Tag: presenting

Before becoming a freelancer data scientist, I used to work in a distributed company. Remote communication, including remote presentations were the norm for me, long before the remote work experiment no one asked for. In this post, I share some tips for delivering better presentations remotely.

People ask me for good intro video to data visualization. I tend to ask them to look for one of my lectures. To save the search, here’s one of the most relevant talks that I gave

In this post, I will try to convince you that speaking at a conference is an essential tool for professional development.

If you ever gave or attended a presentation, you are familiar with this situation: the presenter asks whether there are any questions and … nobody asks anything. This is an awkward situation. Why aren’t there any questions? Is it because everything is clear? Not likely. Everything is never clear. Is it because nobody cares? Well, maybe. There are certainly many people that don’t care. It’s a fact of life. Study your audience, work hard to make the presentation relevant and exciting but still, some people won’t care. Deal with it.

On Thursday, March 20, I will give a talk titled “Three most common mistakes in data visualization and how to avoid them.” I will be a guest of the Barcelona Data Science and Machine Learning Meetup Group. Right now, less than twenty-four hours after the lecture announcement, there are already seventeen people on the waiting list. I feel a lot of responsibility and am very excited.

Today, I made a presentation to the faculty of the Chisinau
Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science. The audience gathered in a conference room in Chisinau, and I was in my home office in Israel.

I consider teaching and presenting an integral part of my job as a data scientist. One way to become better at teaching is to collect feedback from the learners. I tried different ways of collecting feedback: passing a questionnaire, Polldaddy surveys or Google forms, or simply asking (no, begging) the learners to send me an e-mail with the feedback. Nothing really worked. The response rate was pretty low. Moreover, most of the feedback was a useless set of responses such as “it was OK”, “thank you for your time”, “really enjoyed”. You can’t translate this kind of feedback to any action.

When I teach data visualization, I love showing my students how simple changes in the way one visualizes his or her data may drive the potential audience to different conclusions. When done correctly, such changes can help the presenters making their point. They also can be used to mislead the audience. I keep reminding the students that it is up to them to keep their visualizations honest and fair. In his recent post, Robert Kosara, the owner of https://eagereyes.org/, mentioned another possible way that may change the perceived conclusion. This time, not by changing a graph but by changing the order of graphs exposed to a person. Citing Robert Kosara:

Two months ago, on the PyCon-IL conference, I gave a lecture called “Time Series Analysis: When “Good Enough” is Good Enough”. You may find the written version of this talk here. Today, the conference organizers published all the conference talks on YouTube. Here’s mine: