Now it’s LinkedIn Official! I’ll spare you the Star Wars video of Anakin being told he wasn’t going to be granted the title of Master, with a snarky caption of superiority. But it’s important to me for you to know that I thought about it. Master of Science, Health Data Science Saint Louis University School of Medicine Get the full details (including verification steps) on my LinkedIn post. If you’ve been with me since the beginning of this stage in my journey, I hope you’ve enjoyed the ride and gotten value from my learning out loud. What’s next? Stay tuned… :)

So a Couple of Things Have Happened Since December 2022… OK, I’m not really *back* back, but I am popping back in for a couple of relevant updates for this blog audience: As of last week, I have officially turned in all…

The End of the First Phase of My Data Science Journey The completion of my Capstone marks the last data science course in my Master’s in Health Data Science program. I have one more semester before I graduate, but the courses I have left are health research and misc. Effectively…

M.S. HDS Capstone Complete For the last couple of months I’ve been too busy to write about the things I’ve been learning and doing, but if you’re curious (or have a previously incurable case of insomnia) click this link to access my just completed Capstone project for my Master’s in…

Recognizing Rewards and Risks of Redeploying Prejudiced Pretrained Ptransformers In a couple of previous posts I’ve talked about the level of data crunching that has to happen in order to train a Transformer Large Language Model (LLM). This turns out to be an…

Demystifying the Magic Behind Large Language Models When I first started reading/watching people in the field talking about complex encoding and decoding systems for NLP (including transformers and various other neural network architectures), if I’m being honest, it sounded (still sounds?) like magic. …

An Initial Foray into Bloom using Google Colab As part of my Master’s program Capstone project, I get to explore how to implement Large Language Models (LLMs). I’m sure this exploration will spawn a number of blog posts, but for starters, I wanted to just kick the tires on one…

When Overthinking Produces the Simplest Explanation In my previous post on the Monty Hall Problem, I walked through the logic and statistics behind the 66% probability of winning by switching your answer when given the option to do so. Math, examples, and code stuffs — including examples of tests I…

Making Sense of the Monty Hall Problem The Monty Hall Problem is one of those proof points that illustrates how bad humans (myself included) are at statistical thinking. The quick version is this: you are playing a game with three options, often illustrated as doors. …