Using the YouTube API and Amazon’s AWS Lambda — 🚀 Escaping the YouTube algorithm I love watching YouTube videos that improve my life in some tangible way. Unfortunately, the YouTube algorithm doesn’t agree. It likes to feed me clickbait and other garbage. This isn’t all that surprising. The algorithm prioritises clicks and watch time. So I set out on a mission: Can I write…

Why our AI needs to understand causality — What’s wrong with correlation? In May 2016, the COMPAS algorithm was flagged as being racially biased [1]. This algorithm was used by the US to guide criminal sentencing by predicting likelihood of reoffending. It estimated a black person was more likely to re-offend than a white person with the same other background factors. The…

5 takeaways from an unconventional career transition — Background 3 years ago, I had just finished medical school and started working full-time as a doctor in the UK’s National Health Service (NHS). Now, I work full-time as a data scientist at dunnhumby, writing code for “Big Data” analytics with Python and Spark. More and more people are making the…

(and lead to new, cheaper drugs and improved patient health) — The cost of drug discovery The drug development process is notoriously difficult; it takes on average 10–15 years to take a drug from identifying the molecule to being used clinically, and only approximately 3% of the initial drugs will make it all the way through. The cost of bringing a drug all the way through…

Using BeautifulSoup and Selenium — Motivation I’m currently looking for a new data science role, but have found it frustrating that there are so many different websites, which list different jobs and at different times. It was becoming laborious to continually check each website to see what new roles had been posted. But then I remembered…

And why the healthcare AI space needs more doctors — We are seeing increasing use of, and discussion about, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) across all sectors; healthcare included. Greater volumes of data, improved computing power and break-throughs in machine learning techniques have provided fertile soils for innovation. In healthcare, this is reflected by an exponential increase in…

I read an article a few months ago about how Jeff Bezos banned PowerPoints from meetings at Amazon. Instead, people write a “narratively structured six-page memo” to lay out what’s being discussed. At the time of reading the article, I was creating a PowerPoint presentation for a group of medical…

About 3 years ago, I developed a deep interest in learning to rap well. I emphasize the word ‘developed’ because up until this point, I was waiting to passively discover a passion which would somehow carry me towards expertise. Authenticity The main initial ingredient — from my experience — needed…

“Is medicine right for me?” is a question that a lot of medics ask at some point during their career. Perhaps you’re fed up of endless exams, not enthusiastic about working nights and weekends for the foreseeable future, or just don’t think it’s a good match for your personality. Whatever…