Getting started in data science
Alex Antic: I’d like to get an idea of your career trajectory, especially with the interesting role you had early on as a police inspector. Did you think of taking another career based on your early studies? What made you shift your focus to AI and data more broadly?
Jason Tamara Widjaja: I think I’m very fortunate to have arrived at data science and AI because, for the earlier part of my career, I was struggling to find an area that intersected with my interests.
My first degree was in computer science, but I always knew I didn’t want to be a purely technical “backend” person. I was trying to find something that brought different parts of the discipline together but, unfortunately, here in Singapore where I did my first degree, they labeled you a little bit – you were either a computing person, a business person, or an arts person. Things have improved since then but this was maybe 20 or so years ago,...