Once or twice a year, a company called Griddy makes headlines for the insanely high electricity bills incurred by consumers in ERCOT, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. This traditionally happens during the hottest days of the Texan summer, when the world of wholesale energy traders and grid operators are biting their fingernails around near-miss blackouts — days which usually come and go with most consumers remaining blissfully unaware of the creaking and straining grid powering their air conditioners. During the week of Valentine’s Day 2021, the headlines were caused by an extreme cold snap instead of an extreme heat…
EpiQuery is a realtime “influenza-like illness” (ILI) tracker. It’s updated on a daily basis. The system was set up in 2016 to track emergency room visits with chief complaints that mention flu, fever, and sore throat. These are not confirmed nor denied to be influenza, nor any other disease. Meanwhile, the US government has severely bungled the COVID-19 test rollout, and we’ve only tested ~15k people total so far. In the absence of widespread testing, we need to rely in EpiQuery (and ILINet, the federal CDC version covering all 50 states) to understand the likely growth of the COVID-19 outbreak.
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The explosive growth of data in our lives and our technology is a trend that I’ve built my entire career to date upon. I was lucky to have spotted this trend back in 2012 and have worked over the past six years in a variety of data science and data engineering roles, all revolving around leveraging novel datasets to create value. During this time, a hobby of mine has been to widely explore the most obscure industries I could find, and imagine how the creative application of data could be used to make these industries more efficient and productive.
Cofounder and CTO of Amperon. Forbes 30 Under 30, Energy. Ex-McKinsey, Etsy, Planet Labs.