Tag Archives: Spry Inc.

David Zhao ’15, Spry, Inc.

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My fel­low Princeterns and I arrived at Spry Incor­po­rated not quite sure what to expect from our three day stay. We had read the mate­ri­als the com­pany had sent us and we had combed through its web­site, but what Spry actu­ally did was still not quite clear. How­ever, once we met Spry CEO Brooke Steven­son ‘01, the Prince­ton alum who brought us out to Mary­land, she showed us around the office and fully elu­ci­dated the company’s field of work. Spry endeav­ors to allow client com­pa­nies and cor­po­ra­tions to eas­ily search their data by con­nect­ing their indi­vid­ual data­bases that are often dis­jointed and inflex­i­ble. As she duly noted, scat­tered data pre­cludes any attempts at a thor­ough analy­sis, pre­vent­ing a com­pany from mak­ing impor­tant and piv­otal deci­sions in this fast-paced world that waits for no one. At the heart of their approach is the use of ontolo­gies to orga­nize the data. This kind of seman­tic archi­tec­ture empha­sizes the rela­tion­ships between infor­ma­tion, mak­ing it eas­ier to query for the desired answers. An equally impor­tant aspect of Spry is their agile approach to devel­op­ment. Instead of the tra­di­tional water­fall approach where a com­pany releases a sin­gle end-product after com­plet­ing devel­op­ment, Spry espouses an agile scheme that allows them to not only quickly turn over a work­ing inter­me­di­ate prod­uct, but also show clients real­ized value. The incre­men­tal releases allow Spry to eas­ily meet the ever-changing needs of its clients.

We quickly real­ized that this Princetern­ship was not going to be the typ­i­cal shad­ow­ing oppor­tu­nity. Instead, it was going to be much bet­ter. Usu­ally, it seems that those who shadow are given tasks that are either menial or bor­ing, but Spry was going to give us a crash course on seman­tic and query lan­guages so that we could develop a solu­tion to an exist­ing prob­lem. This was both excit­ing and refresh­ing; we were tack­ling an issue that no one else had ever solved. After learn­ing Tur­tle (Terse RDF Triple Lan­guage) to write ontolo­gies and SPARQL (SPARQL Pro­to­col and RDF Query Lan­guage) to write queries, we wrote a user-customizable query cre­ator in MDQO (Model Drive Query Ontol­ogy) that Spry will con­tinue to improve.

Spry Incor­po­rated has a casual dress code that many tech star­tups often have, but it also has a lively and enjoy­able atmos­phere that may not nec­es­sar­ily reside in com­pa­nies of any size. The employ­ees feel com­fort­able bounc­ing ideas around daily progress off their cowork­ers, regard­less of their senior­ity at the com­pany. Spry thrives on this mutual assis­tance atti­tude that nat­u­rally man­i­fests itself.

Spry Staff, David, and fel­low Princeterns

This Princetern­ship let me explore the new and constantly-changing field of ana­lyt­ics. Per­haps the most pro­found dis­cov­ery was that this sort of job exists. It is fill­ing a much-needed role in the relentlessly-expanding global data par­a­digm. The most valu­able knowl­edge I gained is that, accord­ing to many of the employ­ees with whom we spoke, learn­ing how to learn in col­lege is the most impor­tant thing to take away from those four years. Although the actual mate­r­ial of aca­d­e­mic courses is def­i­nitely impor­tant, the abil­ity to problem-solve proved to be the most help­ful skill from col­lege in their daily projects.

I would like to thank Brooke, Meg, Christina, and the rest of the Spry team for their immense help and sup­port dur­ing the Princetern­ship. They really made the three days stim­u­lat­ing and pleas­ant. I would def­i­nitely rec­om­mend this Princetern­ship to other stu­dents, because I gained valu­able insight into my future plans. This expe­ri­ence has encour­aged me to con­sider ana­lyt­ics as a pos­si­ble career path. For that, I am also grate­ful to Career Ser­vices for offer­ing this program.

Eugene Lee ’15, Spry, Inc.

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The first day of our Princetern­ship, the six of us we were brought to the spa­cious offices of Spry by Mar­ket­ing Direc­tor Meg Nacios, who told us briefly about the com­pany on our drive. After we arrived, we spoke with Brooke Steven­son ‘01, CEO of Spry Inc., who walked us through the company’s method­ol­ogy and phi­los­o­phy. Sev­eral other employ­ees spoke with us, elu­ci­dat­ing the struc­ture and tech­ni­cal side of the technology.

