Book Review: Machine Learning for Kids

I greatly enjoyed reading and reviewing this delightful new book, Machine Learning for Kids: A Project-based Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, by Dale Lane, which was developed to introduce machine learning technology to children. It is well-written and includes everything needed to jump-start a kid’s life in data science. The book is just the thing to motivate a young person to extend their innate curiosity to data centric experimentation.

New Research Suggests Young Digital Natives Lack the Data Literacy Employers Crave — But Is It All a Big Misunderstanding?

Exasol, a leading high performance analytics database company, launched the findings of its new study into the attitudes and understanding that young people currently in higher education or just entering the world of work have towards data. The study of 3,000 16- to 21-year-olds (coined D/NATIVES by Exasol because of their everyday digital skills) finds that despite over half of respondents believing that their ability to understand data will be as vital to their future as their ability to read and write — only 43% actually consider themselves to be data literate.

ACM Issues Computing Competencies for Undergraduate Data Science Curricula

Recognizing the explosive growth of data science as a field, as well as the demand for data science training at the undergraduate level, a Data Science Task Force convened by the Association for Computing Machinery’s Education Board recently released “Computing Competencies for Undergraduate Data Science Curricula.” The ACM report seeks to define what the computing/computational contributions are to this new field, as well as to provide guidance on computing-specific competencies in data science for departments offering such programs of study at the undergraduate level.

Mistakes to Avoid When Starting a Career in Data Science

In this contributed article, IT and digital marketing specialist Natasha Lane, highlights how the shortage of data science talent is dramatic, but there are still a few mistakes you can make getting your foot in the door. These are the types of mistakes that can slow down your initial career progress, so the article covers them to help you make sure you’ll avoid the pitfalls.

How Third-party Data Can Enable Better Business Insights

Join this virtual event with Stephen Orban, author of Ahead in the Cloud and General Manager of AWS Data Exchange. He will lead a panel discussion with AWS customers to discuss the innovative techniques being used in data pipelines, with data analysis, and for data visualization. You will hear about real-world initiatives and breakthroughs being enabled by third-party data.

Academia and Industry Meet to Reimagine the AI Graduate

In this contributed article, Alan Mc Glinchey, VP of Emerging Growth Companies at IDA Ireland, discusses how higher institutions are building out their course rosters as the AI talent gap spans new markets. In this area, Ireland has an innovative approach that has yielded a ready supply of AI talent in recent years.

KDD 2020 Celebrates Recipients of the SIGKDD Best Paper Awards

KDD 2020, the premier interdisciplinary conference in data science (which took place virtually Aug. 23-27, 2020), announced the recipients of the SIGKDD Best Paper Awards, recognizing papers presented at the annual SIGKDD conference that advanced the fundamental understanding of the field of knowledge discovery in data and data mining. Winners were selected from more than 2,000 papers initially submitted for consideration to be presented at the conference.

KDD 2020 Showcases Brightest Minds in Data Science and AI

The Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (ACM SIGKDD) will hold its flagship annual conference, KDD 2020, virtually, August 23-27. The KDD conference series, started in 1989, is the world’s oldest and largest data mining conference, and is the venue where concepts such as big data, data science, predictive analytics and crowdsourcing were first introduced.

How to Launch Your Data Science Career

Are you interested in getting into the field of data science? We don’t blame you. Data science is an exciting field that’s constantly changing and developing, which gives data scientists’ work endless potential. Here are six tips for ways that you can launch your data science career.

UCLA DataFest Winners Announced, Presentations Posted

For the annual UCLA DataFest, student worked hard with data pertaining to the monumental challenge we are all facing: COVID-19. This year’s virtual version of ASA DataFest at UCLA brought forth unforeseen challenges and wonderful opportunities. This beloved tradition is generally a competition wherein groups of three to five students have just 48 hours to make sense of a huge data set and present their findings in five minutes, using just two slides.