Summary of background
Before starting at Australia Post I worked as a consulting data scientist for innovative startups in Melbourne. During this time I:
• lead a team of data scientists applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to document comparison at isgood.ai (a social good start-up).
• Subject Matter Expert for the Applied Analytics and consultant for the Consumer Analytics courses at RMIT Online's "Master of Data Science Strategy & Leadership" program.
• Frequent speaker in Australia and Taiwan on data science, data privacy and ethics, and on the entrepreneurial ecosystems in China, Europe and Australia how they differ.
Before returning to Melbourne, I was a data scientist at MCON group based in Shanghai where I was responsible for developing BI products consisting of machine learning solutions and predictive analysis models primarily for our automotive clients in China. I typically wrote in R for statistical solutions and Python for image manipulation applications and deep neural network applications (with TensorFlow and Keras). MCON was recently aquired by MSX International, a leading, global provider of technology-enabled business process outsourcing (BPO) services to automotive manufacturers.
In many ways, the AI and data science projects currently being conducted in China are far in advance of what is typically deployed in Australia for two reasons; 1) financial backing from industry and government, 2) access to plenty of diverse and clean data. The insights I gained while working in China form the basis for the talks I have given in Australia and Taiwan.
Before working as a data scientist I worked in astrophysics, electrochemistry and geophysics, building computational mathematical models of complex systems, often from scratch using the fundamental physical equations (e.g. MECSim). This has been conducted in three countries, namely Australia, China and Spain.
My resume can be found here, LinkedIn profile here and I can be contacted via email at: gareth.f.kennedy -at- gmail.com
Other resources
• While spending half of the last decade in China I looked a lot at (sometimes even through) air pollution. Beijing AQI levels were turned into movies and formed the basis of a statistical analysis which included weather effects covering the years from 2008 to 2015.
• My Ph.D. thesis (2010) entitled "Problems in stellar and planetary dynamics", under the supervision of Dr. Rosemary Mardling at the Centre for Stellar and Planetary Astrophysics (now Monash Centre for Astrophysics) at the School of Mathematical Sciences, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia is is available as a summary and in its complete form.
• Some previous examples of pursuits outside work places include: politics and paintings.