Kellie Ottoboni

Kellie Ottoboni

Data Scientist - Statistics PhD

Random Problems with R

less than 1 minute read

Published:

I gave a lightning talk at the SF R Ladies meet-up about a problem with R’s sampling algorithm. Check out my slides here!

As part of my dissertation, I dug into the pseudo-random number generators and sampling algorithms used by common statistical packages. Along the way, I found an issue with the way R generates pseudo-random integers using the sample() function. I’ll give an example where we’d like to generate integers uniformly on an interval, but sample produces 2x as many odd numbers as even ones. Our short paper on the problem is on arXiv.

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Demanding Leisure in the Time of COVID

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November 2020 was the lowest time for me during the COVID-19 pandemic. My boyfriend left to spend a month with his faimly across the country, while I stayed home in our apartment. Aside from a few days visiting my sister, I spent the month without human contact.

Practicing Essentialism in the Tech Industry

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Hello readers! It’s been a long time since I posted on this blog. Years, actually. During that time, I finished my PhD at UC Berkeley and started working at Pinterest. It was an adjustment, to say the least. I traded my 10 minute walk to campus for an hourlong bus ride across the Bay Bridge; freedom to work from anywhere with Wifi for butt-in-chair from nine to five; the pursuit of knowledge for the pursuit of measurable business impact.

How I Traveled the World in Grad School

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If you follow me on social media, you might’ve seen that I’ve been traveling a ton this past year, and most of it has been related to my grad school work. In my five years as a PhD student, I’ve visited five states and five countries for conferences and other events. As someone who didn’t travel much as a kid, I’ve been loving these opportunities!

Internet voting, security, and transparency at E-VOTE-ID

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Last week, I attended my first voting conference: E-VOTE-ID. I’ve presented at statistics conferences before but never an interdisciplinary one like E-VOTE-ID. It brought together people working on electronic voting issues from a whole range of disciplines: legal studies, sociology, cryptography and security, voting systems developers, former election officials, and one statistician. This guy!