Michael Cummings, Community Editor

cummings@grinnell.edu

This week’s Scholars’ Convocation featured Grinnell alum Hilary Mason ’00, who since graduation has become very prominent in the growing field of data science. Mason spoke about topics including the evolution of big data and what it means to be a data scientist.

“I see Grinnell in the many activities that Hilary does. She started something called hackNY to convince smart computer scientists that they shouldn’t spend their time on Wall Street, but they should do something good for society,” said Professor Sam Rebelsky, Computer Science, who introduced Mason at the talk.

Much of Mason’s work has focused on analyzing social networks. She shared one example from her time at Bitly in which she analyzed the words people read about pizza based on geographic location, comparing New York City, San Francisco and Rome, Italy.

“You can actually start to see slight differences in culture just by counting the word distribution in the articles people read tied to their geography,” Mason said.

Mason concluded with a call to any potential data scientists.

“If it’s something that’s at all interesting to you, that interplay between tech, society and ethics, there’s a huge amount of work to be done there,” she said.