Summer School on Profession of Future – Data Analysis

From July 24th to 28th, 2017, a summer school on ‘Automatic text processing and data analysis’ took place at HSE MIEM. Thirty undergraduate, master’s and doctoral students from HSE, MIPT, MSU, Bauman State University, St. Petersburg State University, and other universities from Helsinki, Kazan, Chelyabinsk, and Yaroslavl spent their days studying machine learning and data analysis and solving problems in teams.

Comments by the teachers:

Eduard Klyshinskiy, head of the School, Associate Professor at HSE

The object of machine learning is a computer, a system. There is some data, which the system learns, and we check, whether it has learnt this well. If yes, we release it, so the system starts working and solving data analysis problems, which is the primary purpose.

Elena Bolshakova, Associate Professor at HSE

The demand for such work has been growing recently, due to the development of the internet. The volume of information, including text information, is constantly growing. In addition, people from other areas, such as physics, mathematics, engineering, and programing, are coming to text processing and data analysis today. Machine learning and data analysis is an interdisciplinary field.

Eduard Klyshinskiy

Data analysis is a profession of the future. And at the school, the students learn this profession. The school lasts five days, and each of them includes three lectures, one laboratory-based work, and a total of eight class hours, which sums up to 40. In fact, it equals a full semester-long data analysis course. Most importantly, the students get up-to-date information, first-hand knowledge, and have an opportunity to practice using their newly acquired skills.

Comments by the participants:

Katerina Voskoboinik, master’s student, Helsinki, on team work

We had a couple of days to get to know each other, and it wasn’t too embarassing to come up with some silly ideas.

Elizaveta Korotkova, graduate in mathematical linguistics of the St. Petersburg State University

As a linguist, I sometimes have a feeling that linguistics is not that necessary at the contemporary level of computer technology development, and computers can calculate everything. But thanks to this school’s lectures, I’m starting to shake off this feeling, and I feel happy that linguists are still in demand.