Claudiu Rontu

Background

About Claudiu Rontu

It was a chilly morning of April when the 10-year old boy woke up to an admittedly quiet, picturesque view of the village down in the valley. He usually spent spring break at his grandparents, his parents being busier than usual with work at the office. He wanders around the backyard, hands in his jeans overall's pockets, kicking stones here and there until he lifts his head up and sees it. It wasn't there yesterday, was it? It couldn't have, his grandpa must've brought it when he arrived last night. A brown, plastic box with two symmetrically opposed circles on it, a dark dial with a tuner on its left and a shiny, metal antenna pointing to the sky sitting on the tooldesk. Such a curious device. The little boy reaches up with both hands and grabs the radio, knocking over a couple of screwdrivers. Carefully he unscrews the back and there it is, a myriad of green and dark plates and chips, connected with a handful of wires, all twisted, tied and scrambled together. What a mess. But somehow this ordered chaos manages to produce delightful sounds and voices from far away places. He has to know how. In the remaining days he would tinker with the radio's components, take one apart and see if the device still works, connect one wire another way and observe the result, ask his grandpa what does this or that do and draw enough schemes to fill a notebook. The day came that his parents would pick him up and right as he sees them, he triumphantly proclaims:"Mom, dad, look! I put it back together, I know how it works!" I may not have realized it that spring, but that was the moment I discovered what really gets me going: breaking down systems into smaller elements and observe how they interact with each other in order to produce an output, the curiosity to identify patterns hidden in chaos. Equipped with knowledge of statistics, probability and data mining I am able to pull the fibers from the woven blanket of data in order to paint a coherent story and extract insight.