A little bit about me…

Hi! I’m Ali, an electrical engineer turned software developer currently looking to move into the analytics industry. Probability theory and statistics have always been two of my favorite areas in Mathematics and since I enjoy coding too, I was naturally drawn to the world of data. My experience as a full-time MS Business Analytics student here at the University of Cincinnati (UC) has been great so far and I am looking forward to what the future holds.

Outside of work and school my interests include reading, sports and spirituality (for those familiar with the English Premier League, you could say being an Arsenal fan these days is a good test of the strength of human spirit :).

Academic Background

Professional Background

Before coming to UC I worked as a software developer at the telecommunications company Ericsson in their Budapest office (a beautiful city!). My primary task was to develop and maintain their multimedia telephony application server which was written in C++. Most of my time was spent reading code and fixing bugs reported internally or by customers. This really gave me an appreciation of the need for clean code (a good mantra to follow is “Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live”). One of the best things about my job was the variety of work. For example I also performed functional testing in TTCN-3 and did some scripting in Python.

Prior to that, I worked as a Research Assistant at the Advanced Communications Laboratory at my alma mater. In hindsight, the reason I liked the communications field was because of the Math, particularly all the random processes and probabilties flying around. At the end of my research I proposed an innovative energy-efficient way for better utilizing the wiresless spectrum. The software tool I used for this work was MATLAB.

Experience with R

My first introduction to R was at the awesome workshop conducted by Dr. Brad Boehmke during orientation :). I have been using it since and the more I learn R the more I like it (definitely prefer it over SAS). I am looking forward to building my R skills in this course.

Experience with Other Analytic Software