Data science education
As many of you know, I have been involved in the space of data science education for a long time. Either through my work with universities like University College London, or London Business School, or the Tesseract Academy, I have always been working hard on helping people of all backgrounds understand how data science can help them, and their businesses.
One of the most common questions I get from CEOs, and CTOs is: “Can my developers use library X to build a machine learning model?”. This is a tough question to answer. There are many things that can be done using Python libraries and various tools. However, this can leave someone open to many problems. If you lack fundamental knowledge in data science, it is easy to make critical mistakes. That’s why it is rarely as easy as simply using up a library.
A company can always hire a data scientist to do this, but at the same time, this is not something easy. Hiring is complicated, and finding the right people is not simple. Plus, if you want to create a new system, you need to integrate it within the existing IT infrastructure. A new data scientist would have to learn about this system and how it works. This simply complicates things and increases the time needed to build the solution.
Beyond Machine
I had been thinking about how this problem could be solved, and what I came up with was the Beyond Machine. This is a format which combines education with mentoring. This format ensures that a software developer acquires the necessary skills to deliver a solution, within 6 weeks, while at the same time being mentored by an expert data scientist.
So, let’s say, for example, that a company wants to build a recommender system. This is an area of interest for any B2C company. Our recommender systems bootcamp, covers all the fundamentals of recommender systems that someone needs to know: from basic techniques like content-based filtering, to collaborative filtering. But it is not just about the content, since, in theory, you could also learn all that from a book.
The mentoring, experience, however, is invaluable. You get to practice what you’ve learned, and by the end of the program, the company will have a fully functioning recommender system. And the best part is that the bootcamp costs a fraction of the price of what you’d pay to hire a data scientists
So, the benefits are clear:
- The company gets an upskilled and happy developer.
- A fully working system.
- And at a fraction of the cost it would take to hire someone new!
Get in touch now if you want to learn more! Visit Beyond Machine to learn more about our bootcamps. And if you are interested in data science, make sure to join my on-demand webinar where I talk about what it’s like to be a data scientist.