The Knewton Blog

I have to admit, I’ve always been a little skeptical of the idea of the “fun-loving tech startup” — companies full of geeks lounging on bean bag chairs and playing ping-pong. The idea that a pampering environment could stimulate creativity and lead to wild success in the great internet frontier always seemed a bit trite. Weren’t these really just a bunch of geeks who got lucky, now attributing their success to some nebulous inspiration found… Read more

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This summer we were lucky to have a rockstar set of interns on our tech team. Here’s just a quick look at some of what they accomplished this summer: Andersen Chen worked on models for estimating the way student proficiencies change over time. Most existing methods are focused on point estimates resulting from tests and surveys, so they don’t concern themselves with how students improve over time — but that’s exactly what we’re focused on!  Andersen worked with… Read more

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Check out the latest post on the Knewton tech blog, written by one of our star summer interns, Harvard student Joy Zheng. Here’s a sneak peek: THE PROBLEM How do you quickly visualize and validate data in a large-scale, distributed, and real-time system? How do you make it deployable in multiple cloud environments? And how do you track changes to this data over time? These are questions that I set out to answer in my… Read more

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Every summer, the seams of our office stretch a bit to accommodate a few good interns. This year is no exception. We’ve got a crop of impressive college students, recent graduates, and grad students here to prove — once again — that age is no measure of errand-running talent. Just kidding. The only coffee these interns will be fetching is their own — and they’ll need it. All of them will be digging into some… Read more

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When I first arrived for my internship at Knewton, I had a bit of free time to get settled in and decided I wanted to do something fun (but still related to data science). So I made a map of the world using Twitter tweets. I began by writing a script in Python to extract geotagged tweets using Twitter’s API. I ignored the text contained in the tweets, and only stored the longitude and latitude… Read more

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This post was written by Zlata Barshteyn, a former intern here at Knewton.  Every few months at Knewton, we have something called Hack Day, where team members take a day off from regular work tasks to tackle projects they’ve been itching to develop. These “hacks” typically fall into one of four categories: product, business, culture, or performance. A Robot for the Office For my Hack Day project, I worked with my mentor on building a… Read more

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