The View from Eigenvector
EigenNews and EigenViews from Barry and the Eigenvector staff.

Chemometrics without Equations
Nov 29, 2022

In 1988 Donald Dahlberg, Professor of Chemistry at Lebanon Valley College (LVC), decided to take a sabbatical leave at the University of Washington (UW) Center for Process Analytical Chemistry (CPAC). At the time, his former student Mary Beth Seasholtz was a second year graduate student in Bruce Kowalski’s Laboratory for Chemometrics. Mary Beth asked Don […]
2022 Lake Chelan Valley Scholarships Announced
Aug 5, 2022
The Lake Chelan Valley Scholarship Foundation (LCVSF) will award 20 scholarships this year to college bound seniors and previous awardees. Recipients are from Chelan Valley schools including Chelan High School (CHS) and Manson High School (MHS). Two graduates from MHS class of ’22 will receive awards: Anthony Martinez and Francisco Munoz; seven members of CHS class of ’22: […]
Evaluating Models: Hating on R-squared
Jun 16, 2022
There are a number of measures that are used to evaluate the performance of machine learning/chemometric models for calibration, i.e. for predicting a continuous value. Most of these come down to reducing the model error, the difference between the reference values and the values predicted (estimated) by the model, to some single measure of “goodness.” […]
Python is free
Apr 5, 2022

PLS_Toolbox is not free. But you don’t have to be a dedicated data scientist to use PLS_Toolbox (or its stand-alone equivalent Solo). Many of its users are, but the real expertise of most users is in something else such as analytical instrumentation (typically spectroscopy) or the specific problem they are working on (e.g. chemical process […]
We used to call it “Chemometrics”
Feb 23, 2022

The term chemometrics was coined by Svante Wold in a grant application he submitted in 1971 while at the University of Umeå. Supposedly, he thought that creating a new term, (in Swedish it is ‘kemometri’), would increase the likelihood of his application being funded. In 1974, while on a visit to the University of Washington, […]
Remembering Svante
Jan 6, 2022
Svante Wold passed away on January 4, 2022, at the age of 81. In the fields of chemometrics and data science, there is no need to use his last name. If you say “Svante,” everybody knows who you are talking about. I first met Svante almost 30 years ago at the Chemometrics in Analytical Chemistry […]
Under Same (Old) Management
Oct 21, 2021

That’s not a headline you see very often. Usually it’s “Under New Management.” But here at Eigenvector Research we’re proud of our stability. I wrote the first version of our MATLAB-based PLS_Toolbox while I was in graduate school thirty-one years ago. I still oversee its development along with our other software products. In 1990 Partial […]
Lake Chelan Valley Scholarships for 2021 Announced
Aug 3, 2021

For 2021 the Lake Chelan Valley Scholarship Fund (LCVSF) will award 18 scholarships to college bound seniors and previous awardees currently attending. Recipients are from Chelan Valley schools including Chelan High School (CHS) and Manson High School (MHS). Included this year are three graduates from MHS class of ’21: Jonathan Fernandez, Cody Fitzpatrick and Zoe […]
The Model_Exporter Revolution
Jan 28, 2021
The development of a machine learning model is typically a fairly involved process, and the software for doing this commensurately complex. Whether it be a Partial Least Squares (PLS) regression model, Artificial Neural Network (ANN) or Support Vector Machine (SVM), there are a lot of calculations to be made to parameterize the model. These include […]
New Year, New Courses and Webinars
Jan 12, 2021
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2020 we offered many online courses, over 100 hours of lectures in total (not counting the classes we did for specific clients). We gave ourselves a break towards the end of the year but we’re now re-energized and ready to get going again. Our first webinar of the […]
Year 27
Jan 5, 2021
And so it begins again! For the 27th time I’ve gotten up on the first business day of January looking forward to a new year with Eigenvector Research. The overall plan doesn’t change much: keep improving the software, provide training in data science/chemometric methods and help clients with their challenging data problems. But the details! […]
LCVSF 2020 Scholarships Announced
Aug 4, 2020
The Lake Chelan Valley Scholarship Fund has announced 15 award recipients for 2020. The scholarships go to college bound seniors from Chelan Valley schools including Chelan High School and Manson High School, and also renewals for previous award recipients. This year’s crop includes three graduates from this year’s MHS class: Brenda J. Alonso Arreola, Nadia […]
How to Run a Webinar or Online Course
Jul 8, 2020
We started running “how to” webinars with our chemometrics software in the Fall of 2019. When COVID hit we decided to step up the frequency of these, and to add short courses. Up to now we’ve done ten webinars and five short courses running from 2-5 days each. Both have been quite popular. We’ve had […]
Sociopaths, Enablers and Due Diligence
Apr 15, 2020
I just finished reading “Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup” by John Carreyrou. It is the story of Theranos and its founder Elizabeth Holmes. Our Bob Roginski sent it to me after I mentioned that I’d seen the HBO documentary “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley.” I highly recommend […]
COVID-19 Upate: Still Here to Help You
Mar 18, 2020
As with most of you, we here at Eigenvector are very concerned about the COVID-19 outbreak and its impact on our families, friends, customers and communities. We continue to monitor its evolution closely, especially in regard to our employees and their families. The direct effect of COVID-19 on the daily business of Eigenvector, however, is […]
Chimiométrie 2020: Models, Models Everywhere!
Feb 4, 2020
Domain Knowledge and the New “Turn Your Data Into Gold” Rush
Jan 29, 2020
A colleague wrote to me recently and asked if Eigenvector was considering rebranding itself as a Data Science company. My knee-jerk response was “isn’t that what we’ve been for the last 25 years?” But I know exactly what she meant: few people have heard of Chemometrics but everybody has heard about Data Science. She went […]
UW ChemE Graduates Barry M. Wise and Neal B. Gallagher Celebrate 25 Years at Eigenvector Research
Jan 3, 2020
Eigenvector Research, Inc. (EVRI) was founded by UW Chemical Engineering graduates Barry M. Wise and Neal B. Gallagher on January 1, 1995 and celebrated its 25th anniversary. EVRI is largely based on data science methods in chemistry, i.e. chemometrics, that Wise researched during his graduate work under the supervision of Professors N. Lawrence Ricker and […]
Eigenvector Turns 25
Jan 1, 2020
Eigenvector Research, Inc. was founded on January 1, 1995 by myself and Neal B. Gallagher, so we’re now 25 years old. On this occasion I feel that I should write something though I’m at a bit of loss with regards to coming up with a significantly profound message. In the paragraphs below I’ve written a […]
Everybody’s Welcome in the Eigenvector Sandbox
Nov 20, 2019
When I was a kid I was lucky to have a great sandbox. The fact that it was on the shores of Lake Chelan made it especially nice, but there were a lot of other things that made it great. First off, it was big enough for several kids to play in at the same […]