Data mining mining data

Some professional news: after close to 5 years, today will be my last day at Capital One.

I joined Capital One to learn about an entirely new domain, make a big impact, and work with great people. Over the years, I have developed a knack for scaling Python adoption, and developing and deploying machine learning models to fight credit card fraud. I have thoroughly enjoyed working with my team members, and I have learned a ton from my time here.

Starting next week, I will be joining KoBold Metals, a startup working on mineral exploration of battery materials (such as Cobalt) using big data and superior science of ore deposits. (Hence the pun in the title - "Data mining mining data"). The startup consists of a stellar team of domain experts in mining exploration and data science / machine learning (if I may say so myself), and we have aspirations to make big impacts to climate change by finding new sources of supply-constrained battery materials, thereby accelerating the electrification and decarbonization of transportation.

Climate change is a problem domain that I have cared deeply about since college (from a talk by Yuan Tseh Lee, a Taiwanese Nobel Prize laureate), and have worked on for close to a decade (PhD + two industry jobs) before I joined Capital One. Going back to this problem domain has always been at the back of my mind, but it really kicked into high gears in the latter half of last year, catalyzed in September 2019 by the climate strike. Seeing a ground swell of youth activists, marching in the streets all over the world, really brought tears to my eyes. (Image source: 350.org)

Then, Greta Thunberg, the climate activist from Sweden, gave a speech at UN Climate Action Summit on 2019-09-23. The full speech transcript is available on NPR (Transcript: Greta Thunberg's Speech At The U.N. Climate Action Summit), but the speech ended as follows:

"You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you."

"We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not."

I was literally in tears over this speech in three separate occasions - first time when I read the transcript, second time when I heard her voice over the news, and third time when I saw the video online. I have young children of my own, and they are not that far from Greta's age. I couldn't help but project my kids faces to hers, and imagined that my kids saying those exact words to me, and I felt utterly devastated.

After September, it's not like the climate change issue has dropped out of sight. The world had a series of extreme events that has been fueled in part by climate change - California wildfire, Australian bush fire, East African locust plague... etc. While the science of climate change has been pretty clear over several decades, the effect of climate change is slowly but surely becoming more visible and severe every year.

As I do more research on the climate change and climate tech job opportunities, I came across a Watt It Takes podcast episode that did an interview on Mateo Jaramillo, an long-time executive in energy storage. In the podcast, he said something that resonated with me. This is about 28-min into the podcast:

I really tried to do something other than storage. But, as it turned out, having thought about batteries for as long as I have, it's hard for me to just put it down and not returning to that. The sermon process tells you that, if your brain naturally returns to something, that's probably a good indication that it's something you should spend time on. What do you read on, truly, in your spare time? When your mind wonders, where does it go? These are pretty simple things. For me, it was simply (energy) storage. I cannot not think about it at this point.

When I think about what I read in my spare time, it is oftentimes climate change - mitigation, adaptation, and everything in between. I truly believe that climate change one of the most important problems in the 21st century. After close to five years at Capital One, I am trading my measure of impact from millions of dollars of fraud prevented, to (hopefully) millions of tons of CO2e prevented. Wish me luck!