Welcome to the OpenJaw Data Science Blog!
Insights and opinions for data scientists and engineers in the travel industry.
By John Carney, Chief Data Scientist, OpenJaw Technologies
OpenJaw started its data science journey on 1st May 2017. I remember it well because it was my first day at the company! Since then, we have hired a world class team of data scientists and data engineers, built a petabyte scale Big Data platform for customer analytics and personalisation in travel and deployed this platform into production for some of the largest and most innovative travel brands in the world. We are now, in October 2019, generating insights for personalised travel retailing for over 40 million travellers globally; quite an achievement from a standing start just over 2 years ago.
The purpose of this blog is to openly share the lessons learned and technical insights we have accumulated over the past 2 years on our journey. We will continue to do this as we develop our platform into the future. We want to give something back to the data science community in travel to accelerate progress in the field and also to engage with the field in an open, pro-active and collaborative way. If you are working as a data scientist in the travel industry, or in the field of personalisation in any industry, it is highly probable that you are currently trying to solve the same or very similar problems as we are here at OpenJaw.
In our first series of articles, we will share with our readers the methods we use to accurately predict customer lifetime value, perform identity resolution, predict customer purchase propensity and segment customers with machine learning — all ‘pillars’ of personalisation for any online retailer or advertiser today. In the area of data engineering, we will focus on the key topics of data pipeline management, ETL and data warehousing, spanning technologies such as Apache Spark, Hadoop and Airflow. We will also touch on the challenges of data visualisation at scale and how to optimise Big Data deployments in the Cloud.
More than anything though, this blog is a testament to the amazing technical creativity, determination and hard-work of the data team here at OpenJaw. We have some emerging stars of data science and data engineering here and I think you will enjoy listening to what they have to say and taking the time to understand how they think and solve the very challenging data science and Big Data engineering problems they face every day.
Most of our articles are written in consumable parts of about 1,000 words each, but we will endeavour to cross-reference them so that readers can see how everything fits into coherent vision for data science in travel.
I do hope you enjoy our articles. Feel free to reach out to us with feedback and questions. And don’t forget to clap! Happy reading!
John Carney, Editor, The OpenJaw Data Science Blog
Data.Science@openjawtech.com
