Game Intelligence Analyst @Ubisoft. Former journalist @IJFMedia @cbcnews @mtlgazette. Not on social media much these days, but my DMs are open.
Montréal, Québec
Joined March 2007
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Roberto Rocha retweeted
We are excited to announce that two of our stories made it to the finalists for the Best Data Journalism category in @DPAwards!
Congrats to @kteschneider and @robroc for the amazing achievement and all the others who are nominated. theijf.org/investigative-jou…
I first learned about @G_S_Bhogal on this After Skool video and was instantly impressed. His interview on the @ChrisWillx podcast solidified my admiration.
Powerful thoughts that invite self-reflection.
The brilliant @AfterSkool100 animated one of my most popular essays, "Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things," which I narrated.
(Sound: On)
youtube.com/watch?v=5Peima-U…
I imagine *this* will make U.S. lawmakers take data privacy a little more seriously.
A data broker tracked the devices of visitors to a private island where Jeffrey Epstein allegedly assaulted and trafficked countless women and girls.
The data, exposed online, details precise coordinates where hundreds live and work in the US
wired.com/story/jeffrey-epst…
Wow. This is my dream job.
occrp.org/en/occrp-jobs/text…
Ever since I learned about NLP I've wanted to excel at turning raw text into data. It's what I've directed almost all my learning towards.
I love that news orgs are starting to invest in this specialization
Roberto Rocha retweeted
Searching for good images on the Web has become such a shitshow (thanks, Gen AI!) that Better Images of AI (betterimagesofai.org/) has become my go-to place for getting cool pics for slides and talks.
Check them out, and contribute if you can!
While enjoying my funemployment, I'm taking time to learn stuff. And I've been learning about pair programming with LLMs.
Basically, using AI language models to help you write code faster in a coding environment like Colab.
I wrote about it here:
robertorocha.info/pair-progr…
They excelled in writing SQL queries and machine learning code.
Only a few (GPT-4 and Claude) knew how to wrangle a complicated Excel file into something suitable for analysis.
LLaMa, the LLM from Meta, sometimes spat out an internal dialog of how to proceed rather than the code itself. That was funny.
Google's Gemini 1.5 isn't all that better over 1.0 for the tasks I gave it.
Here's a Colab notebook with all the details:
colab.research.google.com/dr…
Trying to change a flight with @AraJet has been a nightmare. Their website is full of bugs, throws unhelpful errors and the customer service is even less helpful, telling me to use the website to make changes. Not worth the cheap fares
Love seeing some GIS in the middle of a rainforest.
Pictured: a map of the Brazilian Amazon, protected indigenous zones, and deforested area since 2008 (yellow).
Manaus botanical garden (MUSA)
Roberto Rocha retweeted
Want to expand your investigative reporting skills? @Robroc specializes in data analytics like web scraping and data visualization to do investigations. Apply by Feb. 28: caj.ca/programs/mentorship/
Manaus at night. The dish is tacacá, an indigenous shrimp soup with jambu, a fruit that numbs the mouth like Sichuan peppers.
The finalists of the @sigmaawards are being announced now. Join us!
youtube.com/live/xgibgdkfjRE…
And here is the shortlist. Every region of the world is represented, showing how mainstream and valuable data journalism has become.
sigmaawards.org/shortlist-20...
It was my 5th time as a juror and each year I'm more impressed with the quality of submissions.
Oops broken link. Here's the right one.
sigmaawards.org/shortlist-20…
I'm in Manaus, the gateway to the Brazilian Amazon. They have a version of the bodega cat. But at 35°C in the shade, they're a tad less interactive.
Roberto Rocha retweeted
We're hosting a livestream on #ArtificialIntelligence in #datajournalism 🤖+ #datajournalism on #climatechange 🌎at the #Sigmas24 Shortlist Reveal, tomorrow 21 Feb 4pm GMT feat. @robroc @SrourAli0 @j_la28 @samjoiner @cephillips @IDashboard 👉bit.ly/Sigmas24Shortlist
