Magic Data

Hi, I’m Stijn.  I’m one of the few business analysts out there with data science skills such as machine learning and data mining.  I make bridges between data and business outcomes.

My strength over most data analysts is that I speak both ‘tech’ and ‘business’.  Besides being able to code and work with data structures, I’ve personally worked in sales and business positions for 8 years.  I’ve worked for a startup, a mid-sized family business and a corporation.  Yes, that’s the full spectrum.

Unfortunately, you can’t really learn this stuff at school.  You either graduate with a technical degree or one in business.  I personally haven’t heard of any course that teaches both at once.  Have you?  It’s quite unfortunate though, cause many of the more interesting business challenges require one to understand both sides.

I took the hard way to learn this myself, which also happens to be the only way.  After graduating in computer science, I spent almost a decade sharpening my business skills.  Then I finally surrendered to my inner geek and got back into coding.  I embraced my life long passion for data and that got me to the point where I am now.

Through my direct experience in the business world I’m comfortable working in both technical and business roles.  In fact, I *LOVE* projects requiring both of these so that I can approach the challenge from both perspectives.

When I analyze business data, I don’t go for fancy graphs and stats.  When you work with me, you get actual ideas and recommendations to drive your business forward.

I work freelance and remotely.  Whether you’re in the EU, the US or Tasmania, you can work with me.

I’m interested in any data challenge with a business focus such as:

• Custom lead classification and segmentation
• Product recommendation systems
• Error and anomaly detection
• Data mining

I do business consultancy as well, but always with a technical touch to it.  Usually it’s about creating a bridge between a technical concept and the business idea behind it.  That can go in both directions: from business concept to a technical approach and data infrastructure; or from an existing technical asset towards creating new business and monetizing ideas.

• Achieved “top solver” ranking on Crowdanalytix, a platform using crowd-sourcing to enable data science solutions for the retail industry.  The rank has been awarded to just 9 out of 20000 data scientists on the platform.
• 1st place out of 362 participants in a competition organized by Honeywell to predict fuel usage of airplanes. Besides having created the best predictive model, I provided a report with actionable insights to reduce fuel consumption. The potential is absolutely huge. A 0.1% drop in fuel consumption can save millions per year.
• 1st place out of 173 participants in a competition to automatically extract Manufacture Part Numbers from text for online retailers.
• 3rd place out of 147 participants in analyzing IoT registration data and recommending ways to improve sales and marketing for HEOS by Denon/Marantz wireless home audio solutions.
• 3rd place out of 316 participants in a data visualization (dashboard) competition to visually understand fuel consumption of air planes.
• Automatic new leads generation tool for online business developers. This tool allows certain business developers to save about 7 hours of work per day. Basically if you have several of those business developers, you only need to keep one of them.