For my second interview in the Interview Series, I interviewed Schaun Wheeler. Schaun is co-founder of Aampe, a startup that embeds an active learning system into mobile apps to turn push notifications into part of the app’s user interface. Before he co-founded Aampe, Schaun was the data science lead for the award-winning Consumer Graph intelligence product at Valassis, a U.S. ad-tech firm. And before that he founded and directed the data science team at Success Academy Charter Schools in New York City. Then before that, Schaun was one of the first people to champion the use of statistical inference to understand massive unstructured data at the United States Department of the Army. Schaun has a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Connecticut.
If the audio does not play on your computer, you can download it here:
Over our conversation, we discussed the following:
- Schaun’s experiences as both a data scientist and anthropologist
- His utilization of anthropology within data science to decipher the right problem before launching into data science solutions
- Recommendations for how anthropologists can develop data science and programming skills
- His experiences starting a new data science consumer and market-research based company
To learn more about Schaun Wheeler and Aampe, check these out:
LinkedIn (the best way to contact him): https://www.linkedin.com/in/schaunwheeler/
Medium: https://medium.com/@schaun.wheeler
Twitter: https://twitter.com/schaunw
Aampe website: https://www.aampe.com/
Aampe blog: https://www.aampe.com/blog
A User Story, The Data Science Children’s Book: https://www.aampe.com/blog/a-user-story
More Detailed Walkthrough: Clip #1: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL03WDMCL2PHjRd8Y8USzvVkcIyQM57FMU and Clip #2: https://youtu.be/kwk_Ot8orPY
Previous Interview in the Interview Series: https://ethno-data.com/astrid-interview-1/
3 thoughts on “Data Scientist, Anthropologist, and Entrepreneur: Interview with Schaun Wheeler (Interview #2 in the Interview Series)”