Kiva Loan Recommender Project

Having spent a lot of time in rural East Africa, I’ve seen the benefits of small loans to local entrepreneurs and I’m a big fan of organizations like Kiva. However, choosing a borrower to lend to requires a lot of toggles and button presses on their site. To address this problem, I created a Loan Recommender, www.kivaloans4.me, which recommends loans you might be interested in based on your previous loan history.

Insight Data Science Project

As a fellow at Insight Data Science from January to March of 2015, I consulted with a startup to find what factors best predicted churn. My results from that consultation are written up here.

Non-Data Science Projects (aka Adventures)

While I was in Uganda, I worked extensively with my student Alfred Okello, who lost his sight when he was 20 years old and has been working tirelessly to empower people with disabilities since that time. Together, we received a grant from the Pollination Project to construct tandem bikes to allow visually impaired people to ride.

Since I left Uganda in the summer of 2014, Alfred founded Foundation Hope for People with Disabilities, which has organized a workshop to train people with disabilities in sweater-weaving.  He also received a second grant from the Pollination Project to continue organizing training workshops in the region. We hope to organize workshops to train bee keeping and construction of solar cookers in the near future!