Hi! I’m Colin. I use he / him pronouns, live near San Diego, and split my time between machine learning and large-scale interactive art.

Data Science Manager @ Stitch Fix

I am currently a data science manager at Stitch Fix, where my team works on marketing, onboarding, and incentives. This site has a good overview of what the broader algorithms team does.

To me, data science is about deeply understanding the meaning of your data, analyzing it with honesty and creativity, and communicating results clearly. It is extremely gratifying to use data and math to help so many people make better decisions.

Lead Fabricator @ Glass House Arts

Glass House Arts is an art collective that I co-founded in 2023. We work out of a workshop near San Diego, and maintain a list of stuff we’ve made. Most of the art I work on is playful and interactive.

Our major project in 2024 is a theremin powered time machine that takes the form of a 30 foot diameter great stellated dodecahedron.

In 2023 I was one of the lead artists on The Temple of Floating Compression, a large scale tensegrity sculpture that was displayed at Burning Man.

Previous Work

Lecturer @ UC San Diego

Between Fall 2018 to March 2024 I was lecturing at UC San Diego as part of the undergraduate data science program in the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute. I designed a class that is super fun: DSC 96: Perspectives in Data Science, which I like describing as “intro-level big picture plus stuff that fell between the cracks in other classes”. You can watch the lectures from Fall 2020 here.

I have also taught a large intro lecture class: DSC 10: Principles of Data Science, designed and taught a seminar on technical presentations and interview skills DSC 90, and Fall 2020 am running the senior capstone project track on recommender systems (DSC180 Fa20/Wi21), and another on search DSC180 Fa23/Wi24.

On official evaluations (UCSD CAPE), 97% of students said they would “recommend the instructor” in my classes.

Senior Data Scientist @ Seismic

Until July 2021 I was a Senior Data Scientist at Seismic, where I built recommender systems.

As Seismic’s first data scientist I did a lot of different stuff - from search learning to rank to deep learning, and from interactive visualizations to NLP. I shiped code to production and did math on paper.

You can read more stuff I wrote about Seismic: what the Seismic data science team does and Seismic’s Guiding Principles for Data Science.

Fun

A while ago, for a one-day hackathon, I made an anti-recommender for Spotify. You can get your own customized bad-for-you playlist - read about it here

Reading

I keep a list of books I really liked, which you might like too. I am also pretty excited about the material on the DSC96 reading list.

Glass House

I live in the neighborhood of Del Dios, on the shores of Lake Hodges, in a house called the Glass House. Most of my weekends are spent in the garden or the shop there.

Data Science

In April, 2020 I was on the UC San Diego Data Science Student Society’s podcast. It was super fun! You can listen to it on Spotify or read summary on Medium.

In June, 2020 I did my final lecture for UC San Diego’s intro data science class, DSC10. For that class I zoomed way out, and tried to answer questions my students had about data science in general. You can watch that lecture here.

Older Stuff

I love learning to do new things. One example: with no real experience, my friends and I built a small cabin on Palomar Mountain.

I was very active with the San Diego Collaborative Arts Project for several years, culminating in being the president of the board of directors. Here is an interview that I did that gives some details.

I used to do some “art” with a group called the Dada Scientists. You can see some examples here and here.

I helped found a small intentional community called “The Normal House” and lived there for six years. It was pretty great!

In addition to my dissertation, I also wrote a bunch of beer reviews.

All my academic publications, conference presentations, and awards are listed here.

I was Harvey Mudd’s 2004 graduation speaker, and recently found the video.

Contact

cjemmott@gmail.com is the best place to reach me.