It's not something that I ever woke up

and said, "I want to be a data scientist when I grow up."

No, it didn't exist.

I didn't know I would be working in data science.

- When I grew up there wasn't

that field called data science.

And I think it's really new.

- Data science didn't exist until 2009, 2011.

Someone like DJ Patil or Andrew Gelman coined the term.

Before that there was statistics

and I didn't want to be any of those.

I wanted to be in business and

then I found data science a heck of a lot more interesting.

- I studied statistics, that's how I started.

I went through many different stages

in my life where I wanted to be a singer

and then a doctor and then I realized

that I was good at math.

So I chose an area that was focusing

quantitative analysis and from then

I do think that I wanted to work with data

not necessarily, data science as it's known today.

- The first time that I had contact with data science,

was when I was in my first year of mechanical engineering.

Strategical consulting firms,

they use data science to make decisions.

So, that was my first contact with data science.

- I had a complicated problem that I needed solved.

The usual techniques that we had at the time

couldn't help with the problem.

- I graduated with a math degree in the worst

possible time right after the economic crisis.

You actually had to be useful to get a job.

So I went and got a degree in statistics

and then I worked enough jobs that were

called data scientist that I suddenly became one.

- My undergraduate degree was in business

and I majored in politics, philosophy and economics.

And then I did a Masters in Business Analytics

at New York University at the Stern School of Business.

When I left my undergrad, the first company I joined,

it turned out that they were analyzing

electronic point of sale data for retail manufacturers.

And what we were doing was data science

but we only really started using that term much later.

In fact, I would say, four or five years ago

is when we started calling it analytics and data science.

- I had several options for my internship here in Canada

and one of the options was to work with data science.

I used to work in product development

but I think that was a good choice.

And then I started my internship with data science.

- I'm a civil engineer by training,

so all engineers work with data.

I would say the conventional use of data science

in my life started with transportation research.

I started building large models trying

to forecast traffic on streets,

trying to determine congestion

and greenhouse gas emissions or tailpipe emissions.

I think that's where my start was

and I started building these models when I was

a graduate student at the University of Toronto.

I started working with very large data sets

looking at household samples of 150,000 households,

half a million trips and that too,

I'm speaking from mid-nineties,

when this was supposed to be a very large data set

but not in today's terms but that's how I started.

I continued working with it and then I moved

to McGill University where I was a professor

of transportation engineering and I built

even bigger data models that involved data and analytics.

So I would say, yes transportation research

brought me to data science.