About

My Data Odyssey: A Stochastic Voyage

My data journey started back in the mid 2000s, working as a Reliability Engineer of Power Systems for the operator of the world’s fourth biggest hydroelectric power plant Guri. The objective was ambitious:

  • Dynamic monitoring of the risk of blackouts with probabilistic KPIs.

At that time the position Data Scientist didn’t exist, but some books in the realm of Data Mining and Emerging Computing Methods trying to organise and formalise the field. However, the area of Survival Analysis, specifically Reliability and Risk were pretty matured due to their importance in the industry.

Going forward with a stochastic thinking in an organisation with a lack of statistical culture and less amounts of data wasn’t easy, relying only on a mixture of internal ERP data, world surveys and standards. A continuous push towards a data culture from top-level management was key, and it still is!

Education

IBM

IBM AI Engineering Professional Certificate, 2022-2023 (Joseph Santarcangelo et al.)

Udacity

AI for Business Leaders, Nanodegree, 2022 (William Ross & Luis Serrano)

Introduction to Machine Learning Free Course, 2017 (Sebastian Thrun & Katie Malone)

Stanford University

STATSX0001 Online: Statistical Learning, 2022 (Trevor Hastie & Robert Tibshirani)

Udemy

100 Days of Code: The Complete Python Pro Bootcamp for 20231 (Angela Yu)

Microsoft Power BI Desktop for Business Intelligence, 2022 (Maven Analytics, Chris Dutton)

Tableau A-Z: Hands-On Tableau Training for Data Science, 2019 (Kirill Eremenko)

Kaggle

Feature Engineering, 2023 (Ryan Holbrook & Alexis Cook)

University of Nottingham

MSc. Electrical Technology for Sustainable and Renewable Energy Systems, UK (2010-2011)

Universidad del Zulia

Dipl.-Ing. Electrical Engineering, VE (2000-2006)

Languages

  • Spanish (Native Language)
  • English (Fluent)
  • German (Fluent)

Publications

To date I’ve authored and co-authored several publications2 related to advanced analyitcs in different domains like Power & Energy Systems, IoT and utilities.

Journal Articles & Conference Proceedings

[1]
T. Bernard, S. Wallner, U. Leibfried, Stürtz Simon, and J. Thomas, “Cloud-basierter energiemanager ermöglicht angebots- und bedarfs- gerechte zuschaltung von energieträgern,” HLH. Heizung, Lüftung/Klima, Haustechnik, vol. 73, pp. 22–25, 2022.
[2]
C. Kühnert, N. M. Gonuguntla, H. Krieg, D. Nowak, and J. A. Thomas, “Application of LSTM Networks for Water Demand Prediction in Optimal Pump Control,” Water, vol. 13, no. 5, 2021.
[3]
J. Thomas, “Prediction of Heat Demand for Building Energy Managers: An IoT and Control Perspective.” 2020.
[4]
J. Thomas, “Optimisation Method for the Clear Sky PV Forecast Using Power Records from Arbitrarily Oriented Panels.” 2018.
[5]
J. Barry, N. Munzke, and J. Thomas, “Power fluctuations in solar-storage clusters: spatial correlation and battery response times,” Energy Procedia, vol. 135, no. March, pp. 379–390, 2017.
[6]
J. Barry and J. Thomas, “Online and offline PV power forecasts for optimal control of storage systems,” in 33rd european photovoltaic solar energy conference and exhibition, 2017, pp. 2729–2732.
[7]
J. Barry, N. Munzke, and J. Thomas, “Short-Term Power Fluctuations in Densely Clustered PV-Battery Systems,” in 32nd european photovoltaic solar energy conference and exhibition, 2016, pp. 2393–2398.
[8]
J. Thomas and N. Munzke, “A Static Solar-Tracking Configuration for PV Power Plant to Redistribute the Daily Power Supply,” in 31st european photovoltaic solar energy conference and exhibition, 2015, p. 76344.
[9]
L. E. Aparicio and J. A. Thomas, “Stochastic reliability study of the western 765, 400 and 230 kV transmission lines maintained by EDELCA,” in 2008 IEEE/PES transmission and distribution conference and exposition: Latin america, 2008, pp. 1–7.
[10]
J. A. Thomas and L. E. Aparicio, “Stochastic reliability study of the western transmission substations maintained by EDELCA,” in 2008 IEEE/PES transmission and distribution conference and exposition: Latin america, 2008, pp. 1–6.

Footnotes

  1. Ongoing↩︎

  2. Check my ORCiD↩︎