Nigeria’s leading Data Science group, Data Science Nigeria is now set for the second edition of its highly revered data science bootcamp aimed at bridging capacity gaps in Data Science for intermediate and expert-level Nigerian professionals and students who are interested in machine learning, R or Python programming languages and Statistics for advanced data analytics.
The goal of this initiative is to develop participants to become world class data analyst and data solution developers. This is part of an effort to make Nigeria the Data Science outsourcing hub for Africa before 2019 and to create 1 million new jobs during the next 10 years.
The bootcamp is expected to run for four days between Thursday, 12 October and Sunday, 15 October 2017 in the Lekki axis of Lagos State. The bootcamp will include face-to-face teaching, virtual online classes, and a hands-on hackathon using the Kaggle platform. The sessions will be facilitated by leading Nigerian data scientists and many international PhD-level data scientists, including both industry professionals and academics.
This second edition will be heralded by a national summit on the Big Data economy to discuss and showcase relevant case studies of how the application of data science is driving socio-economic development in emerging markets. Dr Yemi Kale, the Statistician General of the Federation will be the keynote speaker. The summit will also include robust industry discussions about real-world applications of data science in the economy, consumer behaviour, health, business, city planning, security, agriculture, manufacturing and logistics. The summit is scheduled to kick off the bootcamp on Thursday, 12 October 2017, and will showcase many local and international tools and algorithms from leading data science firms.
The bootcamp and the summit are supported by Microsoft, 4Afrika, Proshare Nigeria, the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics, OneFi, DataCamp, BusinessDay, TechCabal, Hagof Analytics, Xlytics, Kaggle, Keoun, and the Machine Intelligence Institute of Africa.
The free residential bootcamp comes with an explicit requirement. All the would-be participants are expected to complete a three-month course on the highly rated Microsoft Professional Certificate Track in Data Science on EDX.com. This will be followed by a Kaggle competition to select the best participants for the intellectually stimulating and career-enhancing bootcamp.
Microsoft 4Afrika will also be providing internship opportunities for the top 20 participants, and DataCamp will offer free access to some of its world-class training on datacamp.com.
The bootcamp will also include a very competitive hackathon aimed at using Nigeria-centric data to explore, extrapolate and explain local socio-economic issues. The Nigerian Bureau of Statistics and ProShare Nigeria will provide data support services to the participants.
Data Science Nigeria is a non-profit initiative of MTN’s executive, Bayo Adekanmbi. It is spurred on by a compelling drive to raise a new generation of world-class data scientists and knowledge entrepreneurs who will set up data science-based businesses and attract foreign exchange to Nigeria. This will position the country to access its fair share of the over $125 billion Big Data analytics market as foreign currency earnings.
For more information on how to enrol in the bootcamp, interested participants may visit www.datasciencenigeria.org or send an email to the event organiser at kayode_ledipo@yahoo.com.
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