A Q&A with Richard Kwock, Principal Data Scientist
Cornerstone AI is publishing a series of Q&As with team members to provide more information and context on their role at Cornerstone AI, as well as their professional background. This is the third post of the series. Visit our blog to see previous posts in the series.
Your background is in biostatistics and, later, data science - can you tell me a little about why you chose to go into that field in the first place?
I’ve been interested in math since I was a young kid, and I remember in high school when I took my first AP Statistics class. That’s when I really began to love the topic, the theme of it, and being able to translate numbers into insights is really satisfying for me and a lot of it came intuitively to me. The “bio” part came to me because I spent a lot of time around my family, and we have a family history of high blood pressure. And as a curious kid, I wondered, you know, why? What was the pattern behind it, is it genetics? The combination of the two led me to want to do more and ultimately to study biostatistics. The move to data science happened simply because there wasn’t really a “data science” major back when I went to college. It’s a relatively new concept, which I think got more popular in the early 2010s. If there had been a degree for it at the time, I probably would have studied that! Even though I studied statistics, I found the move to data science very natural since I already enjoyed working in statistics and engineering, as well as generating meaningful insights from data. When you’re studying topics like statistics and math, it can be very theoretical so it’s exciting to have a way to tie it to applied topics, and data science naturally became a great segue into that.
You worked with Medidata for many years before spending some time at Facebook and then coming to Cornerstone AI – was there anything in particular that compelled you to make this change?
My career was always revolving around data, and both those companies I worked with previously, Medidata and Facebook, gave me insights and different perspectives from their respective industries. Medidata was more on the real-world, healthcare data side of things, while Facebook is on the social media side, and those were great opportunities for me to learn more about the different challenges each of those industries face regarding data. Facebook especially gave me insight on what large data really looks like. While Medidata has big data, Facebook was on a totally different scale with billions of data coming in from all over the world at all hours, and we had to be able to handle that data efficiently by creating good pipelines, and in a cost-effective manner.
When Mike reached out about an opportunity at Cornerstone to be one of the first employees there, I couldn't say no because I had worked with Mike before at a startup company that eventually got acquired by Medidata, and having also trusted in his leadership and understanding his vision gave me great confidence that I would be making a good choice. Plus, a lot of people at Cornerstone at that time were people that I worked with at Medidata in the past, so being familiar with people and just trusting my colleagues gave me great confidence and reassurance.
On a day-to-day basis, what does your work look like? What drives you to continue the work each day?
My day-to-day is a little bit different, I guess, from most of the team. I work on the West Coast, but more than half the team is on the East Coast so my mornings usually consist of logging in and catching up on things that my East Coast colleagues have been working on for a couple of hours already. After getting caught up in the morning and following up on any issues, I’ll check to see if I've been tagged on any new topics, and I’ll review my list of to-do items for today, prioritizing new bugs that came up overnight or in the morning and eventually shifting over to working on initiatives that we've scoped out for the quarter.
One thing I really enjoy about working here is getting to do a little bit of everything. I'm not siloed in the way that I might be at bigger companies, so even though my title is data scientist, I do a little bit of software front- and back-end work. I also do some data engineering and some analysis work, which keeps things interesting and refreshing. It also gives me an opportunity to learn a lot, from collaborating with different people and brainstorming a variety of ideas. At Cornerstone, an issue may come up that I've never seen before and no one else on the team has seen before, so I’m often thinking on the fly and being more resourceful and creative to find a way to fix it.
Once a quarter we have team offsite events, which are nice breaks from the remote work, but it's impressive how much we're able to do without being together for 11 months of the year – I think it must be a special team we have at Cornerstone.
What does the future hold for Cornerstone AI?
The future of Cornerstone AI is very exciting! I've been here for three and a half years now, and I still remember in the first couple months, maybe the first year or so, trying just to build something that works – an algorithm, a UI interface – to get it up and running, to get a simple proof of concept completed. But over time, in the last year or so, a lot of my work has been on reinforcing and improving reliability, making it more stable and more foolproof. And that includes things like adding more tests or more automation, to make things more productive for the company. That way, we don't need to do the same script or the same steps over and over again. So the future definitely looks more exciting. We are building tools to help scale and make a lot of things that we've been doing much easier so that we can do more in the same amount of time.
What are you most proud of in your professional and/or personal life?
I'm really proud of where I am in my career, the network that I've created, and the people that I've gotten to know. I’m the first in my family to go to college, and I’m so grateful to my parents for providing me with the opportunity to get me where I am today. When I told them I wanted to pursue statistics, no one in my family really knew what that meant because it wasn’t “doctor” or “lawyer.” It was also difficult for me to explain it in their dialect, but they still supported me. Honestly, even I didn't really know what I could do as a statistician at the time. I thought that if I just got a degree and then a job in data analysis, I’d be happy. But eventually I found my passion for statistical programming, and I’m proud that I was able to make a career with that and build a network of bright people I get to work with every day. I wouldn't have been able to do that without my parents’ unwavering support and mentors in the field I’ve met along the way.
What are you passionate about outside of work?
My favorite pastime is getting walked by my dog, Luna. Another thing that I really love about the culture here is we have a pets channel in our Slack workspace. We share a lot about our pets, and it's a nice way to take breaks from work during the day. It always makes me smile.