able to
pull it off the shelf quickly and do it ourselves
easily would be a great thing.
Naomi: In our Master of Science in Analytics
program this quarter we are learning to build
and deploy end to end production ready
applications. Can you talk about the
uniqueness vs intersections of the data scientist
vs software developer role these days?
Patrick: I would call that role a machine
learning engineer. There are strong cultural
differences between data scientists and
software developers. Software developers can
unit-test locally and there’s a sense of
certainty where the uncertainty is from users.
With data science it can be a bit frustrating
because there is uncertainty in the data. So
when someone says, “If I give you this data,
will it work?” The answer is “I think so”. There is
also technical rigor. We can learn from
software developers: version control and a
DevOps mindset.
Click here for the full
interview!

SEND US YOUR
SELFIES!
We always make Diego take selfies when he's attending conferences.
Follow us on Instagram to check it out [instagram.com/nu_analytics]!
Also, send us your selfies (analytics@northwestern.edu), whether it be
at work, in your city, on a trip, or at a conference. We'll make you an
MSiA star!

MSiA's current
cohort is busy at
work...and we mean
that literally. They
marked their
internship location
on the map. Check
out the video to see
where they are
during the summer!
Summer Internships

U P C O M I N G
E V E N T S
Boot Camp
Student
evanston
Mixer
Alumni
Francisco
San
Please Click
to volunteer
2019
30
august
for details
Click
rsvp
and
2019
MSiA Staff

MSiA Staff
Beau Breeden
Borchuluun
Yadamsuren
Cindy Nguyen
As the program’s System
Administrator, Beau’s
mission is to make sure
that the technological
needs of the students and
faculty are met. He calls
upon more than 18 years
of single-user to multienterprise
IT experience to
assist in that effort.
DEEP DISH
OR
THIN SLICE?
THIN SLICE.
CHANGE MY
MIND.
As a research facilitator, I
will work with students on
their extracurricular
projects. Previously, I
worked for the Information
Experience Laboratory of the
University of Missouri on
various user experience
research projects. I also
taught computer science and
user experience related
courses at the University of
Missouri and Columbia
College.
WHAT IS
YOUR GUILTY
PLEASURE?
BROWSING THE
INTERNET FOR
SERENDIPITOUS
INFORMATION
ENCOUNTERS
Cindy La Nguyen is our lead on
admissions and marketing. She
has her PhD, and MS in
Sociology, and her BA in
Comparative Sociology (a mix of
sociology and cultural
anthropology). Cindy is
fascinated by cultural
movements big and small. She
specializes in ethnographic
methods and the study of how
race, ethnicity, gender, and
citizenship intersect.
WOULD YOU RATHER
GIVE ADVICE TO YOUR
PAST-SELF OR HAVE A
CONVERSATION WITH
YOUR FUTURE-SELF?
I’M MORE OF A FORWARD LOOKING
PERSON. I’D DEFINITELY SIT DOWN
AND HAVE A TALK WITH MY
FUTURE-SELF. I’D SAY TO HER,
“YOU’RE SITTING DOWN AND
HAVING A CONVERSATION WITH
YOUR PAST-SELF RIGHT NOW,
WOULDN’T YOU RATHER BE TALKING
TO YOUR FUTURE-SELF?” AND THEN
I’D ASK HER IF TELEPORTATION
EVER BECOMES A THING.

MSiA Staff
Noelle Afolabi
Sarah Mitchell
Noelle Afolabi is our Program
Assistant. She holds an MFA in
Creative Writing from Northwestern
University and a BA in Anthropology
and Creative Writing from Eastern
Michigan University. Noelle uses her
cultural anthropology background
with her creative writing skills in
order to create well-rounded fiction
pieces. When she’s not reading or
writing, she enjoys biking
Chicagoland trails with her husband
and knitting.
IF YOU OPENED A
BUSINESS, WHAT
KIND OF BUSINESS
WOULD IT BE?
Sarah Mitchell has been
with the MSiA program for
3.5 years and has her
Bachelor's degree in
education. She enjoys board
games, has a mean cat, and
pays to play bass guitar in
a blues band. Her favorite
local tourist spot is the
House on the Rock in
southern Wisconsin.
WHAT MAKES
YOUR DAY,
SARAH?
BARACK OBAMA SAID, "THE FUTURE
BELONGS TO YOUNG PEOPLE WITH
AN EDUCATION AND THE
IMAGINATION TO CREATE." I WOULD
LOVE TO BUILD UPON OBAMA'S
WORDS AND OPEN AN ARTS MEGA
CENTER WHERE PEOPLE OF ALL
AGES COULD LEARN AND REFINE
SKILLS IN WRITING, MUSIC, DANCE,
FINE ART, CULINARY ART AND
FASHION.
THE EARTH'S ROTATION.

A C K A T H O N 2 0 1 9
H
MSiA's sixth annual Hackathon, sponsored by ABC Supply Co., proved to
challenge students to use learned knowledge from coursework and apply it
to real data.
Thanks to MSiA alumnae Jill Fan (MSiA ’18), Zili Li (MSiA ’18), and Madhuri
Gupta (MSiA ’17) who participated as judges for the competition.
"One of the things I
enjoyed the most was
that the prompts were
so open ended,” MSiA
student Shreyas Sabnis
said. “We didn’t go into
the day knowing what
problem we were going
to solve, but we
understood what to
look for as we studied
the data. Many of the
concepts we learned in
class proved to be
extremely useful.”
Read the FULL ARTICLE
to find out more!

