I received my PhD in experimental particle physics in 2015 after spending four years analyzing the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) data. I was searching for proton collisions that had the signatures of the Higgs boson, a new particle discovered in 2012. At the same time I worked on software that decided in less than 200 milliseconds which particle collisions to discard. Every second 40 million group collisions would occur, and only about 500 of them were interesting enough to send to storage.
After graduating, I became a data scientist at an ad tech company in New York City whose amount of data rivaled that of the LHC. There I realized that my favorite part about being a data scientist was telling stories with data and visualizations. These days I live in Tokyo and work as the head of data science at a small startup.
I created Dreaming of Data so that I could dive deeper into topics that interest me and practice my data analysis and data visualization skills. If you would like to contact me or suggest a topic for the next project, you can email me at inga@dreamingofdata.com. And if you like this website and don’t want to miss new postings, you can follow me on Twitter @IngaSilkworth.
– Inga Silkworth