Data Science

This is a Rough Transcript from The Virtual Bash on Ethics Introduction Around two thousand, two hundred and 20 years ago, Archimedes said “Give me a place to stand and I will move the world”. Archimedes has come to be (rightly) associated with many fundamental innovations in mathematics and engineering, and while I’m sure we’re all sick and tired of screws and levers and jumping out of bathtubs, I’d like to start off with a discussion on one of his more mundane creations, the compound pulley. ...

Originally posted in Cybersecurity Insiders Back when I was pursuing my undergraduate degree in electronics and software engineering, I couldn’t imagine a path that would lead to me working with NATO on port protection and maritime defense, teaching smart submarines how to trust each other. But while I was working toward a Ph.D., that’s what happened. Instead of following the path into academia, a friend enticed me to work with him on biometrics. From there, I found an opportunity to apply my skills and knowledge to the cybersecurity industry – but that’s not something I could have predicted either. ...

Approximate Script from my #NIDevConf19 talk a few weeks ago Introduction The technology community is known for being strongly inward looking to the point of being miopic at times; we focus on techniques, products, languages, frameworks, and best practices and we consider success and failure based on concrete facts and evidence. ...

Another year gone, thought it was time for some reflection. As @Sigma helpfully pointed out to me, 31 is officially the boundary of “30’s” not 30, so I’m gonna take this year as being my “friendly match” with my 30’s and hopefully take this year a bit more wisely. What follows is a vaguely structured stream of consciousness, more for my benefit than anyone else’s. If you want a wee window to see what’s behind the beard, read on. If you’re expecting anything revolutionary, disruptive or surprising, you’re gonna be disappointed… ...

This is an approximate transcript from my July 2018 talk at Digital DNA’s AI NI Community Panel on wether the use of AI in defence and surveillence was inherently evil Yes, It’s been sitting in my drafts folder for months because I completly forgot about it, sorrynotsorry Hello folks, I’m Andrew Bolster, most everyone calls me Bolster. And nobody calls me Doctor. I’m a Data Scientist at Alert Logic, a cyber security firm based Texas but with a research office in Weavers Court where we monitor, analyse and identify malicious and suspicious internet activity, protecting thousands of companies with advanced sequence and pattern matching sensors deployed across the world. ...

I am a heavy user of Jupyter Notebook, both personally for wrapping my head around Open Data, professionally for analysis and reporting, and for education/presentations. So am very comfortable with just spinning up new notebooks all over the show. However, this ends up looking like this… Less than informative and impossible to work out WTF I was doing. Helpfully, there’s a way to change it. In your jupyter_notebook_config.py file (Normally in ~/.jupyter), add the following somewhere sensible ...

After last weeks return to posting, I thought it was time to do something vaguely useful (and actually talk about it) so I’m tidying up a few meetup sessions I’ve presented at into a series of Basic Data Science (with Python) posts. This is the first one and covers my Python environment, the Jupyter notebook environments I use for analysis, and some on the Plot.ly graphs and RISE / Reveal.js methods I use to turn those notebooks into presentations. ...

This post is a little different from my usual fare; Basically, there was a tweet from MATRIX NI that caught my eye; the latest Office of National Statistics report on Internet Use in the UK. @MATRIX_NI @ONS And the tables show Northern Ireland being around 7% behind the Avg and 2% behind the next-worst-region... — Andrew Bolster (@Bolster) May 22, 2015 Basically, NI “lost”. So I thought it was a good opportunity to play around with the data a little bit instead of my usual stuff. ...

About 6 months ago now, I had the pleasure of getting Phil Herron to talk at the Farset Labs PyBelfast group about his work in GCC/Cython fron end optimisation work, which was simultaneously waaaaay over my head and really interesting. I’ve been a ‘Python Primary’ software engineer now for about 5 years, in web-dev, infrastructure monitoring, data analysis, and scientific computing, with some esoteric stuff involving small-vector linear algebra optimisation on GPU CUDA, Matlab bridging with Octave / Oct2Py, and distributed state systems. But somehow, I’ve managed to dodge hardcore Cython. ...

Illustrated Guide Explains Your Mind’s Decision Biases [Mind Hacks] NIST Releases Updated Handbook of Math Functions Matplotlib For Python Developers