Now, More Than Ever, The World Needs More Data Scientists
Every day, all around the world, we are being bombarded with messages about how we can help stop the spread of COVID-19 by washing our hands, keeping our distance, and simply staying at home. Can we be useful even in this condition, be creative, be impactful?
Even from home, there are other ways that data scientists can help with the management of the pandemic. For example, many of the visualizations that you will come across on news media, disease tracking reports that are widely available drawn with this technology, are the result of advanced analytics, some even include artificial intelligence in the form of predictions and estimations.
Some of the Scientists are also using text mining and other analytics techniques to carry out research into treatments. You can support this research using a dataset published by the White House containing 29,000 articles via Kaggle.
Closer to home, my colleague Gerhard Svolba is sharing some of his recent presentations at conferences.
His idea is to share information about advanced tools and techniques that he has found useful in recent projects, as a way to help data scientists stuck at home to improve their skills.
These are all good ways to improve and draw on the skills of existing data scientists. However, we also need to train brand new data scientists, because there is no doubt that we will need their skills more than ever in the coming future. I caught up with SAS Turkey General Manager Tayfun Topkoç to discuss a new initiative called “Digital Technology Developers” Program.
Nihan: Tayfun, can you tell us a bit more about the “Digital Technology Developers” Program? What is SAS’s goal kickstarting this initiative?
Tayfun: It is a program in advanced analytics and artificial intelligence, carried out jointly by SAS and the Turkey Informatics Foundation (TBV). Our long-term goal is to reach over thousands of young people at universities, providing them with both online and in-class training to develop data science skills and join the future workforce.
How did the project start?
As we have seen with the outbreak of COVID-19, using data to analyze situations and provide a basis for decisions and actions in a rapid manner can be very critical. Working together with Turkey’s major universities, we at SAS decided that it was important to try to increase the level of data science skills in the country. This should be a good way to support and accelerate digitization too.
What has been done under this program so far?
We started partnering Top universities in Turkey, Boğaziçi University and Sabancı University, working in cooperation with the Turkish Informatics Foundation on a program to increase data literacy, analytics maturity, and expertise. We have also held a week’s training program with our new participating universities,
· Istanbul Technical University,
· Yildiz Technical University,
· Gazi University, and
We now have eight major universities throughout Turkey that got the “Train the trainer” program and will be delivering courses on data science under the program, through this 2020 academic year. The leading academics from 12 universities have put together this training, and we aim to reach thousands of young people over the next few years.
If you want to reach up-to-date information about our program, you can find information from this link.
Universities that want to participate in the program can reach us via selin.ozdinc@sas.com.
We have free online classes for our university students. You can find these resources on our SAS Software Certified Young Professionals page.
We also have online training options for professionals. It is available on this link.
And how will this help us to tackle COVID-19?
Well, it will provide more data scientists, which can only be good. Projects are springing up around the world to draw on the skills of data scientists to answer some of the big questions around the pandemic. For example, SAS has extended the partner hackathon environment for new use cases related to the virus, and also set up an international, distributed task force working on COVID-19.
If you are thinking that there are already plenty of hackathons, my response is that there are also plenty of problems, and we need all the help we can get! Our young data scientists in Turkey will be trained in the use of the SAS Viya platform as part of their course, so they will be able to make a contribution from a very early stage — maybe even as part of their course.
Tayfun, thank you very much.
Nihan Yami
Systems Engineer, SAS
