Though academically inclined, running a business is something I cannot let go of. I am a sound student with expertise in software development and data analysis who strives to overcome the poor educational background from Nigeria through the international-education path. My life goals are to overcome my struggles by persistently pushing myself to be better. My future overlays past experiences, and I hope to become a highly sort after resource person in Information Technology. I recently became interested in predictive analytics using machine learning. Consequently, I have learned how to work with Octave, Matlab, and Python programming language. Amidst the harsh business environment in my own country, I was able to start a business that was geared towards the agric sector. Because I was not in the Agric field, I sort for a way to integrate my expertise to an agro-allied framework. This led to the formation of a business called Agrostash. This business is an Information Technology-driven Agricultural business aimed to empower the youths in Nigeria through Agriculture. We achieved this through an online platform allowing people who are ready to work to have access to land spaces at a very reduced rate. Not only do we provide a land space for the farming exercise, but we also went the extra mile to create an eCommerce platform for all the farm produce to be sold through the Agrostash platform and the proceeds given to the farmers. The inspiration was drawn from a business perspective. The over-dependence on oil by my home country triggered my innovative mindset. My home country imports almost everything they consume. According to Nairametrics (an online publisher), Nigeria In 2017 alone imported $32.67 billion worth of goods from around the globe, down by 7.29% from the total amount of goods imported in the previous year. Moreso, according to the data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), Nigeria’s total import value was N2.106 trillion in the second quarter of 2018, compared to N2.518 trillion in the previous quarter of Q1 2018, showing a negative quarter on quarter growth of 16.3%. Also, total imports in Nigeria declined by 19.9% on a year on year basis. With this kind of statistics, one has to brace up and make something work. Every worthwhile business starts with solving societal problems through small channels. That was the strategy that Agrostash adopted. Going big was less of an option because we needed to study our business terrain to be able to come up with what works for different geographical locations. In the next ten years, we hope to connect investors to farmers through sponsorship packages to fund higher yields for a share of the returns. We are currently rolling out an app that allows investors all over the world to tap into the rich agricultural ecosystem in Nigeria and Africa at large. Our field workers will be taking care of funding farmers, training them, and also providing the market for the farmers to sell. We will be integrating a logistics arm that will move farm harvests to the market, making sure farmers earn a decent return at the end of their cycle.

My simple description but not limited to this is a hardworking student and a software developer with an interest in data analytics and machine learning. The field of data analytics and machine learning has managed to create a paradigm shift on how computing is moving beyond computer-computer interaction to permeating the space of computer-human relations. It is evident as we see the transitioning between the traditional approach of decision making to how software programs are employed to predict the future, thus, aiding the decision making process. I have started contributing to the field of data science, and my future contribution lies in the knowledge acquired over time. Consequently, it would be better to start with my foundation. One of the most exciting parts of my involvement in data science is the learning process and the strength that I have developed. People in this field are constantly learning and journeying their way through data. The discoveries, insights, and innovations along the way make the journey worthwhile, because being able to use historical data to enhance the present, and the future adds to the excitement of building a human-relatable system. My undergraduate project titled: 'Design and implementation of a text-to-speech synthesis system' triggered the passion for data science research. Though the project was developed initially as an Artificial Intelligence program, the drive to know the role that a large volume of data plays in improving artificial intelligence program kept me persistently wanting to explore more. This has deepened my interest in data science extending from text-to-speech analysis to machine learning and big data analytics. To successfully understand and apply data science, I enrolled in an online Data Science module by WorldQuant University in 2019. This module allowed me to gain both theoretical and practical knowledge in a series of tasks that involved in-depth statistical analysis, data structuration, and machine learning using the Python programming language. Before this, I had hands-on experience with data analytics tools like Qliksense, Tableau, SAP Object, and Lumira, from my previous work as a Business Intelligence developer. Adding the pieces together was a daunting task, as the field of data science was broad and slightly intertwined with machine learning, but, a major shift occurred after the Data science course by WorldQuant University. I learned, afterward, that data science shows how historical data plays a crucial role in building a decision support system, and this led to my Master's degree thesis titled: Development of a Decision Support System for Growth Hacking Analysis. Furthermore, my hands-on experiences in the research environment exposed me to the possibilities that data can solve many problems in any organizational setting, starting from, but not limited to, decision making, predictive analytics, sentiments analysis, internet of things, etc. I started by developing a Language mining platform for Nigerian languages and was published by the international journal of Data Science, with a publication titled ‘Digital Language Mining platform form Nigerian Languages’. I have gone ahead to also develop a sentiments analysis program, plotting the graph of human sentiments from social media, against the actual result for the two major candidates in the last Nigerian election, which attracted lots of audiences. To further deepen my capability and outstanding working knowledge in data science, I applied to the school of information technology at the University of Cincinnati to pursue a graduate degree leading to a Doctor of Philosophy in Information Technology and was opportune to be admitted and to resume in fall 2020. My future overlays my previous journey, and I hope to improve as time goes by. I recently started working on a machine learning system for predicting housing prizes for real Estate companies. This particular idea came through as I started the Machine Learning Online class organized by Coursera and taught by Prof. Andrew Ng., of Stanford University. It is an 11 weeks’ class and, I am currently in the 4th week. The project will solve issues related to pegging prizes to real estate housing using Octave and Matlab. In conclusion, my field has a plethora of exciting ideas on how data can be employed to work for us, instead of working for data, thereby reducing the time to solve organizational/societal problems with an exponential increase to the learning curve, and I can’t wait to do more.