SCHOOL FOR DATA SCIENTISTS LAUNCHED IN ALMATY

Data Analyst— a profession that school graduates will receive — is one of the demanded and highly paid in the world today. The shortage of professionals in this specialty in the US alone is estimated at 180 thousand people. The demand for data analysts in Kazakhstan is growing every day. According to the initiators of the project, during 8 weeks the participants will be learning how to collect, process and visualize data, studying large amounts of data and optimizing existing business processes. At the classes, participants will be recognizing images, working with neural networks, solving problems on the Kaggle. The last two weeks of the school, her students will devote to solving project problems, real business cases, that will become a kind of exam. Galimzhan Yessenov, the foundation’s founder, noted that the project aims to train analysts, promote the use of data analysis in science and stimulate research activities in this field, as well as the use of data analysis skills in Kazakhstan organizations and companies.

— About 120 people competed for a place at Yessenov Data Lab. This profession in our country is getting more and more of important. We cover all expenses for lecturers and students. Disciples who successfully complete the course will receive a certificate of data analysis specialist. We are sure that none of the graduates will be left unemployed, — told Ilzira Aldagarova, Program Manager of the Yessenov Foundation, initiated the school.

Among the winners are representatives of 8 cities of Kazakhstan, seven participants of Yessenov Data Lab are females. The aim of the project is to train analysts, promote the use of data analysis in science and stimulate research activities in this field and the use of data analysis skills in Kazakhstan organizations and companies. The leading experts in this field will be lecturing at the school. Among them are Dmitry Kotovenko (AGT International, Frankfurt) and Marina Gorlova (Yandex.Money, St. Petersburg), Professors of AlmaU Kuanysh Abeshev and Timur Bakibayev, obtained doctoral degree in the United States and Germany, as well as Mikhail Lipkovich and Dmitry Russanov (EPAM Systems, St.Petersburg).

— We will devote most of the time to solving applied problems using state-of-the-art machine learning technologies. Data science requires a lot of skills and extensive knowledge, and it’s not always easy for beginners to understand where to start. The topics of my introductory week will be: to remove such fears, to describe the general structure of questions and problems of data analysis, to give an opportunity to try basic algorithms on real data and to explain the importance of these algorithms, that have not received such a “hype” as, say, neural networks,— said Dmitry Russanov.

The need for the profession is dictated by the fact that today we are talking about too large amounts of data that need to be processed, with which the standard means of mathematical statistics are not able to cope.

— The demand for specialists in the country is much higher than supply, so such schools should be held regularly. In addition, for many mathematicians and programmers it is a good chance to retrain and try something new. During the selection, the applicants showed an incredible interest in this area. I am sure that the participants of our school will learn a lot and will be able to raise the overall level of the country in the field of data analysis, — Timur Bakibayev expressed his hope.

The profession “Data Scientist ” (data analyst) is officially registered as an academic and cross-sectoral discipline in early 2010, and the associated term “Big Data” appeared in 2008.