In her nine-to-five role, Dr Jody-Ann Jones is a public affairs professional at the United States Department of State. The multifaceted Jones enjoys a dynamic career as a data scientist, data engineer, and political economist. However, there is a special joy in her other role as an adjunct professor at the University of Commonwealth Caribbean.

A conversation inspired her passion for data science with a data engineer who eventually became her mentor. He shared the opportunities in the domain, which intrigued Dr Jones and motivated her to transition from political economy to data science. There she would build on her original skill sets in statistical analysis and apply them in the context of data science and data engineering.

In describing the data science workflow, Dr Jones shared that data science aims to solve business or organisational problems. “The data science workflow starts with collecting and exploring the data. Data exploration allows one to garner insights from the data collected and represented in a format that will allow the computer to ‘train’ a model. This step is known as pre-processing or data cleaning. After the model has been ‘trained’ to learn the data patterns, one can evaluate its performance, “ said Dr Jones.

Finally, after evaluating the model, Dr Jones suggested deploying the model using a cloud provider, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), or Microsoft Azure. The model undergoes continuous testing and monitoring to provide accurate, real-time insights.

Dr Jones is thrilled to be implementing data science principles to build an end-to-end data pipeline model to uncover patterns and make predictions. She encourages visual aids such as flow charts, diagrams and mind maps to guide the process. She further emphasised that the challenges of data and its use are particularly acute in the Caribbean. Therefore, Dr Jones is passionate about training individuals in the discipline through masterclasses and workshops dubbed “The Data Sensei”. She urges using learning platforms like Kaggle, which houses resources for individuals interested in learning the principles of data science, giving the opportunity to explore, analyse, and share quality data. She also suggested that a typical personal computer (PC) could build data models using cloud servers like Google’s Network Time Protocol (NTP) and Graphics Processing Units (GPUs).

She believes that equal representation of minority tech societies in Jamaica and the Caribbean is vital because it will foster inclusion. “This is necessary to create a more responsible ecosystem of artificial intelligence tools that will ultimately benefit society,” Dr Jones noted. As an adjunct professor at the University of Commonwealth Caribbean, where she teaches python for data analysis, Dr Jones is proud to experience the transformational learning development of her students. For her, the opportunity to partner with the US Embassy to organise a CodeFest hackathon last year focused on addressing social issues was a humbling experience. The event gave high school students, in particular, the opportunity to build apps using machine learning. “Some of the solutions included a free open source chatbot dubbed “Trixie”, trained to provide well-researched and informed answers about the reproductive system,” Dr Jones explained. She was particularly impressed with a solution created to predict changes in sea levels based on carbon dioxide emissions.

Dr Jones wants to continue cultivating the data ecosystem so that Jamaica can become more connected and make better decisions with real-time data.