Q1 - Professional Background

Q1 - Tell me a little about your professional background and how did your interest in this fascinating area of Big Data arise?? 

Answer to the question:

My name is José Antonio Ribeiro Neto.

I am a Portuguese-Brazilian citizen, residing in Portugal and Brazil.

I graduated from Scientific High School, at Colégio Técnico MKT, and obtained a BA in Mathematics.

I have worked as a computer programmer, systems engineer, network administrator, IT manager, and IT professor and author.

I was the IT Executive at USA WebCT, managing translation, technical, marketing, and software-as-a-service sales teams, and eLearning servers in the Brazil partnership.

I was a partner of Digitalis Portugal in Brazil for educational systems.

I am an Author and Researcher in Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, and Digital Transformation in Portugal.

1 - Initial Interest in Big Data

It began in 2009 when, in Washington DC, I acquired a book called “The Numerati” by Stephen Baker.

The book highlighted people dedicated to a new area of computing, seeking to understand human behavior on the Internet through product purchases, voting, and dating.

They collected large volumes of data from the Internet and cross-referenced them to find patterns, anomalies, and generate insights from the data.

I realized the importance of the book in 2015 when I read an article in the Harvard Business Review containing the words Big Data and Data Scientist.

2 - Interest in Studying Big Data

After reading the article, I became interested in learning Big Data.

I started courses at IBM Big Data University, taking online courses on the Apache Hadoop platform.

I took courses on Coursera, obtaining specializations in Big Data from UCSD, Data Science with R and Data Science for Executives from Johns Hopkins University, and Data Visualization from UC Davis.

I completed other courses on digital transformation, data analysis, Machine Learning, Data Science, Python programming, and Databases for Big Data.

3 - Activities Carried Out in Big Data

• Researcher in Big Data, Data Science, and Machine Learning.

• Coursera Mentor in the Big Data course at UCSD.

• Author of the book “Big Data for Executives and Professionals - Technologies, Applications, and Careers”.

• Author of the online Big Data course for the Graduate Program at Universidade Cândido Mendes RJ (UCAM).

• Author of Big Data courses for the edX online platform.

• Founder of Xnewdata Portugal for Big Data dissemination.

• Big Data career advisor on LinkedIn.