Nicolas.Kruchten.com

For the latest in my series of maps of the results of the 2013 Montreal municipal election, I’ve produced a pair of graduated symbol maps, representing the results as a pie charts overlaid on a base map.

I had the pleasure of visiting with many members of my wife’s family this summer, some of whom are genealogy enthusiasts.

I learned to program in the late nineties through a game called RoboWar.

Earlier this year, I collaborated with a reporter from the Montreal Gazette to analyze a dataset containing information about 1.4 million service requests received by the City of Montreal from its citizens.

I recently did the first ever public demo of the product I'm working on at Datacratic: the Machine Learning Database.

I’ve always been curious to see what kinds of patterns would be visible if one tried to visualize the distribution of house numbers (the number in a street address) across a city like Montreal.

I recently organized and MC’ed the fifth Visualization Montreal meetup, and I think it was a great success!

The visualization I presented at VisMtl 5 was entitled “Canadian Members of Parliament in 2012 by Province, Party, Age & Gender” and is shown above.

A recent article on AdExchanger asks “In the supposedly super-efficient world of RTB, why would publishers continue to waterfall their demand sources?”.

I gave a talk at in Barcelona at the PAPIs.io 2014 Predictive APIs conference last November.

For part of my presentation at Montreal Python, I made an interactive map of the various sub-sections of the website Reddit (called subreddits).

I gave a talk at Montreal Python on Data Science and Unsupervised Machine Learning with scikit-learn.

Last week, Bloomberg came out with an article on RTB arbitrage, which included a couple of sentences that made it sound a lot like it was possible to front-run an RTB auction: “Some buy from an exchange and sell it right back to that very same exchange” a…

I gave a talk at Visualization Montréal entitled Maps, Tools, Stories.

Data visualization, by definition, involves making a two- or three-dimensional picture of data, so when the data being visualized inherently has many more dimensions than two or three, a big component of data visualization is dimensionality reduction.

Video and slides from my talk at the kickoff of Big Data Week Montreal 2014.

If you’ve ever been browsing the web and been annoyed by those One Weird Trick ads, or by ads for that product you looked at online last month and then bought offline, you’ve probably given a thought to blocking ads altogether.

Recently I made some maps of the 2013 Montreal municipal elections, showing voting results down to the ballot-box level, using data from the Montreal Open Data Portal.

In the Montreal mayoral election last November, nearly 85% of the vote went to one of the top three candidates.

The Montreal municipal elections were just over two months ago but I played with the election results dataset over the holidays anyways as an excuse to play with a type of data I don’t normally have much to do with: geographical data.

I was inspired by some cool "dot map" visualization projects around the internet (North American Census Dotmap, Toronto Visible Minorities Dot Map) to create a similar visualization of the results for the recent Montreal municipal election.

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.

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.

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

When I wear my 'data scientist hat', one of the tools I reach for most often is a pivot table.

In 2003, I wrote a neat and powerful piece of software called Galapagos for my 4th-year undergraduate thesis (download PDF).

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.

There’s an organization in Montreal I think is awesome called Santropol Roulant which, among other things, has a meals-on-wheels operation.

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

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.

One of the things we do at Datacratic is to use machine learning algorithms to optimize real-time bidding (RTB) policies for online display advertising.

At Datacratic, working with data often means data visualization (or dataviz): making pretty pictures with data.

This is a screenshot of what I pull up on my iPhone every morning now after its alarm clock wakes me up.

At Datacratic we tend to worship, like Etsy (and AppNexus!)

So I finally got around to working on my Silvia Mod Plan, getting all the way to Step 5!

So in October I finally bought the Rancilio Silvia I'd been coveting (after coveting a La Pavoni manual espresso machine first!)

On Saturday I attended hackMTL, a one-day hackfest/competition.

After building my little autonomous wanderer robot, I saw this iPad-controlled blimp and went ahead and added iPad control to my robot too.

Back in April I got an Arduino Duemilanove and a variety of sensors and actuators, which promptly caused me to go order a rover base from RobotShop.ca, and a few days later, I had put this little guy together!

I did a 'short bit' presentation at Bitnorth 2009 about my feelings on myEWB and its history.

I always have trouble remembering what famous people were alive when, and more importantly, who was alive during, before or after who’s life.

From October 2005 to May 2010, myEWB.ca was Engineers Without Borders Canada's official online community system.

In the fall of 2003, my classmates and I were given an assignment in our Bridge Design course, to model the Salginatobel Bridge as a truss and analyse it using the Stiffness Method in Excel (ignoring buckling effects).

The Problem You're part of a small-to-medium group of people who trust each other and have some reason to spend time and money together (e.g. you have a few housemates or you work in a friendly office environment).