Hello! My name is Colin Mills, and I’m a data scientist with a background in logistics, supply chains, and marketing.  I’ve always been interested in applying the techniques used in these disparate domains to personal development, self-improvement, and general well-being and happiness.  The idea at the core of my interest is ‘anything that can be measured can be improved’.  Combine this with modern living making us leave digital footprints everywhere we go, and we end up with the real possibility of building software that learns from both what data you create and what goals you give to help guide decisions and provide feedback. Although having such a powerful piece of software is beyond the scope of my ambitions, parts of this can be demonstrated, and I have seen the impact of this idea in my own life.

 

I grew up interested in technology and science as a nerdy child, and after graduating high school, went to earn a B.S in Physics from Georgia Tech in 2009, followed by finding a job in New Jersey writing software for a consulting company while I thought about other career paths before me.  Data Science was becoming a burgeoning field, with many cool demonstrations of the power of applying statistics and the scientific mindset to any problems with available data, and seemed ideal for my mixture of interests in science, mathematics, and technology, and that I had a unique skill set to apply, having been an undergraduate TA in the math department and almost completed a minor in computer science.  To pursue this dream I earned a M.S. in Business Intelligence and Analytics from Stevens Institute of Technology.

 

During the latter half of my M.S. I was hired by Verizon Wireless to help optimize their retail supply chain and lower the inventory on hand in both the retail outlets, where a large portion of the dollar investment in products were sold very intermittently outside of brief large product launches, and the centralized warehouses, where both in store inventory was resupplied and online sales were fulfilled from.  This introduction to the importance of high quality predictions to planning future actions and how to develop a machine learning project from conception to prototype to integration into the day to day workings of the company was invaluable to my development.

 

Later I moved on to Digitas, a marketing agency part of the larger Publicis Groupe umbrella. Here I got my first proper introduction into manipulating and analyzing large data sets typical of web-scale projects, and got more experience in developing new tools and building not just the data science models and implementations, but engineering the data in the background, gaining experience in managing and utilizing cloud infrastructure in both AWS and GCP clouds. (This website being the latest in my cloud experiences  is hosted on yet a third cloud company, Microsoft Azure)

 

I also reserve the right to blog about any of my other interests, including music, video games, electronic tinkering, and general science, especially the intersection of those domains and data science.

 

I’m also available for freelance, contracting, or consulting work! Please reach out to me at colinmills at colinmills dot net for any business inquiries. You can also contact me at LinkedIn here.