From PhD drop-out to Google Data Scientist with Megan Risdal [Podcast #142]

On this week's episode of the podcast, I interview Megan Risdal. She's a data scientist and Product Manager at Kaggle, Google's Data Science competition platform.

Megan works closely with the global data science community, and on Google's Gemma open models project.

We talk about:

• Google's Kaggle, which hosts 300k open data sets and runs data science competitions each week that anyone can participate in.

• How people talk in academia VS how people talk in tech

• Stack Overflow VS Kaggle – Megan contrasts what it was like to work on these two "communities of practice"

• Linguistics and its importance in LLMs and AI research

Can you recognize the song I'm playing during the intro? It's a punk song from 1994.

You can watch the interview on YouTube:

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Links we talk about during our conversation:

Meg's blog: https://www.meg.dev/

The Sliced Data Science Gameshow that Meg co-hosted with Nick Wan: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6PX3YIZuHhyQmXKnyZmVDzdgAYbzwgDw

Meg on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MeganRisdal

Kaggle's open learning resources: https://www.kaggle.com/learn

The Gemma team at Google that Meg also works on: https://ai.google.dev/gemma