Now
presenting
two
summaries
from the Etas'
extracurricular
projects.
Extra-
Curricular
BuildChange
by Elliot Gardner (class of '19)
Over the winter and spring quarters, four students (Ruixiang Fan, Elliot Gardner, Kejin
Qian, and Yiwei Zhang), with the advisement of one PhD student (Zhe Su), worked on a
project for BuildChange, which is a non-profit that conducts structural retrofitting
projects on housing in third world countries that have faced natural disasters. One
impediment to increasing the scope of work that BuildChange can conduct is the time
needed to measure houses for suitability for retrofitting. As a result, BuildChange is
considering building an app that will use a Machine Learning model, coupled with
Computer Vision techniques, to allow users in a country to assess whether their house
is a good candidate for retrofitting. In order to train such a model, quite a bit of
training data (in the form of labeled pictures of houses) would be needed, much more
than BuildChange currently has access to.
As a result of this challenge in obtaining training data, BuildChange reached out to
Northwestern through MSiA alumnae, Patty Liu Svenson (class of 2016) to get help with
generating training data. BuildChange has software which will take measurements of a
house and generate a CAD model of the structure, from which a picture of the structure
from different perspectives can be extracted. However, generating a statistically
distributed set of house measurements for generating the set of houses was beyond the
technical capacity of BuildChange. Thus, the MSiA students set to work understanding
the problem set, the ranges of possible values for measurements, and designing a
script with an R Shiny dashboard which would take a set of possible input ranges and
output a set of building measurements of the desired size. This would allow
BuildChange to generate a sufficiently large training set of images for training a model
for house retrofit classification, and also to adjust the parameters in the future for
changing environments/changes in the types of structures to be retrofit.
Player Profiling and Retention Prediction in Sandbox Games (Just Cause 2)
by Arpan Venugopal (class of '19)
Open world video games are designed to offer free-roaming virtual environments and agency to the
players, providing a substantial degree of freedom to play the games in the way the individual
player prefers. Open world games are typically either persistent or for single-player versions semipersistent,
meaning that they can be played for long periods of time and generate substantial
volumes and variety of user telemetry. Combined, these factors can make it challenging to develop
insights about player behavior to inform the design and live operations in open world games.
Developing behavioral profiles, and predicting the behavior of players, are important analytical tools
for understanding how a game is being played and understand why players depart (churn).
During the course of the project, we explored a novel method of building behavioral profiles in a
sandbox game (Just Cause 2) and apply the same methodology to predict players likely to churn or
to continue engaging with the game. We have adopted the Relaxed Tensor Dual DEDICOM (RTDD)
algorithm for bipartite tensor factorization of spatio-temporal and behavioral data, allowing for
semi-autonomous representation learning and dimensionality reduction. We also attempted to
interpret the features generated from this tensor factorization and their utility in profiling players
and predicting player retention. Our results indicate that the incorporation of the temporal
dimension as made possible by RTDD provides meaningful prediction improvement when compared
to simple lifetime-behavior models.
The tensor factorization methodology and player retention prediction were discussed in a paper
submitted for the Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE’19) conference
and is currently under review.

REINFORCEMENT
LEARNING
There's always room for reinforcing your skills
and knowledge! Last year, Diego began teaching
a new elective called Reinforcement Learning
"where an agent learns in real time based on an
ever-changing environment and receiving a
reward after an action is taken." We have select
recordings of Reinforcement Learning class
sessions to share with you.
Click to view!
Analytics
Props go out to Rishabh Joshi, Varun Gupta, Xinyue Li, Yue Cui and Ziwen Wang, a few Zetas who co-wrote
the ACSW 2019 paper, "A Team Based Player Versus Player Recommender Systems Framework For Player
Improvement" while in the program.
Gaming
"Modern Massively Multi-player Online Games (MMOGs) have grown to become extremely complex in terms
of the usable resources in the games, resulting in an increase in the amount of data collected by tracking
the in-game activities of players. This has opened the door for researchers to come up with novel methods
to utilize this data to improve and personalize the user experience. In this paper, a novel but flexible
framework towards building a team based recommender system for player-versus-player (PvP) content in
such MMOGs is presented, and applied to a case study in the context of the major commercial title Destiny
2. The framework combines behavioral profiling via cluster analysis with recommendation systems to look
at teams of players as a unit, as well as the individual players, to make recommendations to the players,
with the purpose of providing information to them towards improving their performance."
Click to read
the full
analysis

Greenberger (class of 2017)
Julia
I spent some time talking in the
and
offices of Opex in downtown
new
last week.
Chicago
has an engineering background and has
Julia
been interested in using numbers and
always
but the tipping point for her
problem-solving,
when she hit the wall-that-is-Excel in her
came
as an economic consultant in the energy
work
practice.
science is a perfect fit for her because it
Data
numbers and problem-solving, while also
uses
aspects of visualization and design.
incorporating
asked her if there was something she learned
I
in the program that she unexpectedly found
about
using in work. She said that after having
herself
several more algorithms for a text mining
tried
the Jaccard Similarity Index (MSiA 431,
project,
Mining: Malthouse) ended up being the most
Data
demonstrating that sometimes the
accurate,
no stranger to hard work. Before her MSiA
Julia's
studying and working on projects, her
all-nighters
Friday and Saturday nights making stuffed
efforts
to sell at weekend farmers' markets gave
bagels
company she co-founded, Poppy’s Stuffed
the
its start in DC years ago.
Bagels,
her free time, Julia still enjoys spending time in
In
kitchen, and is currently going through her
the
and grandmother's recipes to try each one
mother
She also enjoys going to the dog beach with
out.
A L U M N I S P O T L I G H T
b y S a r a h M i t c h e l l
simplest answer is indeed the best.
Olive!
Olive.