Juan Pablo Marín Díaz

Juan Pablo Marín Díaz was a 2017 Professional Fellow from Latin America with ICFJ.

Country: Colombia

Organization and Position: Random Monkey - Founder and Data Scientist. I create data driven applications and tools for journalists using data science. We also create custom applications for decision making in different industries.

Favorite digital tool: R programming language. I love it because it is very versatile. One can work in the whole spectrum of extracting knowledge from data. From scrappers to beautiful visualizations.

Project Proposal: My project is Datasketch, a Data driven news site for Latin America featuring tools for Data Journalists to improve their workflow. The aim of the news site is to contrast realities with data so readers can have an informed opinion of different topics, additionally Datasketch features access to open data, open visualization tools for non-coders, a visualization recommendation engine, and a search engine to get inspiration on data stories by topic and information about related newsrooms and journalists.

Proudest Professional Accomplishment: I am very proud of quitting corporate life and becoming an entrepreneur. I am very proud of failing (twice already) while trying to start and consolidate businesses in Colombia, Chile and Brazil. I am very proud of moving forward without giving up on my quest to complement human intuition with data driven tools to make smarter decisions.