Spry’s Agile Ana­lytic approach to data man­age­ment works through a fast-paced, or ‘agile’, devel­op­ment cycle, tak­ing advan­tage of seman­tic ontolo­gies to link dis­parate data­bases which enhances flex­i­bil­ity while main­tain­ing the ana­lyt­i­cal power of tra­di­tional meth­ods. To explain more sim­ply, Spry uses a novel way of con­nect­ing data with seman­tics, specif­i­cally ontolo­gies. An ontol­ogy works by con­nect­ing objects to sub­jects with pred­i­cates, like “Bob is a stu­dent of Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity” and “Bob is a Com­puter Sci­ence Major.” This allows the struc­tur­ing of data through log­i­cal “triples,” which is much like a human men­tally struc­tures infor­ma­tion. Because a major part of their work involves seman­tics, Spry employs the inter­est­ing com­bi­na­tion of Com­puter Sci­en­tists and Philoso­phers. Like other data ana­lytic tech­nolo­gies, Agile Ana­lyt­ics allows for mak­ing con­nec­tions between dif­fer­ent data sources. For exam­ple, with enough stu­dent data, you could assume from the two pre­vi­ously given prop­er­ties of “Bob” that he stud­ies Com­puter Sci­ence at Prince­ton, almost def­i­nitely lives on cam­pus, is prob­a­bly between the ages of 18 and 22, and is most likely a mem­ber of at least two stu­dent groups. How­ever, one major dif­fer­ence is that Spry’s tech­nol­ogy allows for real time updat­ing when the source data is changed, does not require rework­ing of the ontol­ogy when adding new descrip­tors, and is sim­ple enough for non-technical work­ers to edit the ontology.

After exten­sive expla­na­tion of the company’s work­ings, we began to work hands-on with some of the soft­ware the com­pany uses, allow­ing us to gain a more inti­mate under­stand­ing of how the tech­nol­ogy is run and what kinds of activ­i­ties are per­formed by employ­ees there. First, we looked at Knoodl.com with Meg, a web­site devel­oped by part­ner com­pany Revolyt­ics, which allows for the cre­ation and stor­ing of ontolo­gies online. Sev­eral major projects are on Knoodl, includ­ing Bio­BIG, a data­base cur­rently under con­struc­tion intended for phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies that can be used to ana­lyze drug infor­ma­tion. Next, we learned RDF, a stan­dard­ized method of writ­ing ontolo­gies, and wrote our own ontolo­gies in Tur­tle, a more stream­lined method of writ­ing RDF, as RDF is a rather dif­fi­cult lan­guage to read. We were guided by Christina, as well as other mem­bers of the com­pany, includ­ing Michael, another Prince­ton alum, who in addi­tion to teach­ing us the new lan­guage, gave us valu­able infor­ma­tion for the future, as well as their indi­vid­ual expe­ri­ences dur­ing and out of college.

Eugene, Brooke Steven­son, and Princeterns

Our time at the offices of Spry went from about 10 am to 4 pm each day, and we were offered lunch from the office’s kitchen. Dur­ing lunch, employ­ees (and we) had an oppor­tu­nity to take a break and chat freely or use the ping pong table. Spry in gen­eral is rather infor­mal (although the work they do is very seri­ous), as there is no dress code, few restric­tions on how you work, and oppor­tu­ni­ties to work on some­thing out­side of your niche. Employ­ees also can sched­ule weekly mas­sages and appar­ently have group yoga ses­sions. Clearly, there are some advan­tages to work­ing at Spry, in addi­tion to the inter­est­ing posi­tions here.

The sec­ond day was filled with SPARQL – a spe­cial­ized query lan­guage for data ontolo­gies. We were guided by Christina, again with other mem­bers of the com­pany talk­ing about other sec­tions of Spry that they spe­cial­ized in. We used SPARQL queries to go through the Bio­BIG data­base — and retrieve the num­ber of drugs in each cat­e­gory listed in the data­base. While chal­leng­ing at times, par­tic­u­larly due to our lack of expe­ri­ence in this new lan­guage, we were all able to suc­cess­fully pull this off, and cre­ate a pro­gram that uses actual data to per­form a prac­ti­cal task.

