November/December 2020 Newsletter

PACM & DSA Newsletter

November/ December

The PACM and DSA Newsletter allows you to learn more about applied math and data science by including interesting journal articles, interactive dashboards, upcoming PACM and DSA events (such as career panels, seminars, and conferences), significant news articles, and featured profiles of students, faculty, alumni, and industry professionals. By providing you with timely and relevant information we help you to stay up-to-date with the fields of applied math and data science.

In this issue:

Updated PACM website
Featured Research
40 Under 40
Faculty Pick
Meet the GA Austin Wangler
Data Now
Most in-demand DSA Skills
Upcoming Events

UPDATED PACM WEBSITE

We are excited to announce the unveiling of the updated PACM website! This new version contains:

Most recent PACM student and faculty handbooks
Information about careers in applied and computational mathematics
Required paperwork and information for ACM 690
Interactive map of Buffalo for new students moving to the area
Alumni profiles
and more!

Featured Research

The Buffalo State website posted an article featuring the research of Bruce Swan, a PACM faculty member and associate professor in the mathematics department. Bruce and his wife Tina Swan has been studying the internet’s influence on the global economy, which has become especially interesting during the COVID pandemic due to the large number of people who now buy more things online.

Read the full article here.

40 Under 40

Congratulations Jessica Copeland

Jessica Copeland, a member of the Industry Advisory Board and attorney at Bond, Schoeneck & King, was named in Buffalo Business First's 40 under 40 list. See the full list of award winners here.

Faculty Pick

Matthew Nagowski is an Adjunct Lecturer at Buffalo State College, serving in his 10^th year of teaching in the DSA and PACM Professional Science Master’s Programs. He has worked at M&T Bank since 2007, where he serves as a Group Vice President leading a modeling and analytics group focused on customer deposit and loan behaviors to support the Bank’s risk management practice.

Matt selected the book Machine Platform Crowd by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brnjolfson because it explores the ways that digital technologies and advanced data science techniques are transforming the way in which we live and work. New techniques in machine learning, leveraging scalable technologies that aggregate and harness the insights of innumerable human interactions are bringing us to the cusp of a revolutionized economy. Published in 2017, the book is relevant for all our PACM and DSA students because the analytical techniques and approaches they are learning in the classroom are being used to inform every interaction we experience in our economy and society and will have far reaching effects on our world.

Data Now
Data science in the everyday

Election Season

The first presidential debate took place on September 9th. From the number of interruptions to the most commonly used words and amount of speaking time there was lots of data to be analyzed and turned into visualizations.

Check out this article from Theo Goe where he walks us through his data collection, analysis, and visualization process using data from the first presidential debate. This article lists many of the tools he uses, test them yourself and share your newly made visualizations with us!

Read full article here.

BIAS IN DATA

Were 21% of New York City residents really infected with the novel coronavirus? In this article Cassie Kozyrkov dives into the notion of garbage in/ garbage out; how different kinds of bias (selection, reporting, confirmation) could have affected the results of this study.

How data is collected affects the ability to draw conclusions from the data and when presenting data we should be careful to also share the the limitations of the analysis.
Read the full article here.

Meet the GA

Austin Wangler

I’ve lived in the Buffalo area for most of my life. Eventually, I ended up in the Elmwood Village where I have been living for about half a year now. I started my college education here at Buffalo State in 2016. After a few major changes, I ended up graduating as a student in the Muriel A. Howard Honors Program with a BA in Mathematics. It was in my last year of my undergraduate studies where I was both introduced to and found my passion for data science. After learning the basics of data science with a few projects and undergraduate DSA classes, I knew that I wanted to further my education in the field. This is why I decided to enroll in Buffalo State’s DSA-MS program.

I chose Buffalo State for a few reasons, one of these being my experience here as an undergraduate. The connections I made at Buffalo State helped me and continue to help me further myself as both a student and a person overall. The students and faculty at Buffalo State truly make it a great place to be. Through my years of studying at the school, I definitely grew a liking to the immediate area as well – this is also why I decided to move here. The Elmwood area is lively and diverse, full of many great places to eat, have a drink, or just hang out.

I plan on finishing my current degree at Buffalo State which would, for now, complete my formal education. The overwhelming vastness of the job market in data science still has me undecided on a specific industry I would like to enter after school. That being said, I know I want to be involved in some sort of predictive modeling, whichever industry it may be in.

In my free time, I enjoy playing sports. I play soccer in the summers in the Buffalo District Soccer League on a team that I started with a few friends. I also enjoy playing pickup Basketball whenever I can. I recently started playing Golf as well, which has quickly become my new favorite sport. Beyond sports, I am a big fan of movies – crime dramas and sci-fi are my favorite genres. I listen to a lot of music as well, specifically Hip-Hop and R&B. Also, now and then I like to make music by flipping old records into new Hip-Hop instrumentals.

My favorite part of data science is diving into a new data set and coming up with creative approaches for analysis. I think that every problem in data has a unique plan and solution, coming up with and implementing this plan is where I have the most fun and learn the most as well.

I am beyond thrilled to be a part of the DSA program as both a student and a graduate assistant. I look forward to continuing my college education with the peers and faculty that have already made my experience here so great.

MOST IN-DEMAND DSA SKILLS

In this article, Jeff Hale scraped Indeed, SimplyHired and Monster to determine which skills were most in-demand in data science job listings. He then compared 2018 to 2019 to determine which technologies were gaining and losing popularity. BUT can we really say that these are the most in demand DSA skills?

Jeff only scrapped data on 1 day in 2018 and 1 day in 2019, are these two days representative of all DSA jobs posted that year? Also, he only included job listings that appeared when he searched "Data Scientist" what about all the many other titles that data scientists hold? Was the same job posted on multiple sited counted more than once or were duplicates removed?

When you are making conclusions remember to think critically about the gaps in your data.

Read the full article here.
Students looking for an idea for a project to showcase their skills may want to consider a 2020 update taking into account some of the concerns.