About

I’m an applied scientist with twelve years industry experience in data science and machine learning deployment: eight years at Shell and four as a customer-facing consultant at MathWorks.

I’ve always enjoyed learning about the world and how things work. This began as an obsession with maps when I was four or five, somewhat out of necessity. My family members were full of talent just the not the spatial kind. I started college as a physics major, but soon discovered geosciences, which had more maps. I focused on the physics of natural systems, and predicting how a landscape will respond to changing conditions, such as sea level. This in an expensive experiment to run in the real world, and a difficult one to scale in the lab, so most of this research relies on computer models and programming.

Even though my domain expertise is in geoscience, I’m committed to continuous learning, and have consulted for clients in the energy, extraction, medical, manufacturing, and semiconductor industries, as well as governmental agencies. I believe that scientific computing, including physics-based and machine learning models, provides a powerful tool to help answer questions and inform decisions.

On a lighter note, I also enjoy the outdoors, so the blog may be a mix of my interests and probably pretty uneven (in all meanings of the word). I hope that others find the content helpful, or entertaining. This blog contains my opinions and doesn’t reflect the opinions of any organizations that I currently work for, or have worked for in the past.

Nick Howes

In case you haven’t come across the sudo (in Sudoscience), it is an override command in unix systems that gives you lots of power. I wish it were that easy in science. Here is the idea…