Today's guest is Alexander O’Connor, Lead Data Scientist at Autodesk in San Francisco. Autodesk makes software for people who make things. If you’ve ever driven a high-performance car, admired a towering skyscraper, used a smartphone or watched a great film, chances are you’ve experienced what millions of Autodesk customers are doing with their software. Autodesk gives you the power to make anything.

Alex leads a team whose purpose is to help the customer to get the answer they need by allowing them to state their problem in their own words. The team is dedicated to enhancing support. They work in an agile fashion to deliver projects that leverage a variety of Machine Learning tools and have access to a fantastic store of data in many forms, all of which can be mined for insight, automation and prediction.

In the episode, Alex will tell you about:

Applying Machine Learning & Data Science at Autodesk,

What he loves most about his job,

Making the transition from academia to industry,

The potential of Personalisation, NLP and Deep Learning,

Exciting projects he is working on at Autodesk,

How to build an effective data science team,

and Key tips for a successful Data Science career