Here's Looking At You, Data Career

Here’s Looking At You, Data Career

- Lango Deen

Brett Matthews is leading the way in data science and data analytics at GE. How did he become a data scientist? What did he study?

Developing industrial machines and devices that touch people’s lives are all in a day’s work for Brett Matthews and his team.

They make technology that power planes, trains, provide power for large and small grids all over the world. The technology they create also allows us them to make our devices more energy efficient and environmentally friendly. “Our business partners usually come to us with some technical problem they’d like to solve,” Brett explains.

Those problems include increasing efficiency or safety, reducing costs or emissions, or detecting or preventing mechanical failures.

“These machines are equipped with many sensors—pressure transducers, vibration and acoustic sensors, arterial blood pressure,” he adds.

How does he do that?

Brett says his job is to use his professional background in digital signal processing, machine learning, and statistical pattern recognition to make machines smarter.

“I develop and apply digital signal processing and machine learning methods, which we call “analytics” on these signals to solve our businesses’ problems,” Brett says.