Take the audience on a journey

During my final round interview at Tapad, the VP of Data Science noticed my academic background in neuroscience, and we started to discuss how neuroscience research could contribute to online advertising. Later in the interview, he asked “Have you heard of reinforcement learning (RL)?” And I said no. He explained this reward-guided learning paradigm, which immediately reminded me of my undergraduate research on aversive learning in fruit flies. After the interview, he emailed me the link to RL Courses on YouTube taught by David Silver, the leading scientist of AlphaGo.

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Time to Spark

After investigating a sample dataset using Python for a month on a local computer, I discovered some interesting patterns and optimized my algorithms to achieve a high measure of goodness. This week, I finally got the opportunity to run my algorithms on a much larger dataset – too large to be stored or processed on a single computer. Finally, it is time to Spark!

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Iterative learning

In my very first meeting with my mentor at Tapad, after an introduction to DeviceGraph and AdTech 101, we started to discuss the project I would be working on during my internship. The first week was very intense and my mentor understood my struggle in the face of information overload. He showed me his system of organizing information by writing down his incremental knowledge about certain technology as well as his spark of ideas. I adapted his system and developed my own archive to track my learning process and ideas using Google Docs (the picture above).  Now, 5 weeks have passed and I have continuously updated the documents as I learn: the more I know, the more I realize I do not know, and the more I want to learn. Learning is an iterative process.

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Yes, and…

Halfway mark of my summer internship at Tapad! The past 4 weeks have been very exciting and fulfilling. Learning from experienced colleagues and marketing gurus is not only educational from a technical perspective, but also quite inspiring for my personal development. This Friday, we had a team-building improv workshop (I truly recommend everyone and every team to check it out. Really mind blowing!). I was impressed by the “Yes, and…” teamworking spirit and the power of encouragement.

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