#135 Where Data Science meets Sports Analytics with Golfer Turned Engineer Ken Jee
The freeCodeCamp Podcast
Quincy Larson
5.0 • 549 Ratings
🗓️ 2 August 2024
⏱️ 126 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Ken Jee. Ken's a Data Scientist. He's also a Sports Analytics practitioner who works with US Team Golf and USA Basketball.
Ken hosts the excellent Ken's Nearest Neighbors podcast and the Exponential Athelete podcast.
We talk about:
- How an injury pushed Ken out of pro sports and into data science
- How Ken explains his statistical insights to coaches and players to help them improve their performance
- Why Ken doesn't think building projects is all that useful anymore. "Data Scientists should instead build products."
- How Ken starts and ends each day with meditation, and writes down all the ideas that pop into his head after each session.
- Ken's observation that: "Who is the best suited to excel in a world where AI tools are prominent? Probably the people who are building them. People in the data science domain, people who are coding – they're the most prepared to use these tools for other things."
Can you guess what song I'm playing on my bass during the intro? It's from a 2006 dance song, and it was originally played on a synth.
Also, I want to thank the 10,109 kind people who support our charity each month, and who make this podcast possible. You can join them and support our mission at: https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate
Links we talk about during our conversation:
Ken's Nearest Neighbors Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpEJMMRoTIHJ8vG8q_EwqCg
The Exponential Athelete Podcast, also hosted by Ken: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAkSd12rP282takuFJKsAsYlHdpdEDhuE
The Founders podcast, which both Ken and Quincy listen to. James Dyson episode: https://www.founderspodcast.com/episodes/88384801/senra-james-dyson-against-the-odds-an-autobiography
Anna Wintour episode: https://www.founderspodcast.com/episodes/58741411/senra-326-anna-wintour
San Antonio caves that Quincy visited: https://naturalbridgecaverns.com/
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | And part of getting good at sports, especially reactive sports, is training our own internal algorithm |
| 0:05.5 | to be able to predict outcomes as effectively as possible. Same thing with tennis, same thing with any of |
| 0:10.0 | these sports where you're hitting a ball. You're actually creating an algorithm yourself to predict what |
| 0:15.2 | is coming and how to locate or go to it. And that is what makes the best athletes in those domains. |
| 0:21.2 | If they can accurately predict where something's going to be and to execute after they've |
| 0:26.4 | gotten to the right positioning, which to me is this really cool intersection of like the same |
| 0:31.2 | process that goes into a machine learning model. |
| 0:33.4 | Yeah. |
| 0:33.7 | But we're training ourselves. |
| 0:34.9 | And like the way we train ourselves can be very different. |
| 0:36.8 | If we use gradient descent, if we use gradient to sign. |
| 0:38.1 | If we use some of these different things, like... Welcome back to the Free Code Camp podcast. |
| 1:16.1 | I'm Quincy Larson, teacher and founder of FreecodeCamp.org. |
| 1:19.4 | Each week we're bringing you insight from developers, founders, and ambitious people getting into tech. |
| 1:24.1 | This week, we're joined by Ken G. |
| 1:30.4 | He's a data scientist, sports analytics practitioner who works with USA, U.S. team golf and USA basketball. And he's also the host of the |
| 1:37.9 | excellent Ken's nearest neighbors podcast and the exponential athlete podcast. |
| 1:44.9 | Ken, |
| 1:45.1 | welcome to the show. |
| 1:46.7 | Thank you. |
| 1:47.6 | Quincy, |
| 1:48.2 | always grateful to be able to have conversations with you and come on your show |
... |
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