Our third day, we went in early to watch a ‘stand up’, where the ana­lyt­ics team of Spry have a short con­fer­ence where they ask each other about any prob­lems they may have  encoun­tered the pre­vi­ous day, and oth­ers offer poten­tial solu­tions to their prob­lems, pre­vent­ing any one per­son from suf­fer­ing from a par­tic­u­larly annoy­ing prob­lem for more than a day. This is an inte­gral part of Spry’s ‘agile’ devel­op­ment process, as it allows them to over­come obsta­cles, and avoid prob­lems that pile up as the project goes on. The rest of the day was spent writ­ing in another lan­guage called MDQO (Model Dri­ven Query Ontol­ogy) which is so spe­cific to Spry that inter­net searches come up with no rel­e­vant links. This pro­gram is used to con­vert user input from the UI to send cus­tom SPARQL queries to the data­base. Our task was to mod­ify a com­pleted MDQO pro­gram used to search through a mil­i­tary mis­sion data­base for the Depart­ment of Defense so that it would work with the Bio­BIG data­base. This was very dif­fi­cult, as we were not given much instruc­tion on the work­ings of the pro­gram, which is under­stand­able. It is nec­es­sary to learn a pro­gram your­self if you know you will be unable to eas­ily get help. Thus, we had to charge head first into the code, result­ing in many stum­bles, but also a very fast under­stand­ing of the pro­gram. For­tu­nately, we were able to talk with some of the employ­ees who had pre­vi­ously under­gone this same strug­gle. The pro­gram we edited will be used by Spry as a start­ing point for the UI they will be using as a demo for future clients. We also were able to talk with Christina, Topher, Andy, the leader of the ana­lyt­ics team, and oth­ers about their opin­ions on col­lege, edu­ca­tion, dif­fer­ences between col­lege and work envi­ron­ments, and the real­i­ties of what the future held.

This Princetern­ship affirmed my plans to study Com­puter Sci­ence, but helped me change my men­tal­ity towards how I should treat my col­lege edu­ca­tion, what I should focus on, and how I should approach the end of my col­lege career when it comes. It also showed me a bet­ter pic­ture of what life would be like work­ing in a small com­pany, where every­one is very close, work is fast– paced, and employ­ees’ roles are far less restricted than at a larger company.

I would def­i­nitely rec­om­mend this Princetern­ship to any­one inter­ested in tech­nol­ogy; how­ever, I would like to stress that ANY Princetern­ship would be extremely help­ful for any­one look­ing towards get­ting a job or lengthy intern­ship in the future. Even if one has plenty of prior work expe­ri­ence, get­ting a Princetern­ship at a dif­fer­ent com­pany will reveal a very dif­fer­ent set of peo­ple, envi­ron­ment, and work methodology.

I would like to thank every­one at Spry; Christina for instruct­ing and guid­ing us through our code, Meg for help­ing orga­nize the Princetern­ship, both online and in per­son, and Brooke for giv­ing us this great oppor­tu­nity to come to Spry in the first place, as well as con­tin­u­ing to offer future Princeternships.

Christopher Kennedy ’13, Spry, Inc.

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Day 1 – 3/19

Today Brooke Steven­son ‘01, the CEO of Spry, talked to us briefly about what the com­pany is and how it oper­ates.  She was very kind and wel­com­ing, which was indica­tive of the gen­eral office envi­ron­ment we would later encounter.  After­wards, Christina (who stayed with us the entire time) began teach­ing us basics on how the com­pany oper­ates and the query­ing lan­guage that it uses.  Tris­tan, a recent Prince­ton grad­u­ate, later joined her.  He had a lot of good insight on the dif­fer­ences between our col­lege and post-graduate expe­ri­ence, notably the changes in expec­ta­tions for work and the type of knowl­edge that is actu­ally applied to the real world. We spent most of the day learn­ing about the data­base, Knoodl, that they had con­structed to inter­pret the lan­guage of seman­tics that is Spry’s trade­mark.
 
Day 2 – 3/20

Now that we were briefed on the basics, today was more in depth.  Hav­ing a stronger back­ground on what the com­pany itself does, we began to dive into more tech­ni­cal details of the lan­guages and meth­ods they use.  The atmos­phere of the office became more appar­ent, and I began to appre­ci­ate the casual work­place demeanor.  We got to talk to a lot of the employ­ees about how they oper­ate on a day-to-day basis, which was very help­ful.  In par­tic­u­lar, a lot of the advice we got was related to our future and the key dif­fer­ences between the col­lege and work­place expe­ri­ence.  Towards the end of the day, we talked to two very recent Prince­ton grad­u­ates from Reve­lytix (a com­pany that fre­quently col­lab­o­rates with Spry) and their take on post-college life.
 
