GRIDS partnered with the International Data Engineering and Science Association (IDEAS) again this fall and had 40+ members sign up to attend the conference. We enjoyed a full day of sessions in tracks like AI, Big Data, and FinTech at the Los Angeles Convention Center, just a hop, skip, and jump away from USC. We look forward to continuing this partnership through the years!
On Thursday, 10/24, Keith Burghardt, a computer scientist at USC Information Sciences Institute, gave a talk on visualizing and analyzing graphs in Python. We really enjoyed your presentation, Keith - thanks so much!
Our second data science talk of the semester was from Mozhdeh Gheini, first-semester Ph.D. student working with Professor Jonathan May at the USC Information Sciences Institute. She presented on the topic of “What You Need to Know to get Started with NLP”, the area she focuses in. Thank you for the great evening, Mozhdeh!
For our first data science talk of Fall 2019, we had the pleasure of hosting Thamme “TG” Gowda on the topic of Best Practices for Research Reproducibility Using Python. TG, a Computer Science Ph. D. student at Viterbi and research programmer at USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI), took us through the why’s, the what’s, and the how’s of creating elegant, reusable, and reproducible code. We really appreciate you sharing your vast knowledge, TG!
At our Fall 2019 Kickoff meeting we announced that GRIDS was trying something different this year - namely, we would be partnering with the USC Center for Knowledge-Powered Interdisciplinary Data Science (CKIDS), headed by Dr. Yolanda Gil, to work on faculty-led projects ranging from studying video game communities to Catalina Island coastlines. GRIDSters excitedly listened to project descriptions delivered by USC researchers and signed up for the ones that interested them most. These projects, along with our traditional student-led projects, will make this our best semester yet!
What a way to to start the new year - it was standing-room-only at our kickoff event for Fall 2019. New and returning students from a variety of academic backgrounds came to learn how they can pursue and refine their passion for data science by joining GRIDS. We are excited to work and learn with you this semester!
Thanks to all that made it out to GRIDS Presents last night - what a way to end the semester! Students, faculty, and industry members enjoyed three presentations showcasing the work from three of our teams:
Behavioral Context Recognition
Detecting Diabetic Retinopathy Using CNNs
Detective of Los Angeles: Crime Data Investigator
Partnering with USC AAAI, our very own Samar Haider gave a presentation on Deep Learning to an enthusiastic crowd of aspiring AI technologists from GRIDS, AAAI, and other student organizations. For all those who could not attend and for those who may wish to view the presentation again, the slides can be found here.
For our first industry event of the year, members of the Data & Analytics team from Slalom Consulting LA gave a talk on Data Science in Consulting. They described their philosophy and approach to data science/machine learning projects, took us through some real-world client projects, and gave a demo on Amazon Sagemaker. It was a fun and valuable experience for everyone that attended. Thank you, Slalom!
We got off to a great start this semester with a packed house of data science enthusiasts - pizza was at a premium by the time we got going! We met many new students from informatics, computer science, and data science backgrounds that were excited to learn through doing.