David Gamba

PhD Student · UMich · gamba-remove-@umich.edu

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Hi I’m David! I’m a PhD student in Information Science at the University of Michigan. Previously, I worked for a few years in the field of Analytics and Data Science. I worked in positions from consulting to data engineering to model developing, in applications mainly in forecasting and recommendation systems. I came back to academia to develop research on my interest in data science for social good and for understanding societies and groups.

I’m fairly active in participating in projects that use data for social good and I’m always interested in discussing and develop ideas on that space.

Another area that I like to experiment a lot but perhaps is in cooking and in coffee making. Also thrilled to chat about this.

Nice to meet you!

Socialization

Publications

Coming soon…

Supporting chatbot for young women support with recommendation system

Volunteered in Data Science project with the NGO Omdena to build recommendation systems based on NLP models to identify common psychological violence information resquest and reply with the appropiate resources.

Read more..

Detecting potential malaria mosquito sites with satellite imagery

Volunteered in Data Science project with the NGO Omdena to use satellite imagery to extract possible malaria sites to aid the mission of the startup ZzappMalaria.

Read more..

Education

Universidad de los Andes

Bachelor of Science
Physics

2010 - 2016

Universidad de los Andes

Bachelor of Engineering
Systems and Computing

Cum Laude

2010 - 2015

Experience

Senior Data Scientist

MercadoLibre

Lead and mentor technical research on methods to improve granular forecasting across millions of items in Mercado Libre’s inventory. Led the research and implementation of metrics for the development of forecasting methods aligned with business objectives

Sep 2020 - August 2022

Data Engineer

Predictvia

Developed data infrastructure and pipeline architectures to process text analytics and computer vision applications in the company. Optimized machine learning models to run at scale and integrated these models in the data pipelines

March 2014 - February 2016

Data Scientist - Algorithms

Merlin

Develop machine learning ranking models used in the core of the business improving 10% over previous performance metrics. Facilitate data-related outreach activities to promote data science and Merlin, including giving talks at seminars, lecturing workshops of applied machine learning and organizing outreach events.

August 2019 - March 2020

Data Analyst - Sales Ops

Merlin

Developed models for sizing of the sales agent workforce in order to reach monthly sales and margin goals. Developed a forecasting system for sales KPIs with models under 20% error, together with reports and notifications. Analyzed the patterns of returning customers and implemented a model to predict the time of return for appropriate timing of calling frequencies to clients from the contact center.

March 2019 - August 2020

Data Science Consultant

Big Data Innovation Hub

Engaged with customers to understand their business objectives, analyze their data and translate said objectives to Data Science requirements and projects. Also developed these data products, for EDA visualization and dashboards with Dplyr, Pandas, ggplot, Altair and PowerBI and for machine learning models using R, Caret, mlr, Python, Scikit-learn, Pytorch, keras and SparkMLib. The cases included churn prediction, chatbots, inventory management, demand forecasting and client characterization.

March 2017 - March 2019

Research Intern

University of Colorado, Boulder

Under supervision of Ana M. Rey, we studied the theory of entanglement measures such as Spin Squeezing, Quantum Fisher Information and Entanglement entropy in the all to all Ising Model, with calculations and simulations performed in Wolfram Mathematica. We conducted this research with the objective of finding new benchmarks for the current experiments with ultracold atoms at NIST, which are used in the building process of quantum computers.

Jun 2016 - August 2016

Graduate Teaching Assistant

Universidad de los Andes

Developed new course material for courses in computer infrastructure, in particular labs, for topics in low level software concurrency, performance and security. In addition, I lectured the lab sections and assisted students with all doubts regarding the course, and guided their project developments.

Jan 2016 - Jun 2016
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