Samuel Lau
Assistant Teaching Professor at UC San Diego
California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSamuel Lau is an Assistant Teaching Professor and data science educator with 12 years of experience designing curriculum, authoring an open-access Data 100 textbook, and building instructional tooling used at Berkeley and UC San Diego. He combines a PhD in Cognitive Science with an MS and BS in Computer Science to bridge learning science and practical data engineering, focusing on tools that help people learn computation and inference. Sam has led course offerings (Data 8 and Data 100), written core projects and assessments, and contributed production-ready Python libraries and Jupyter-based assets used by thousands of students. His open-source work includes enhancements to the datascience library, map visualizations, and front-end improvements to the widely used Jupyter Book project, reflecting attention to both pedagogy and engineerable user experiences. Colleagues note his ability to translate complex probability and visualization concepts into clear, student-facing materials while also optimizing performance and interactivity in educational software. Based in California, he blends research-driven teaching with hands-on software contributions that improve how data science is taught at scale.
12 years of coding experience
1 year of employment as a software developer
Master of Science - MS, Computer Science, Master of Science - MS, Computer Science at University of California, BerkeleyUniversity of California, San DiegoHigh School Diploma, High School Diploma at Whitney High School
Github Skills (21)
probability10
folium10
javascript10
visualization10
python10
data-science10
matplotlib10
pandas10
responsive-design10
numpy10
jupyter-notebook10
visualizations10
data-analysis10
documentation-generator9
html9
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
data-8/datascience
Jul 2015 - Jun 2019
A Python library for introductory data science
Role in this project:
Data Scientist
Data ScientistContributions:4 releases, 222 commits, 115 PRs in 3 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Samuel significantly contributed to the datascience library by restructuring the package and adding a module for map visualizations. Their work involved setting up the necessary JavaScript for a GMap widget and adding example notebooks. Furthermore, they added functionality to draw points on the map using the `folium` package and created methods for plotting and visualizing tabular data. The user also implemented a percentile function, enhancing the library's data analysis capabilities.
python-librarydata-analysispythonsciencedataframes
data-8/data8assets
Jan 2016 - Aug 2017
Assets for data8.org
Role in this project:Data Scientist
Data ScientistContributions:49 commits, 42 pushes, 2 branches in 1 year 6 months
Contributions summary:Samuel appears to be contributing to a data science project, potentially related to the Data 8 course materials, as the commits reference "data8assets" and the content is based on Norvig's Probability Notebook. The contributions mainly involve adding and modifying Jupyter notebooks, including a probability notebook and related problem sets. These notebooks suggest a focus on probability concepts and related problems for the Core Infrastructure Team and students to learn.
data-analysisdataframestextbookassets
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