The event was organized to provide insight & understanding about the purpose of the Data Science Association, to discuss the stepping stones to get started on the learning path of Data Analysis, Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence, and lastly, propose and discuss future activities that can be organized and implemented as part of the DSA. The event was attended by the faculty members and undergraduate and postgraduate students of Data Science. Approximately 150 attendees were present.
The session started at around 11:10 AM, beginning with the welcome address by the emcee of the session Nihal Thapa, who shared the details of the four clubs under DSA, namely Data Analytics, AI & ML, Data Security, and Coding. Dr Samiksha addressed the participants and shared her expectations from the batch of 2020 with regard to the club activities. This was followed by the address of the Academic Coordinator, Dr Fr Arun Antony.
The first session was a presentation by the guest speaker, Mr Chandra Shekhar Gupta Aravapalli, who is a Data Science Scholar at Ariba Sourcing, SAP Ariba. Mr Shekhar discussed what Data Science is, and how it can be beneficial to apply insights generated from data to real-life scenarios. For instance, making key business decisions or using recommendation systems to find good media suggestions. The examples provided by him were really helpful in understanding these applications. He also provided some helpful resources to start learning about data science and addressed few queries from the audience relating to AI, bias removal, and the future of machine learning.
The next session was conducted jointly by Mr Akshat Ahuja, Scholar and DevOps, production Service Team, SAP Labs India; Mr Vipul Siddharth, CI Software Engineer, Fedora, Red Hat, Bengaluru, India; Mr Prakash Mishra, Site Reliability Engineer, Rapyuta Robotics, Bengaluru, India and Mr Yasharth Singh, CTO, SimplifyCV Software Pvt. Ltd, Bengaluru, India. They provided the students with several tips & pointers on the importance of staying connected to the industry and how hackathons and talks by industry experts helped them gain a perspective. Most of these learnings were rooted in their own personal experiences as students. They also emphasised the importance of maintaining the principles of humility, inclusion, cooperation and being a learner & mentor at the same time. The last part of the session was an interactive session, during which these industry experts discussed some queries brought forward by the students, mainly regarding careers, research projects and preferable operating systems.
