Thoughtful Machine Learning

Matthew Kirk has always been “the math guy” to those that know him best. He started his career as a quantitative financial analyst with Parametric Portfolio. While there, he studied momentum and reversal effects in Emerging Markets and optimized their 30 billion dollarportfolio. He left the finance industry to build the current version of Wetpaint.com, an entertainment website that is visited by over 10 million unique visitors each month. One of hisaccomplishments while there was the initial prototype of their patent pending Social Publishing Platform, which optimizes their publication strategy for Facebook posting. He left Wetpaint to work with a small startup in Kansas City called SocialVolt as their Chief Scientist. While there, he worked on sentiment analysis tools and spam filtering of social media data. In 2012 he started Modulus 7, which is a data science and startup consulting firm. His clients have included Ritani, The Clymb, Siren, Sqoop, and many others. Matthew holds a B.S. in Economics and a B.S. in Applied and Computational Mathematical Sciences with a concentration in Quantitative Economics from the University of Washington. He is also studying for his M.S. in Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He has spoken around the world about using machine learning and data science with Ruby. When he’s not working, he enjoys listening to his 2000+ vinyl record collection on his Thorens TD160 Mk2 turntable.