I work as a recommendations machine learning engineer at Udemy, an online learning company. I think a lot about how to aid discovery of courses relevant to a students learning goals. Around 65% of our 12 million students are outside of the US, with 40% in developing countries. A lot of what I am currently working on is understanding how our discovery algorithms should take into account local tastes, willingness to pay and learning pathways.

More generally I am fascinated by how we can create a good learning experience in an online environment. Creating a community across remote participants is very difficult, but something that is I think is essential for online learning to be a substitute for in person learning. My interest in education runs in the family, my mom is a life long educator in Southern Africa. I grew up mainly in Mozambique (so would love to connect with any Portuguese speakers in the class!). The whole family currently resides in Nairobi, Kenya.

I am taking this course because I am particularly interested in how we can apply deep learning to solve social issues. Three years ago I founded a bay area non-profit called Delta Analytics ( http://www.deltanalytics.org/) that provides pro-bono data science for non-profits across the world. Our fellows are all data scientists, software engineers and analysts in the Bay Area who give their time part-time outside of their full time jobs in 6 month cohorts. It has been an incredible experience working with smart people to fill a skill gap, and I already can't wait to learn from the passion of like minded people in this class.