Kaggle Grandmaster Profile: Martin Henze (Heads or Tails)

throughout my life I was driven by curiosity. The stars and galaxies piqued my interest from an early age and I wanted to work towards understanding their mysteries. In astronomy we've always been dealing with a lot of data some people might say that we were the first to really use big data in our research: there's a lot of sky and there's a lot of universe there's a lot of data to work with and a lot of discoveries to be made. In the Natural Sciences you learn a lot about your specific subject matter but you also learn a lot about how to learn and how to structure a project. And this is the thing I think helped me a lot in Kaggle. I wanted to use Kaggle to learn more about the modern techniques what people were doing to analyze data and to become a better scientist, become a better astronomer. Kaggle had always looked a little bit intimidating from the outside. There were all these smart people there were always these crazy challenges that people were doing with a lot of ideas with very kind of big models and structures and I was an outsider-- I had never done much machine learning. Taking the step into a Kaggle took a little bit of an effort but I found that once I had joined everybody was incredibly welcoming. I started to contribute-- I started to write kernels. There were new ideas there were things I could learn and there were people that were very supportive of every question I asked. When I joined Kaggle my first idea was to learn more tools to get more experience to solve my astronomical problems. The richness of the challenges that Kaggle provided opened my eyes to the whole wide spectrum of problems that were out there in the real world and I became more and more interested in how to use my skills and the skills that I learned on Kaggle to solve real-world problems I decided that maybe it was time for a change... After ten years of looking at the Stars maybe it was time for me to focus my gaze on the real world, and on the people who live in the real world. The Kaggle Grandmaster rank is something that I feel very humbled and very honored about it was not something that I was actively working towards rather I found that I was jumping from competition to competition and my exploration kernels were doing relatively well so I was getting closer to this Grandmaster rank with every competition and it was only when I was one or two competitions away that I thought to myself I can do this. I can become the first Kernels Grandmaster on Kaggle. Being a Kaggle Grandmaster means that people come to you for advice more often than they did before. I like the idea of being an ambassador for Kaggle in that sense. Kaggle had obviously a great impact on my career because I made the transition from being an astronomer in academia to working as a data scientist in industry and tackling a whole set of different problems with a similar mindset I had in academia but provided also with the tools that I learned at Kaggle. There's so much more to learn so much more to discover and I'm really looking forward to this journey. I know that Kaggle will be there to support me and to allow me to stay up-to-date with cutting-edge data science, to learn more tools and learn from all the great members in the community. I'm Martin much better known as 'Heads or Tails' and I'm a Kaggler.

Channel: Kaggle

Views: 10,776

Rating: 4.9727893 out of 5

Keywords: Kaggle, Kaggel, live-coding, live, learn, api, cli, python, data, data science, interview, questions, transfer learning, coding, networks, programming, technology, tech, machine learning, AI, artificial intelligence, coders, programmers, help, tutorial, projects, 101, rstats, stats, statistics, what is kaggle, how to, github, developer, kernels, datasets, data visualization, deep learning, sql, challenge, competition, whitehat, code, lesson, CS, grandmaster, kaggle grandmaster, grand master

Id: _fFenBDzLyM

Length: 3min 50sec (230 seconds)

Published: Thu May 07 2020