Data Science Weekly 15 In-Depth Interviews with Data Scientists Volume 2, December 2014 DataScienceWeekly.org 1 FOREWORD Given the success of our first Interview Series, we kept going! Over the past few months we have been lucky enough to conduct indepth interviews with another 15 different Data Scientists. The 15 interviewees have varied roles and focus areas: from start-up founders to academics to those working at more established companies; working across content discovery, gaming, genomics, health and fitness, entertainment, mobile/communications and more… We wanted to make the interviews more easily accessible to the community, so have put them together in this pdf. We hope you enjoy the read and thanks again to all the interviewees! Hannah Brooks, Co-Editor DataScienceWeekly.org P.S. – If you enjoy these interviews, and want to learn more about  what it takes to become a data scientist  what skills do I need  what type of work is currently being done in the field Check out “Data Scientists at Work” – a collection of 16 interviews with some the world's most influential and innovative data scientists, who each address all the above and more! :) [Full disclosure: author is my co-editor at DSW, Sebastian Gutierrez!] DataScienceWeekly.org 2 CONTENTS Jarno Koponen: "Random" Predictive Content Discovery…………..Page 5 Co-Founder of Random Emmett Shear: Data Science at Twitch: CEO Perspective…………….Page 16 CEO of Twitch Dag Lohmann: Machine Learning in Catastrophe Modeling ……… Page 23 Co-Founder of KatRisk Chul Lee: Data Science to improve Health & Fitness ………………….. Page 32 Director of Data Engineering & Science at MyFitnessPal Michael Watson: Applying & Teaching Data Science …………………. Page 42 Partner at Opex Analytics; Adjunct Professor at Northwestern University Chris Checco: Cloud-Based Analytics for Communications ……….. Page 50 President and Chief Analytics Officer of Razorsight Reid Robison: Creating the "Dropbox of your Genome" …………….. Page 64 MD, MB