My first Data Science meetup
DS Unplugged: Data Science in Practice
One of the first decisions I’ve made when I started venturing into the Data Science world was to participate in as many events and meetups around my area that I could find. I’m lucky that Lisbon has seen an explosion in Data Science, startup and technology events in the last couple of years (the Web Summit being the most notable example).
I was especially interested in events targeted to beginners and that, if possible, would explore the transition from academia. And the first one I went to ticked all the checkpoints! It was a full day event called “Data Science in Practice” which took place on the 9th of February in Lisbon. It was organized by Data Science Unplugged, a community for all of those aspiring data scientists and dedicated to encourage Data Science thinking.
It was a very relaxed and well organised event, which focused mainly on the Statistics part of Data Science and the experience of practicing data scientists who also started their careers in the academia.
The event was essentially divided in two parts.
In the morning, we had a small workshop lead by DS Unplugged founder Saghir Bashir, who asked us to explore the first steps in any Data Science project, from obtaining and cleaning the data to asking the right questions, whose answers lead to decisions via statistical analysis, all before any coding is done (and there was no coding in this workshop).
We analysed an uplifting real life example: predicting the EU cancer mortality for the next decade! One of the most interesting activities was to find ways to restructure the data presented to us and combine them into a single table, suitable for exploratory data analysis. For a beginner like me, it was quite an eye-opening exercise. You can find the slides for this workshop here.
In the afternoon, we had several speakers describing their professional careers as they shifted from Engineering, Biology and Physics into different Data Science roles, such as in risk management, fraud fighting and even birds observation! They also discussed the challenges facing the industry and the trends for the next few months and years.
There was plenty of useful and interesting information presented to us, too much to properly summarise here. I quite enjoyed hearing the stories about the transition from the academic life to Data Science, and learning more about the work being made in some of the companies based in Lisbon.
Perhaps the most rewarding part of this event was to meet several people over the coffee breaks and lunch. One of them was a fellow theoretical physicist, Raquel Ribeiro, with whom I probably crossed paths when we were both in Cambridge and who also decided to move her career into Data Science.
This was only the first meetup I went to, and it was a fantastic experience. I already have a few other events coming up in the near future, the next one being DATA Science 2018 — in (Astro)Particle Physics and the Bridge to Industry, also in Lisbon, which I’m looking forward to.
