Monday 6 March '23 at 8.30 AM, the students of sem 4 MBA Operations were introduced to the field of Practical Data Science by Ms. Maryam Naqvi who is the Director of OPIS, a Dow Jones listed Data Science company in US.
Amazon and Google are the two large global organisations in the present day world that have large humungous amounts of data to analyse, study and to draw insights from. Amazon describes Data Science as -
the study of data to extract meaningful insights for business.
It is a multidisciplinary approach that combines principles and
practices from the fields of mathematics, statistics, artificial
intelligence, and computer engineering to analyze large amounts of data
The interaction on understanding Data Science was very timely and appropriate for the students. Amazed up with all theoretical inputs with less business insights, this interaction will get the interested student all charged up. The interactions from the practicing industry expert Ms. Naqvi started with what were the basics and aspects of Data Science that a student planning to join this field should look for.
- what data is being managed or handled
- the eye for detail
- how is the competition operating and
- what is the level of customer satisfaction the organisation can provide.
Once this question is answered naturally everyone would be interested in knowing how can Machine Learning help humans and society ?
Machine Learning can help us in many ways, the foremost being
- in modeling decision making
- improving customer experience
- improve the efficiency of the process
- reducing costs
- supply chain optimisation and product innovation
The different domains in which data science / AI can help us is varied the most prominent ones being
- travel,
- marketing, up-selling, cross-selling, identifying lifetime value of customers,
- area of health care in image analysis,
- social media analytics,
- HR in identifying the means and ways of motivating the workforce,
- improving the pace and effectiveness in the learning industry,
- credit, insurance industry in fraud prevention etc..
Benefits of learning Data Science include
- gaining customer insights
- inform internal finances / reporting to senior leadership / enabling decision making
- predict future market trends
- streamline manufacturing and
- increase security of operations
Ms. Naqvi also spoke at length on how interdisciplinary collaboration can be implemented. It includes having good
- data understanding
- business understanding
- communication across the organisation
- implementation of the collaboration plan and
- evaluation of the collaboration plan
Ms. Maryam spoke of how collaboration between technology and business experts can benefit organisation specially by
- creating functional teams
- joint problem solving / ideation
- ongoing communication
- training and education and
- shared language of technology / interactions etc
Ms. Naqvi spoke on the trends in the data science area that any student should focus on if he / she is interested in having a future in the data science area
- scaling and operationalisation of AI
- rise in AI adoption
- rise of new roles and responsibilities
- up-skilling
- increasing engagement with the customers and
- delivering more personalised experience to the customers
Finally she spoke to the students on how they can develop a plan for their Data Science future
- develop strong foundation
- develop critical thinking
- apply data insights
- communicate with technical and non-technical people
- choose an area of specialisation - specialise in whatever small domain partnering with others or as team
- seek out internships
- network with industry professionals
- gain additional certifications
- practice Data Science tools for daily work
The speaker did talk of the security, bias, certification aspects of Data Science as answers to student queries. Bias could be avoided by training the ML model on truly varied collections of data across demography, classes, races, time zones etc. She was of the opinion that getting the required certification in the area from the Data Science Society of US had maximum weightage and would take students in the right trajectory. Ms. Naqvi also recommended the text book Data Science for Business by Tom Fawcet.
The session ended on a very positive note when AI would impact al areas of human activity and listed out the future trends and promise of AI interventions in almost allareas of human activity.
She made it a point to stress that mundane repetitive no-brain actions will all get eliminated in no time with the arrival of chatGPT and other AI tools, the only activities that will remain are the creative, innovative and cognitive activities requiring emotional intelligence and empathy.
George..
No comments:
Post a Comment