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Philippe Heitzmann

Professional Summary

I’m an experienced data science and product leader with degrees from Duke University (Certificate in Data Science, BS in Economics) and Harvard Business School. I specialize in translating data insights into business impact and in building scalable AI products. In my free time I enjoy pursuing entrepreneurial projects and have built three software apps 0→1, each bootstrapped and revenue-generating.

Interests

Data Science
Machine Learning
Software Engineering
Product Management

Education

Master of Business Administration (MBA), Class of 2025
Harvard Business School
B.S. in Economics, B.A. in International Relations, Certificate in Data Science
Duke University

Data Science Projects

Investigating Money Laundering Activity with Advanced Data Wrangling

Data Wrangling | Fraud Detection

Investigating Money Laundering Activity with Advanced Data Wrangling

Case study analysis of 12K transaction dataset to uncover suspicious money laundering activity using advanced data wrangling and visualizations.

Jun 1, 2025

Predicting Customer Churn with ML Classification Models

Machine Learning | Python

Predicting Customer Churn with ML Classification Models

Built time-series XGBoost and RandomForest classification models to predict individual customer churn in a bank's wealth management business unit.

Jan 12, 2025

Predicting Lending Club Loan Defaults with Machine Learning

Machine Learning | Python

Predicting Lending Club Loan Defaults with Machine Learning

Build and deploy ML models to predict Lending Club loan defaults and optimize a high-IRR portfolio, with interactive EDA, Flask API, and Dash apps.

Jan 15, 2022

Predicting House Prices with Stacked ML

Machine Learning | Python

Predicting House Prices with Stacked ML

Build stacked models on the Ames Housing dataset to predict SalePrice with rigorous cleaning, feature engineering, RFE, and stacking.

Jan 8, 2022

Predicting SP500 Moves based on Wall Street Journal article sentiment

Web Scraping | Python

Predicting SP500 Moves based on Wall Street Journal article sentiment

I scraped 22k WSJ articles to run statistical analyses on their article text content to determine if WSJ sentiment could be predictive of S\&P 500 returns. Includes an R Shiny app displaying final takeaways.

Sep 21, 2020

Unsupervised ML Projects

Building customer personas for targeted marketing campaigns

Customer Segmentation | Python

Building customer personas for targeted marketing campaigns

We grouped 8,950 credit‑card customers into clear, actionable personas based on real spending and payment behavior. The write‑up explains the data we used, how we formed the groups at a high level, what makes each persona distinct (e.g., cash‑advance heavy vs. everyday spenders), and how teams can activate them to tailor offers, credit limits, and messaging.

Mar 15, 2022

Topic Modeling News Headlines to Classify Articles

Natural Language Processing | Python

Topic Modeling News Headlines to Classify Articles

Unsupervised topic modeling on 1.1M ABC News headlines with LDA, LSA, LSI, and HDP; compare scikit‑learn vs Gensim/NLTK preprocessing and visualize separability with t‑SNE.

Feb 10, 2022

Computer Vision Projects

Credit Card Optical Character Recognition with OpenCV + Tesseract

Optical Character Recognition

Credit Card Optical Character Recognition with OpenCV + Tesseract

Built a lightweight, sub-0.5s/image pipeline to read 16-digit card numbers and cardholder names from card photos using OpenCV (template matching) and Tesseract (OCR). On a small, hand-labeled 23-image set, the baseline achieves 48% recall on PAN and 65% on name. With feasibility of low-latency data capture (fraud/risk, checkout autofill) established, next steps include dataset scaling and custom OCR training to reach production readiness.

Sep 7, 2025

Neural Style Transfer: From-Scratch (VGG-19) vs. Pre-Trained (TF Hub)

Neural Style Transfer: From-Scratch (VGG-19) vs. Pre-Trained (TF Hub)

A practical, side-by-side walkthrough of two ways to stylize images: a custom VGG-19 approach you can fine-tune for unique brand looks, and a pre-trained TensorFlow Hub model that ships fast and scales easily. Includes links, code snippets, and the trade-offs product teams care about (control vs. speed, quality vs. effort).

Sep 7, 2025

Road Damage Detection at Scale: YOLOv5 Ensemble for Real-Time, Low-Cost Road Infrastructure Monitoring

Computer-Vision

Road Damage Detection at Scale: YOLOv5 Ensemble for Real-Time, Low-Cost Road Infrastructure Monitoring

Built and benchmarked a smartphone-first road-damage detector using YOLOv5 (with ensembling + test-time augmentation) and Faster R-CNN on the Global Road Damage Detection dataset. Achieved a top-5 leaderboard result (F1 0.68) across 121 teams while meeting a 0.5s/image inference target—enabling practical, low-cost deployment from dashboard-mounted phones. Includes a mapping concept (GPS → segment scores) to guide maintenance prioritization for DOTs and municipalities.

Sep 7, 2025

Smart Video Analytics: Motion Detection for Security & Monitoring

Computer-Vision

Smart Video Analytics: Motion Detection for Security & Monitoring

Led development of an intelligent video monitoring system that automatically detects moving objects in security footage. Successfully evaluated 8 different detection algorithms across 53 test videos, achieving 96% accuracy in ideal conditions and 82% in challenging lighting scenarios. This solution enables automated security monitoring, parking occupancy tracking, and retail analytics without requiring constant human oversight.

Oct 24, 2023

Apps I’ve built

Building StartupLeads.ai: Shipping a Micro-SaaS That Delivers Same-Week Fundraising Leads to Agencies

Product-Management

Building StartupLeads.ai: Shipping a Micro-SaaS That Delivers Same-Week Fundraising Leads to Agencies

This post walks through how I built StartupLeads through market research, customer interviews, MVP scoping & PRD, technical architecture, pricing tests, building growth loops and early results.

Sep 7, 2025

From Problem Discovery to MVP: How I Built BoostMyRank as a Micro-SaaS for Backlinks

Product-Management

From Problem Discovery to MVP: How I Built BoostMyRank as a Micro-SaaS for Backlinks

This post walks through how I built BoostMyRank through market research, 10 customer interviews, pricing validation at $249/mo, competitive analysis, MVP scoping & PRD, technical architecture, and a one-week build to launch an AI-assisted backlink service supported by an affiliate program.

Sep 7, 2025

Visualizing COVID-19 Cases & Deaths with a Live R Shiny Dashboard

Data Analysis | Python

Visualizing COVID-19 Cases & Deaths with a Live R Shiny Dashboard

An interactive Shiny app to explore NYT COVID-19 case and death data by state, county, and date using bar charts, scatter plots, lollipop charts, and maps.

Jun 1, 2020

Publications

Philippe Heitzmann (2022). A Computer Vision-assisted Approach to Automated Real-Time Road Infrastructure Management. In arXiv’s Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.

Code Dataset PDF