Hilary Mason

“I decided that since I was trying to teach 'style' of thinking in science and engineering, and 'style' is an art, I should therefore copy the methods of teaching used for the other arts - once the fundamentals have been learned.”

“People share things that make them look good.”

“Data science requires having that cultural space to experiment and work on things that might fail.”

“After graduate school, I joined Johnson & Wales University in Rhode Island as an assistant professor, but I continued to program in addition to teaching and working on research. I built a program that crawled job boards to determine which skills employers value, which helped Johnson & Wales explore ways to improve its curriculum.”

“Science is the practice of failing repeatedly but learning as you go.”

“I'm very lucky to work at bitly, with a data set that allows us to explore human social behavior at the scale of human social behavior.”

“I think e-mail should be sorted by importance, not by time.”

“Don't be afraid to push your company in the direction you think is right - you'll either be fired or promoted, and either outcome will end up just fine.”

“The job of the data scientist is to ask the right questions.”

“Deep learning allows you to create predictive models at a level of quality and sophistication that was previously out of reach. And so deep learning also enhances the product function of data science because it can generate new product opportunities.”

“Creating things that people want to tie into their identity is the best way to make them spread.”

“Even smaller companies are putting resources behind their analytics teams in the same way they put resources behind engineering and product teams. There are some great tools out there that allow even tiny businesses to use data effectively.”

“My job is to analyze our data set to understand it and build products on it. I look at raw data, do the math to clean it up, and build systems to make it easy to understand.”

“I'm really curious about people - what their desires and interests are - and bit.ly's data tell me that. It gives me an unprecedented window into human communication and behavior.”

“Often, people think that individual data is the most valuable thing they can collect. But it's not useful to know what I am doing or where I am, unless you're particularly interested in me, which is weird. But it is very useful to know what a population of people are doing.”

“A lot of people seem to think that data science is just a process of adding up a bunch of data and looking at the results, but that's actually not at all what the process is.”

“Teaching someone to program is like giving them a superpower.”

“You really need to have a lot of empathy for the work you're doing and the people who you're ultimately trying to help, whether that's a business colleague, a boss, or, ultimately, the user of the software you're building.”

“Everyone likes taking their own photos and seeing themselves reflected back.”

“To gain the competitive edge, companies must master the ability to innovate.”