Je pense, donc je suis
I'm Kevin Kirby, a Senior Product Manager in the Ad Platforms division at the Walt Disney Company (clears throat: conflict of interest statement), where I work on digital ads data platforms, products, and services. I live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City with my fiancé, Mao-Lin, and serve as the elected treasurer of the board for the self-managed co-op we live in together, a position I was re-elected to with 90% of the vote.
In the fall I'll be starting the Master of Data Science Program at the CUNY School of Professional Studies, where I'll focus on deep learning and neural network theory and application. I'll continue to work-full time while in school. To prepare, I've been taking classes for/from:
- Linear Algebra
- Calculus 1 through multivariable
- Statistics and probability
- Deeplearning.ai specializations in:
- Machine learning
- Deep learning
- Natural language processing
More details on my academic studies can found here
Outside of work, I’m an avid road cyclist and professional cycling fan. I got hooked during Covid lockdowns and haven’t stopped since. I started out by riding a Citi Bike up and down the West Side Highway and then bought a road bike so I could ride further and long. My long covid has changed my endurance capacity a lot but I've done 8 century rides and dozens of 60+ mile rides. These days I'm able to reliably do 30-50 miles and am working on the puzzle to get back to where I was.
I'm...what's the world I'm looking for here.....obsessed with professional cycling. Paris-Roubaix, The Hell of the North, remains one of the greatest one day sporting events in the world. The Tour de France is a circus on wheels and La Vuelta a España exists to make sprinters hate themselves. Professional cycling is also intensely driven by data, and is a pioneer in using data to improve performance. These trends have trickled down to the weekend warrior level, allowing average folks like me to better calibrate training.
Lastly, I’m a huge fan of underground house and techno music. Of the 170 accounts I follow on Instagram, 125 are related to house and techno in some way. My longest lasting subscription is YouTube Premium so I can watch full sets in peace. I’ve listened to sets on my “Cercle Favs” YouTube playlist (named after the famous French electronic music collective) a combined 3,500 times over the last four years. I can't remember the last time I listened to top 40 music, I feel like I have a memory of singing Kesha in college? We R Who We R, anyone?