In 2008, Nate Silver wowed the public by correctly predicting the election outcomes in 49 out of 50 states. But you don't have to be a statistician to perform such analyses. In this talk, I introduce the Bash scripting language and how it can be used to perform advanced number crunching.

To give you a sense for what is possible with Bash, I will demonstrate how Bash can be used to answer two practical questions: (1) In what year did we witness the most rain in Washington state over the last 120 years? and (2) How often are flights late to their destination?

Both questions will be answered using only Bash and publicly-available datasets. This talk is aimed at beginners, and thus no previous coding experience is required.

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I am currently pursuing a PhD in computational biology at CSHL, where I use data science tools including Bash every day to process and analyze large biological datasets. I also write regularly for the Canadian Science Writers’ Association blog about data science (e.g. see http://bit.ly/1viPNLt, http://bit.ly/1jkqiZr, and http://bit.ly/1tQpn8x). Those articles demonstrate how to use the command line to answer interesting data science questions, as I plan to do in this talk. For more information about me, please visit http://www.robertaboukhalil.com