Data Science Retreat
Berlin, Jan 2014
http://datascienceretreat.com/
Introduction to the first Data Science school in Europe
Meet Stefan, he's the Chief data scientist of bigCompany.
They wanted to go 'all in' with big data, but needed people capable of taming it.
Stefan found an ex academic; but he couldn’t put in production what he
designed. His coding skills were mediocre
What do you mean ‘sub-
second queries by Monday’?
Stefan found a great programmer, but he didn't know any machine learning
nor stats
What do you mean ‘improve predictions two
standard deviations’?
When talking to the CEO, he didn’t understand them, nor how they could
produce value for the company
€?
Stefan finally hired Ben, a candidate that was good at math, programming, and
understood the business side!
Then Laura, Stefan’s friend, pointed him to
Data Science Retreat… an intensive course helping selected fellows
ramp-up fast for a career in data science. “Tell me more…”. Stefan was very interested.
Curriculum:
• Formulating the analytical
problem
• Getting data (APIs, feature
engineering)
• Finding insights, making
predictions
• Regression
• Classification
• Recommendation (clustering)
• Mathematical fundamentals
• R as a programming language
• Data at scale
• Hadoop ecosystem
• Distributed machine learning
• Software engineering, solid
implementation practices
• Telling the story, making the case
• Communication skills
• Visualization (D3, shiny)
Methodology
• Ten students per batch
• Pair programming and code reviews with mentors (guild model)
• Datasets come from companies (non-NDA only)
• Portfolio project, where the fellow demonstrates what he can do
end-to-end to deliver value
• Weekly presentation training to improve communication to non-
technical stakeholders (video feedback)
Stefan could interview ten
data scientists that were
as good as Ben.
He hired three, an they jumped into
their roles with little training.
Stefan was Ecstatic!
How It works
• Companies can enter recruitment agreements at ¼ first year’s
salary. Interviews happen at the end of the course
• Selected partners can sponsor data Science retreat in
exchange for privileged access to the students during the course,
influencing the curriculum, providing datasets of their interest,
etc. A full ‘outsourced internship’, building a relationship over
weeks instead of having a one-shot interview
• Additionally, the recommended gold sponsorship (30.000€)
offers:
oBranding on website, offices, and all presentations mentors do
during 2014
oFirst-pick; candidates will only be presented to other
companies after the gold sponsor is done
How It works
Data Science RetreatContact:
Jose Quesada, PhD,Director, Data Science Retreat Berlin
DO you want to be a sponsor?