My name is Brian O’Halloran, and I am the Senior Data Scientist at eFinancialCareers – a financial services job site based in London.
I’m a BIG fan of the R programming language: its capabilities (data munging, visualisation) are superb, particularly for data science. I use it extensively in my work. (I am tool agnostic generally: I use the best one for the job, so use Python, Tableau etc. as required).
Find me on Twitter / LinkedIn / Stack Overflow.
Current Role
At eFinancialCareers, we’re interested in what our clients are looking for in their next financial services role. To this end, I spend much of my time building models to perform text classification of our user-supplied content. Additionally, we want to know what our users are doing on an event basis on our site: we’ve been building up our customer analytic capabilities in order to do this, and to predict what sort of role they’d like to see (and apply for).
Previously, in academia..
Before all this, I was an astrophysicist: after getting a Ph.D. from University College Dublin in 2003, I spent a decade doing post-doctoral work in the United States and the United Kingdom. From 2008 until 2013, I worked on the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory, as part of the team responsible for the SPIRE instrument. On the good days when I actually had time to do research (running a satellite instrument is a very time consuming pursuit), my main area of investigation was looking at the effects of massive stars in other galaxies on their surrounding environment: hence the (old) name of the blog (plus the domain name, and my Twitter handle).
Personal
Still love astronomy (though as an amateur these days), and a bit of a spaceflight geek. QPR fan, too, for my sins. I can be found in the Upper Loft at Loftus Road, on occasion.