YDL GRADUATES WON’T NEED TO JOB HUNT!

The Yessenov Data Lab (YDL) School for Data Analysts will take place from June 15 to July 10. Classes will be conducted on platforms such as Claude, GPT, and Gemini, using development tools including Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Jupyter Notebook, Anaconda, and NotebookLM.

During the first two weeks, students will study remotely. Courses in vibe coding and the fundamentals of machine learning will be taught by renowned Kazakhstani professionals, authors of the YDL academic curriculum and Doctors of Science – Associate Professor Kuanysh Abeshev and Professor Timur Bakibayev.

“This year, we set ourselves the goal of not only teaching the fundamentals of machine learning, but also boosting each participant’s productivity tenfold. Researchers will learn to delegate routine tasks to AI and focus on ideas. Analysts and engineers will learn to build agents capable of gathering necessary data from various sources. But the most important thing we want to teach is to understand data, find meaning in it, and take responsibility for outcomes, rather than simply relying on a model. This is exactly how the world’s strongest teams work today. Those who graduate from YDL with this skill won’t need to job hunt – the job will look for them, because there is currently a critical shortage of such specialists in Kazakhstan,” stated Kuanysh Abeshev, lecturer at the Summer School for Data Analysts.

According to the organizers of the educational intensive, within four weeks of training participants will be able to accomplish tasks that previously took several months. Each of them will graduate from YDL with a real project built on real data, which can be confidently presented to an employer or defended as a research study.

“Our students will work with the same stack used by the world’s top teams today. All work is carried out in the cloud via API, so a standard laptop without an expensive GPU is sufficient,” concluded Kuanysh Abeshev.

The third and fourth weeks of YDL will take place in Almaty at AlmaU University, a long‑standing partner of the Summer School. Classes will be conducted by specially invited lecturers: Saed Hussain, Doctor of Science, Lead Machine Learning Engineer at Sage UK, United Kingdom, and Carl Illustrisimo, a young Data Science researcher, Master’s student at UC Berkeley, USA. During the final two weeks of YDL, participants will study large language models and learn to develop AI agents.

As part of the School, all participants and lecturers will join a team building event, for which the Shakhmardan Yessenov Foundation will traditionally invite them to the Almaty mountains. According to Grigoriy Lee, Program Manager at the Yessenov Foundation, the charitable Foundation fully covers travel, accommodation, and meal expenses for all participants of the School who do not permanently reside in Almaty.

As a reminder, 159 candidates from all over Kazakhstan competed for 20 grants offered by the School, which provides training in Big Data, data analysis, the use of AI agents, and more. The competition was held in three stages. The first stage involved evaluating application documents, while the second focused on testing basic knowledge in mathematics and programming. The third stage was conducted as an interview to assess the personal qualities and motivation of the competitors.

Who made it onto the list of winners? Among them are natives of Kostanay and Shymkent, Kyzylorda and Almaty, Atyrau and Karaganda, as well as other cities across Kazakhstan. The YDL 2026 participants represent a wide range of specializations, including Information Systems, Biotechnology, Economics, Software Engineering, Data Science, and Chemical Engineering. The winners include students from Nazarbayev University (8), SDU (3), AlmaU, Kh. Dosmukhamedov Atyrau State University, KBTU, and L.N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University, as well as other Kazakhstani and international HEIs. The majority of the Yessenov Foundation grant recipients for training at YDL are undergraduate students of different years of study, while the winners also include a Master’s student and a researcher.

Over the past six years of the Yessenov Data Lab Summer School for Data Analysts, thanks to grants from the Shakhmardan Yessenov Foundation, more than 100 young Kazakhstanis – students, master’s and doctoral candidates, young scientists, specialists, and researchers – have gained expertise in the profession. This year, another 20 will join them.