Nick Johnson, Technical Consultant, Widget Brain

Sep202018

Posted inArticles

ROLE: “I’m a technical consultant for Widget Brain, which basically means I am a data scientist” Nick explains. “I help out on a broad range of projects. I explore data for our clients, identifying anomalies and doing a lot of demand forecasting. Most recently, I worked on a project where we predicted when anomalies occur in mushroom environments, which was really cool.”

BIGGEST WIN IN THE PAST YEAR: Nick believes his biggest win was “creating an anomaly detector for a specific-use case somewhere on earth that solved a very important problem for beer drinkers”. Nick’s work is top-secret. “If I told you any more I would have to pop your bike tires”.

“Another major win was that I just bought a Pitchnut board. Its like pool but … you basically flick these little pieces around a board. Although I’ve been losing a lot, it’s a good game”

HOW? “Working with Stacy is great” Nick says. “She’s always really helpful and supportive. Gives great feedback. Carly is also great. I just gotta thank my team!”. Nick also thinks playing ping-pong helps refresh his mind every hour.

Widget Brain: Widget creates the algorithm infrastructure for companies that don’t have time or expertise to do it themselves. They design specialized algorithms to help their clients improve efficiency, predict demand, optimise their workforce, and elude problems.

CAN NICK SEE THE FUTURE? “I cannot see the future… but I’ve got a good feeling that there’s gonna be a lot of snow this winter and it’s not gonna be that cold. I’m saving up my vacation days now to take off powder days at work. It’s a legal maneuver” explains Nick. “In the future, I want to start doing more optimation stuff for Widget… things similar to shift scheduling and route optimization”.

WHAT WERE YOU FOR HALLOWEEN? “I was a plum for halloween, that was one of the best costumes of all time. I dressed up in my maroon grad gown from high school, had a purple wig on, and I stuffed myself”

FUN: “I don’t really have a lot of fun. I mostly like to just sit and air-dry after a nice shower” Nick explains. “But I guess I like all the typical stuff y’know. Getting out there, playing ball, cookin’ enchiladas on Tuesdays”.

“S/o to sklearn packages for being the absolute hoss of machine learning packages” – Nick Johnson