Sunday, May 27, 2012

Update in May 2012

Last year around this time I had decided to take a risk and leave my position at the University of Wisconsin Medical Foundation for a position at the UW School of Medicine, where I was hoping to be more involved with research. This endeavor hasn't turned out as I expected, so I've decided to move on. Starting later this month, I'll be working with CPM HealthGrades, a marketing firm that is offering more and more data services to their customers.

I accepted the position at CPM HealthGrades as a Data Scientist. This is a pretty cool opportunity in a relatively new field of data analysis, using some of the same technologies behind IBM's Watson computer, the computer that bested two top-rank Jeopardy winners. I'll be learning the programming languages Python and R, and I'm really excited to put these skills to commercial and research use.

As you may know, I attended the SAS Global Forum conference last month, and I plan to keep up with the SAS community as well, by writing papers, presenting, staying in touch with user groups, and maybe even writing a book. So I plan on keeping my SAS site up-to-date; however, I may not be developing much new. Perhaps I'll come out with a Python or R site to go along with it, with translations of code back and forth between the languages. Heck, maybe I'll write a SAS macro to write Python, or a Python module to write SAS. We'll see! Stay tuned for more details!