Senior Data Scientist to Develop Next Generation Learning & Assessment Technologies

Project Description

Preference is for applicants to be able to work on site in greater Boston area.

Metacog measures how learners tackle challenges within assessments, simulations, casual and serious games, and performance tasks. This is a lot more data than simply scores or grades.

We are looking for a Rockstar Data Scientist who can work with our educational data mining experts and development team to help them build engines that surface, analyze, score, and visualize learning pathways and patterns.

If you want to power the next generation of adaptive learning and continuous assessment solutions and provide learners with real-time, dynamic and interactive prescriptive guidance, talk to us. You will be instrumental in developing the next generation learning and assessment technologies that will be key in shaping the future of the U.S. Education System.

Responsibilities:

• Explore and advise on new data science techniques to take this industry to a new level.

• Develop, design and implement the company's Big Data system using AWS Cloud services.

• Design and implement data models developed by our learning scientists for deeper understanding around learning in interactive digital spaces, including educational games, simulations, and technology enhanced assessment items.

• Build and interpret probabilistic models of complex, highly-dimensional datasets from time series data.

• Write semantic classification algorithms using a combination of Python, Scala, Scalding, R, Julia etc.

• Organize, analyze, retrieve, classify, and report on student json clickstream and log data streams.

• Design and execute software at production scale by utilizing advanced feature generation, machine learning and data mining techniques to estimate learning efficacy and clusters of learning styles.

• Develop and/or assist in the creation of advanced Data visualizations to transform information into insights (like D3.js) These visualizations will be utilized for learning domain experts to identify how to tackle student misconceptions, as well as to discover opportunities to optimize emergent learning pathways.

• Apply advanced data and parallel programming frameworks (Spark or Map/Reduce) to effect real-world solutions. We seek a skilled practitioner who can also advance the state of the art.

• Present to all levels of the organization including peers, senior management, and external customers.

Desired Skills & Experience

• Experience with supervised and unsupervised machine learning and predictive techniques such as: Bayesian Classification, PCA, Ensembling, Decision Trees, Random Forests, Support Vector Machines, Neural Networks, Clustering and Deep Machine Learning, etc.

• 4+ years experience in analytical and algorithmic design for systems.

• Implementation of Big Data systems such as Hadoop, HBase, Spark, Shark, Storm, Cassandra, Kafka, Apache Drill, MemcacheD, etc. Experience using them in the cloud is a plus.

• Experience with visualization tools and creative data visualization (e.g. heat mapping, radial, and vector-based visualizations) especially for use by non-specialists and educators is a plus.

• Functional data-aware languages (Python, Mathematica or F#) are a strong plus.

• AWS, Big Data, Spark, Scala, Deep Machine Learning.

• 5+ years of application in a broad range of statistical concepts, including predictive and applied statistical modeling. Should have programming experience in Python, R, MPlus, Stata, Matlab, SPSS or other statistical packages.

• Masters (Math, Statistics, CS or physics preferred), Ph.D. or other pertinent industry experience preferred.

• Participation in Kaggle, KDD Cup (or other) competitions a plus.

Metacog seeks a Data Scientist/AWS Developer to reinvent the notion of what education is and extend the capabilities of our Big Data Learning Analytics team by integrating cutting edge data science into education products.

The education industry hasn’t changed much since the industrial era in the United States and the industry no longer creates the types of learners that 21st century employers need to hire. Nor does it produce the types of earning experiences that are engaging to this new generation of digital natives. Our $2.4 Trillion Skills Gap is the equivalent of a deep recession annually that holds back opportunity and potential for millions of learners and workers who are challenged with massive student debt and diminished prospects. These inefficiencies create serious challenges for U.S. competitiveness in a rapidly moving and increasingly automated global economy that has valued education highly as a “feeder system” for their economic engines and invested accordingly.

Metacog aims to fundamentally transform the U.S. Learning and Education industries by creating and making available a powerful game-changing big data analytics platform based on highly granular learner process data. This transformative technology has been built and made available via a series of APIs that companies building learning products can use to:

• Ingest and store massive streams of data exhaust as learners solve digital learning challenges.

• Automatically prove (and improve) the learning products being sold into the education system and determine which ones actually contribute towards effective learning to help improve accountability and optimize efficacy.

• Unlock next generation technologies like AR/VR that enable experiential, authentic and competency based learning technologies that have been shown to double teaching and learning effectiveness.

• Reduce (or eliminate) the reliance on excessive testing to assess learner progress, and instead offer “Invisible Integrated Assessment” into curriculum that can score and teach simultaneously at the point of learning in real-time.