5
May

Look Who`s Doing Big Data in Nova Scotia: CogNova Technologies

What kind of data is your company working with?
Over the last 20 years, I have worked with data from insurance companies, telephone companies and adhesive tape manufacturers to energy analytics companies, water management consultants and provincial health care departments.

What kinds of analytics is your company using?
The company’s mission is to provide consultation and services in the areas of data analytics, data mining and machine learning.

What are the problems your company is interested in solving?
We offer specific talent in the area of Transfer Learning applied to data mining. Transfer Learning is the use of data or models from one or more related source tasks when learning a new target task. Transfer learning is considered a major advance in machine learning and its applications in data mining.

How did you get involved in your line of work?
I have a PhD in Computer Science with specialization in Machine Learning. Prior to returning to Academia, I worked in gov’t and industry where I developed software systems and lead related projects.

What are you most proud of in your work?
Helping to bring Data Analytics and ICT to Nova Scotia. My work in advanced machine learning methods involving transfer learning and life-long learning systems.

What are the biggest challenges in your company’s line of analytics?
Acquiring the data from the client and external sources, and then cleaning, consolidating, and preparing it for modeling and visualization it is always the greatest challenge.

What’s the best advice you can give someone interested in getting involved in a career in Big Data?
Keep that Maritime sense of humour and wonderful people skills, but develop your hard skills in terms of math, science, and computer science in particular. Try it, it is not that tough. This is one of our major ways forward in the 21st Century.

What’s the best thing about doing Big Data in Nova Scotia that you want to share with the world?
We are in a great location in terms of time and space with respect to the rest of the world. We have considerable technical and management talent already. Nova Scotia is a terrific place to raise the next generation of some of the best data miners on the planet.

 

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