About eighteen months ago I decided to leave astronomy, change my career trajectory and join the Data Science Bandwagon-  this is a blog about that journey.

My discovery of this area was serendipitous – I was working on a project in the Solar Physics group at Stanford on identifying and cataloging  “white light flares” (solar flares visible as transient brightenings in the visible continuum and thought to occur when  highly accelerated electrons impinge on the photosphere of the sun) and attended a talk on trying to automate the process using some filters and  pattern recognition algorithms. That was the first time I heard about “machine learning”.  Coursera was still fairly new and I took Andrew Ng’s class on Machine Learning  and I was hooked. I spent a few months studying DataScience courses on Coursera and completed the Data Mining Certification from UC San Diego.  It was/is a new, exciting and upcoming area and I was fortunate enough to become part of a project to build a “recommender system for Biomedical Literature” at Stanford University.

I am hoping to document the development of this project, and my growth  as a data scientist.

Thanks for reading!