(popping) (upbeat music) I'm Norman White, I'm a Clinical Faculty Member in the IOMS Department, Information, Operations and Management Science Department here at Stern. I've been here for a long time (laughs), since I got out of college, pretty much. I'm sort of a techy, geeky kind of person. I really like to play with technology in my spare time. I'm currently Faculty Director of the Stern Center for Research Computing, in which we have a private cloud that runs lots of different kinds of systems. Many of our faculty or PhD students who need specialized hardware and software will come to us, we'll spin up a machine for them, configure it, I'll help them and advise on them. A lot of the data scientists, or virtually all the data scientists at Stern use our facilities. And their PhD students use them a lot. (music) I have an undergraduate degree in Applied Physics and while I was an undergrad I took a number of economics courses, so I ended up deciding to go to business school, but I had, this was in the early days of computers (laughs) and I had gotten interested in computers. I came to Stern, which was then NYU Business School downtown and they had a little computer center, and I decided that I was gonna learn two things while I was there. One, I was gonna learn how to program. I had taken one programming course in college. And I was gonna learn how to touch type. I never did learn how to touch type (laughs). Or maybe I did but I've forgotten now, and back to two finger pecking. But I became a self taught programmer, and then I took a number of courses at IBM because I eventually came the director of the computer center, while I was getting my PhD in Economics and Statistics at Stern. In 1973, the school formed a department called Computer Applications and Information Systems and I was one of the first faculty members in the department and I've been here ever since (laughs). (music) My typical Monday is, I usually get in around 11 o'clock and I do my email at home first, but I come in and I have two classes on Monday. I have a class on design and development of web based systems at six o'clock. Two o'clock, I have a dealing with data class. The class is based on Python notebooks, so we start with the basics of Unix and Linux, just to get the students used to that. We move onto some Python, some regular expressions, a lot of relational databases, some Python Pandas, which is sort of like R for Python, lets you do mathematical and statistical calculations in Python. And then I end up with big data, for which, as you probably know, I'm an evangelist. The students I have, weekly homeworks. I put them in teams and they have to do a big project at the end of the term, and they do some really cool things. (music) Yes, in fact, the whole course is taught using Jupyter notebooks. Every student has their own virtual machine on Amazon Web Services, so we pre configure all the machines and they get a standard image that has all of the materials for the course either loaded on it or in a Jupyter notebook, there are the commands to download it or update the server with the right software. So everybody is in the same environment, it doesn't matter what kind of, whether they have a Mac or a Windows machine or how old it is, everybody can do everything in the class. (upbeat music)
