Yessenov Data Lab: the first graduates of the school received certificates!

August 4, at Almaty Management University there was a ceremony of awarding certificates to the graduates of the summer school Yessenov Data Lab.

As a result of intensive 8-week training, 21 students received a certificate of completion of the course.

On the day of the ceremony, students were divided into 4 teams and defended business cases from ATF Bank, First Credit Bureau, “greetgo!” and ChocoFamily.

The strongest specialists in the field of Big Data, including Dmitry Rusanov (EPAM Systems, Russia), Dmitriy Kotovenko (AGT International, Germany), Dean of AlmaU School of Engineering Management Kuanysh Abeshev, research professor of AlmaU Timur Bakibayev and others were carefully selected to the teaching staff of the summer school. Representatives of Kaspi Bank and Yandex.Money also held guest lectures for students. During 8 weeks of training, students learned to collect and process data, apply the latest algorithms, work with pattern recognition and neural networks.

"Strength of the course is that you can ask experts about ways of solving some real problems, get into small subtleties of algorithms, sometimes it takes a long time to reach them, because they do not lie on the surface. They themselves can be very trivial, but you need to know how to apply them in practice. Yes, and get acquainted with local firms, understand what real business needs to solve. It's worth a lot." Dmitry Rusanov shared with advantages of the summer school of analysts:

Mikhail Lipkovich (EPAM Systems, St. Petersburg) taught nonlinear methods of data analysis in the Summer School, which have their own specificity:

"Business wants the method to be simple and give predictable results. And in  analysis of the data you need to try different methods, and the wider your arsenal, the better you are as an analyst. At the same time, you never know which method works best, so you need to be able to try quickly different methods to make conclusions, make necessary changes and get the result. For one of tasks that we solved, it was necessary, having data (characteristics of apartments), to predict at what cost they could be sold. There were tasks related to image recognition".

According to Mikhail, work of a data analyst can be conditionally divided into 4 parts: "The first stage is to understand what needs to be done in terms of business - in our school we do not cover this stage. The second is to collect the data necessary for solving the problem - this stage we also do not cover. The third - when there is already data, to try with their help to solve the set business problem. This is the part that we covered. The fourth stage is to integrate algorithms into a working system, that is, to use the solution found in real life - we do not teach this either. And when they come to the company, our graduates will learn how to implement the remaining stages with experience, and the third one we analyzed in detail. "

According to the speaker, Yessenov Data Lab students are highly motivated: "In practical classes, they always invented something, tried to go beyond what was prescribed." Another school teacher, Marina Gorlova (analyst at Yandex.Money, St. Petersburg) agrees with this: "The participants are very inquisitive, they tried to get to the very essence of the subject and did not let me go until I answered all the questions. I really liked the audience - they really want to learn. While many of them do not have a strong background, most of them came from some other industries. It is amazing and delightful that the organizers of the project managed to select such participants ".

It should be noted, that selection of students for Yessenov Data Lab summer school was held in competitive form. 118 students from 8 cities of Kazakhstan claimed to participate in the summer school and only 21 of them had opportunity to study at Yessenov Data Lab.

Yessenov Data Lab Summer school for analysts was organized by Scientific-educational fund named after academician Sh.Esenov and Almaty Management University (AlmaU) in partnership with Kaspi Bank. According to the organizers, the summer school will be held next year.