About

Who am I?

My name is Austin Wilkins. I love getting very serious about unimportant things, and taking a depth-first approach to problems. I've spent the last few years working with researchers and advocacy groups on various data projects.

Experience

Academically, I hold a bachelors degree in Political Science. Along the way I met a few professors who needed help getting access to and processing data for their research and managed to pick up a few publications.

After university I worked with ProQuest, an academic data company, as an in-house Text and Data Mining consultant. This involved supporting researchers to text mine large batches of licensed news documents, giving workshops on text mining techniques, and working with university libraries across the world to help them better support their researchers (all from the comfort of my home office).

The next few years were spent working with the Jail Data Initiative, a project born of New York University's Public Safety Lab, managing their data pipeline and infrastructure.