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Michael Karanja

Data Scientist

Cropnuts

Biography

Michael Karanja is a Data Scientist at Crop Nutrition Laboratory Services. He works on applying the latest machine learning techniques to soil nutrient prediction models built from a wide variety of data sources. He enjoys solving challenging problems using data. His research interests include quantum machine learning, blockchains and reinforcement learning.

Interests

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Quantum Computing
  • Decentralized Applications

Education

  • BSc in Microprocessor Technology, 2018

    University of Nairobi

Skills

Python

100%

Data Science

100%

NLP

80%

Experience

 
 
 
 
 

Trainee Consultant

The Consulting Academy of Nairobi

Aug 2018 – Aug 2019 Nairobi, Kenya
Responsibilities include:

  • Improved internal operations by setting up the academy’s IT infrastructure
  • Set up of the data science strategy to train tens of student consultants
  • Increased traffic to the website by collaborating with the marketing team to redesign the academy’s website
 
 
 
 
 

Data Scientist

Cropnuts

Nov 2017 – Present Nairobi, Kenya
Responsibilities include:

  • Improved yields for thousands of smallholder farmers by deploying machine learning models as an affordable alternative to expensive lab soil testing
  • Developed APIs to interface models with web apps and dashboards to communicate various data analyses and model results
  • Ensured continual model improvement by developing an outlier detection system to select samples for lab analysis to be used for model retraining
  • Facilitated data transparency and full usage of various data sources by implementing a data warehouse for previously siloed data
  • Improved operational efficiencies by 50% by automating repetitive processes
 
 
 
 
 

Software Engineer Intern

Coretec Systems and Solutions

Aug 2017 – Oct 2017 Nairobi Kenya
Responsibilities include:

  • Designed, implemented and supported the data warehouse.
  • Information System software development in C#
  • Developed Android applications for clients
 
 
 
 
 

Data Science Intern

Power Digital Systems

Mar 2015 – Dec 2015 Nairobi Kenya
Responsibilities include:

  • Developed web scraping tool for data collection
  • Developed custom data visualization dashboards for clients

Accomplishments

Data Lit

The School of AI Feb 2019 – Apr 2019
Completed coursework and projects focused on:

  • Data Visualization
  • Supervised and Unsupervised Learning
  • Deep Reinforcement Learning
  • Distributed Computing

Decentralized Applications

The School of AI Mar 2018 – Jul 2018
Completed coursework and projects focused on:

  • Blockchain Essentials
  • Smart contracts
  • Secure and decentralized applications with incentives

Deep Learning Specialization

Coursera Aug 2017 – Feb 2018
Courses taken in the specialization:

  • Neural Networks and Deep Learning
  • Improving Deep Neural Networks
  • Structuring Machine Learning Projects
  • Convolutional Neural Networks
  • Sequence Models
See certificate

Projects

*
All Deep Learning

Piano Transcription

Using deep learning to generate chord tutorials of youtube songs

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