Day 3 – 3/21

Christo­pher, Brooke Steven­son, and fel­low Princeterns

We finally got to dive in and really explore the tools that employ­ees of Spry use reg­u­larly, espe­cially in the ana­lyt­ics depart­ment.  Christina con­tin­ued to guide us as we did more work in Knoodl as well as Sparql, a rela­tional data­base query lan­guage that Spry often uses.  We even got to apply some of these queries to a project that Spry was work­ing on, to see how they are imple­mented.  Toward the end of the day, Andy, the direc­tor of ana­lyt­ics, came in and talked to us about the advan­tages of work­ing at a small start-up like Spry as opposed to the gov­ern­ment.  His knowl­edge and advice was very cred­i­ble and valu­able, and his mil­i­tary back­ground allowed him to give us a good per­spec­tive on the value of places like Spry.  Brooke bid us farewell and we went on our way, con­tent with what we had learned about the com­pany and the start-up envi­ron­ment in general.

Stephanie He ’15, Spry, Inc.

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The five of us were picked up each morn­ing promptly at 10 am by Meg Nacios, the sis­ter of our host Brooke Steven­son ‘01. Our Princetern­ship began with a tour of the office, which was large and spa­cious, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing that the startup had only 22 employ­ees, but had a close-knit and com­fort­able atmos­phere. In addi­tion to the offices high­lighted by brightly col­ored yoga balls, there was a kitchen area, a ping pong area, as well as a yoga and con­fer­ence room where we would be working.

We spent the first two days immers­ing our­selves in the tech­nolo­gies. Given pre­sen­ta­tions from a cou­ple of employ­ers from Spry Inc., we learned about seman­tics and in par­tic­u­lar, ontol­ogy triples and RDFs. Armed with infor­ma­tion pack­ets pro­vided to us, we cre­ated sim­ple RDF files and used online val­i­da­tion ser­vices to make sure that we were on the right track. From there, we moved on to learn­ing SPARQL, a pro­gram­ming lan­guage sim­i­lar to SQL for man­ag­ing rela­tional data­bases, and how to query for the RDFs we had just learned using OWL ontolo­gies. In addi­tion, we signed up for Knoodl accounts, which helped man­age infor­ma­tion using the tech­nolo­gies we had been learn­ing. Through Knoodl we were first intro­duced to Bio­BIG, which was the focus of our final project that we worked on dur­ing our third and final day. In terms of tech­nolo­gies learned, this Princetern­ship was breath­tak­ingly fast-paced. As soon as I began to grasp one con­cept or lan­guage, we quickly moved on to the next, all with the patient advice and help from var­i­ous employ­ees who took time out of their busy sched­ules to men­tor and teach us.

Stephanie, Brooke Steven­son, and fel­low Princeterns

This fast-paced learn­ing was bal­anced with a num­ber of breaks that occurred through­out the day. Dur­ing the office lunch break when food was deliv­ered and every­one in the office would come out and social­ize, many of the work­ers would migrate towards the ping pong table. Although there were lim­ited “ping pong hours” through­out the work day, over time many of the employ­ees at Spry had clearly honed their skills and had become very impres­sive at the game. The play­ful, ener­getic atmos­phere of this small startup com­pany was most clearly cap­tured dur­ing these ping pong tour­na­ments, where large groups gath­ered to watch their friends and cowork­ers bat­tle it out on the ping pong table.

We also talked to a large num­ber of peo­ple, which was with­out a doubt the most valu­able part of my Princetern­ship expe­ri­ence. Through­out the course of the three days we had at Spry, we came into con­tact and actu­ally talked with every sin­gle per­son in the com­pany! Some employ­ees dropped by to give us a pre­sen­ta­tion, some came to explain a tech­nol­ogy they were famil­iar with, oth­ers sim­ply came to talk, and all of them answered any ques­tions we had and offered us advice on col­lege, jobs and life in gen­eral. Being able to talk to so many tal­ented indi­vid­u­als, includ­ing our host Brooke, the direc­tors and chairs, as well as a num­ber of other Prince­ton alums, we learned more about what to do dur­ing col­lege, life after Prince­ton, and the hir­ing process from the per­spec­tive of those recruit­ing and inter­view­ing for those posi­tions. It was an eye-opening expe­ri­ence to hear advice from peo­ple with such a range of per­spec­tive and experiences.

I would enthu­si­as­ti­cally rec­om­mend the Princetern­ship pro­gram to every­one. Although the dura­tion of the pro­gram was short, through­out the course of my Princetern­ship I learned more than I could have pos­si­bly hoped for and had a great time meet­ing and talk­ing to so many won­der­ful individuals.