Bio

Hello ✌️

I’m a full stack data scientist working at Alan. I’m half British 🇬🇧 and half Belgian 🇧🇪. I went to university in Toulouse, France 🇫🇷. My academic 🎓 background is a mix of maths 🧮, economics 💸, and computer science 🖥️. I got hooked into data science in 2014 after watching Moneyball ⚾ and reading The Signal and the Noise 📖. My PhD topic had to do with database query optimisation and machine learning 🤖. I like to build an interest in different topics, although I do have an area of mild expertise, which is online machine learning.

I enjoy programming and I maintain some open-source projects. In particular, I’m one of the founding members of River 🌊, which is a Python 🐍 library for online machine learning. I’m a Kaggle competitions Master 🏆 and take an interest in competitive data science. I also get a kick out of giving talks and writing blog posts.

Besides work, I like spending time reading 📚, watching movies 🍿, walking 🚶, juggling 🤹, looking at – and sometimes making – modern art, and cooking 🍲. My favorite snack is a peanut butter 🥜 and banana 🍌 sandwich – spatially optimised if possible. My go-to beer is Guinness ☘️. I have a brother who’s into physics and operating systems. My mother runs a quirky restaurant in the French countryside called the Ziboinboin – it closed in October 2021 after 12 years of activity 🍂

Do feel free to send me an email at maxhalford25@gmail.com if you want to get in touch.