About eighteen months ago I decided to leave astronomy and follow the Data Science Bandwagon-  this is a blog about that journey. I spent a few months studying DataScience courses on Coursera and Udacity and was fortunate enough to become part of a project to build a “recommender system for Biomedical Literature”.

Some background: Turns out that the biomedical field is growing so rapidly that it is getting really difficult to keep up with the literature. For newcomers to the field, its hard to figure out what research papers to read, where to start as few thousand articles are published daily and new /open source journals are popping up regularly. For veterans its hard to keep up and not enough hours in the day to scan through the articles to figure what is relevant, new and exciting in their area of research. This is true not just for the academic researchers but also those in the related fields of medicine and bioinformatics. Here is a recent plot I made of number of papers/month uploaded to pubmed (a popular biomedical research literature repository). As you can see, there are about ~92,000 new publications a month…

I have been working mainly on the algorithm design and development for this project and my intention with this blog is to focus on that and my growth as a data scientist.