Listen to our inaugural episode of The Waterloo Advantage! We chat with Navya Mehta, a 3rd year computer science and finance student, who is working at Loblaws as a Data Science Intern. Navya is a very intelligent, humble person and his passion for data science is inspiring.
Find Navya Mehta at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/navya-mehta-uj
00:13 - Podcast introduction
00:40 - Guest introduction
01:36 - Role at Loblaws
03:03 - Data science team at Loblaws
04:30 - How important is understanding the core business
07:19 - Is Loblaws a data first company?
08:28 - Do you mostly work with technical problems or adaptive (people) problems?
10:30 - Are there privacy issues with the data you work with?
11:00 - Is data cleaning and data preprocessing common in a data science role?
14:13 - Time breakdown of data cleaning vs preprocessing vs insights
15:37 - Experience with management and leadership communicating the value of A.I.
18:09 - Love and passion for data (data as a way to understand human behaviour, find order in chaos, pursuit of meaning)
23:54 - Do you think of data science as tools to help programmers or replace programmers?
26:40 - Questions data science struggles with today but could help with in the future
31:51 - Monopolistic sense in ML due to compute resources required
35:47 - Is availability of data also a monopolistic problem?
39:15 - Collaboration in data science
42:53 - Hero/role model in data science
44:21 - How data science impacts other parts of life (eg. optimization in relationships)
45:40 - Ideal data science role
47:07 - How data science training impacts problem solving and link to CS courses
49:37 - Do you think human life and society can be modelled as an optimization problem?
50:56 - What worldview is more appealing: deterministic or stochastic
52:38 - Do you think we're living in a simulation?
53:46 - Impact you want to create
56:23 - Advice for students/people wanting to get into data science
58:00 - Closing
The Waterloo Advantage is produced by The Collective. The theme music is produced by Ayush Ghosh (https://www.ayushsitar.com/).