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