Nicolas Kruchten

Nicolas Kruchten
is a data visualization specialist
based in Montreal, Canada.

Near-Real-Time Election Results Dashboard

Near-Real-Time Election Results Dashboard

There was a municipal election here in Montreal on November 3, and I had the opportunity to help build an election results dashboard to be projected on the big screen at the election-night party for the political party I support: Projet Montréal. The dashboard is still up with final results. I worked with Nicolas Marchildon, who had put together a similar system for the 2009 election.

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Peeking Into the Black Box, Parts 1-5

Peeking Into the Black Box, Parts 1-5

Between 2011 and 2013 I wrote a popular 5-part series of articles about Datacratic's real-time bidding algorithms, and I've collected them together here for easier reading.

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JS-Montreal: PivotTable.js


Slides from a talk I gave at JS-Montreal about PivotTable.js

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PivotTable.js

PivotTable.js

When I wear my 'data scientist hat', one of the tools I reach for most often is a pivot table. When I wanted to build a web-based tool that included a pivot table, I didn't find any Javascript implementations that made sense or didn't have crazy assumptions built-in, so I rolled my own in CoffeeScript, as a jQuery plugin.

It's now up on GitHub under an MIT license with some nice examples. I hope people find it useful!

If you work with data and you don't know what a pivot table is, I encourage you to learn about them, because they are very useful for quick'n'dirty data analysis. My web-based implementation is a decent learning tool but there are other, much-better implementations, such as in Microsoft Excel (although since Office 2003 they've made some changes that were not for the better) and AquaDataStudio.

I posted this on Hacker News and got some nice comments!

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Kernel Density Estimation and Analysis Tool

Kernel Density Estimation and Analysis Tool

In 2005, I was contracted to create a program to support research into the application of a statistical technique called Kernel Density Estimation to the study of global poverty. The result of this contract (which I worked on with my friend and occasional colleague David de Koning) is the Kernel Density Estimation and Analysis tool which I have just released on Github under an open-source license.

The research (which, to be clear, wasn't done by me) resulted in a very interesting paper called Kernel Density Estimation Based on Grouped Data: The Case of Poverty Assessment.

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Galapagos

Galapagos

In 2003, I wrote a neat and powerful piece of software called Galapagos for my 4th-year undergraduate thesis (download PDF). It was a framework for the development of advanced (i.e. distributed, parallel and/or hybrid) evolutionary algorithms, applicable to a wide range of computational challenging optimization problems. I applied it to a variety of transportation-related problems at the University of Toronto.

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Rubicon Tech Talk: The Algorithms Automating Advertising


I was invited to speak on a panel at a Rubicon Project product launch, and this is the video of the event.

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Volunteer Database for Santropol Roulant

Volunteer Database for Santropol Roulant

There’s an organization in Montreal I think is awesome called Santropol Roulant which, among other things, has a meals-on-wheels operation. They have hundreds of volunteers and wanted to upgrade the system they used to store their volunteer information, so I helped them out, and I’ve open-sourced the results, in case any other non-profit wants a very simple volunteer-list management system.

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My QR-Code Business Card

My QR-Code Business Card

This is the machine-readable back of my new nerdy QR-code business card!

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Real Time Bidding, Characterized


There doesn't appear to be a good Wikipedia entry for RTB for me to link at the moment, when I want to blog about it so I'll draft my own explanation here. (Edit: there is an entry now, but I like my characterization better!) Keep in mind while reading this that I'm looking at RTB as a software engineer with an interest in economics, rather than as an ad industry veteran!

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© Nicolas Kruchten 2010-2023