Matthew Brett - the web pages

These are my personal web pages, but, as befits my age, they are mostly about work.

I am various things, but among those things, I am an associate professor in data science at the London Interdisciplinary School.

By “data science”, I don’t mean the traditional formulation of “big data and machine learning”, but the wider conception of data science as a new model of data analysis in the age of ubiquitous computing. This is not data science as an advanced topic in computer science, but data science as the foundation of data analysis. It replaces standard teaching of introductory statistics, but has a stronger emphasis on data exploration and computing. We want to teach the next generation of researchers to be more flexible, accurate and effective in analyzing the kinds of data generated by modern research.

This is the current textbook for my courses on data science. It took much inspiration, and some pages, from the Berkeley course on Foundations of Data Science.

Before starting at the London Interdisciplinary School, I taught data science at Birmingham University, and before that, I was working at the Berkeley Brain Imaging Center (BIC).

My own research interests are:

• the functional imaging of movement.

• functional imaging methodology.

I have also written – and continue to write – open source software. Until 2005, my main language was Matlab, but since then I have used Python almost exclusively. See Matlab vs Python for teaching for a discussion of why I made this change, and recommend it strongly to y’all. Since 2005 I have been working on Python software for analyzing functional and diffusion imaging data; see the nipy community project. I personally work a lot on nibabel as well as the nipy package and dipy.

Nearly all the code I work on is at matthew-brett github.

Like many other people, I have been using the Jupyter notebook and other tools to explore ways of explaining technical ideas using code and formulae. See my tutorials for a list of my tutorials on various topics including mathematics, statistics, brain imaging and computing. I have more tutorials about coding at my Pydagogue page. The coding tutorial I like the most is an introduction to concepts of the Git version control system, called curious git.

I worry about the current state of brain imaging research, and I wrote a manifesto about teaching as a means to higher quality in science.

I confess that I sometimes blog at http://asterisk.dynevor.org.

You will find a list of my publications here. Please let me know if I’ve missed something off or you need a copy of one of my papers.

No doubt you want to know what I look like and how to find me - good news - see About me.

Maybe you want to know how I built these pages - About this site.