What would I do if I had to re-start in ML from zero?

"Hey Francesco, I see you have been around for a while in the ML world. I want to be a Data Scientist too but I don't know where to start. What would you suggest doing?"

I have received this question countless times. And provided the same answer over and over.
I finally decided to put my thoughts together and reply once and for all.

First things first though.

Let me introduce myself. I am Francesco Pochetti.

I am a Machine Learning Engineer at Bolt, where I lead the team responsible for the ML efforts behind the user identity verification platform. We solve computer vision challenges mainly, such as OCR, document and face liveness, and face matching among others.

I don't have a background in Data Science though. I am a chemist.

After graduating, it didn't take me long to realize I was in search of something different.

That was back in 2013.

That's when I started learning Python and then ML. Then landed a job at Amazon as a business analyst and eventually transitioned into Data Science.

A hell of a ride.

If you are up for it, join me in this ~1h video in which I share what worked for me. What I saw in these years as a practitioner and I what I think might work for you too.

Thanks for reading up this far and I hope you'll enjoy the content!

Session details

Duration: 1 hour 10 minutes

Contents:

• My journey: from chemistry in Rome to DS at Amazon in Luxembourg
• Online courses: from data analytics to deep learning
• Contribute to OS: be a great software engineer
• Kaggle: learn how to build and validate models
• Build…: build and deploy models
• …in public: create a blog and share your knowledge on social media