Protecting Forests with Satellite Imagery and Machine LearningPublished 12 May 2021 Unregulated deforestation practices are destroying the world’s forests at an alarming rate, with devastating effects on ecosystems and the global climate. How can contemporary data science techniques be used to combat unsustainable deforestation on a global level?  |
Active Learning: faster and cheaper than beforePublished 06 May 2021 The machine learning techniques we’ve got today are great, but are still left with some sizeable problems in their creation and use. Today I’ll be exploring what happens if you have very little data to work with.  |
The Social Media Echo Chamber: Man or Machine?Published 29 Apr 2021 In the days of snail mail, the idea of knowing what was happening on the other end of the world in anything close to real time was a pipe dream, or the stuff of adventure novels.  |
Errors and Bias - Variance DecompositionPublished 22 Apr 2021 One of the most popular applications of machine learning or data science in solving real-world problems is building meaningful models that could not only explain the variation in the target variable but also provide reliable predictions for unseen observations. But what if our model has high error metrics, what can we do to mitigate the situation?  |
Trading Stocks Based on SentimentPublished 15 Apr 2021 Quantitative Analysis is an ever growing field in finance that draws on Data Science skills to create trading strategies. In fact, the field is often so difficult that institutions often call for Math PhDs to develop their strategies. But what if we could subvert the intracies of developing complex models and instead trade stocks on the sentiment of the crowd.  |
Biased Data and Faulty Models: How can we mitigate these?Published 08 Apr 2021 Given their predictive accuracy and ease of creation, models trained on massive amounts of data are everywhere, and are increasingly used to inform important decisions. How much your insurance premium costs, whether you get a home loan or how much your next plane ticket costs are reduced to mathematical functions. They input your personal data as parameters and spit out a final value which guides the decision.  |
How You Can Get Involved In 'The Sexiest Job of The 21st Century'Published 25 Mar 2021 Half the term has passed, and you’re scrambling to watch the week two lectures at 2x speed, contemplating your life choices because you’re struggling to keep up with the boring burden of your uni degree. Or maybe you’re that top HD student who goes exploring beyond the scope of the course outline, with plenty of time for work, socialising, and making yourself competitive careers-wise.  |
Conversation with an AIPublished 11 Mar 2021 As AIs become increasingly powerful, they become more and more able to imitate, and generate human speech. Last time, I went on a long ramble on the fictional hypotheses about the societal, moral and philosophical questions that might eventually arise around AI. This time, I thought I might put the fictional to the test – by personally engaging with an AI myself.  |
Do Robots Dream?Published 15 Feb 2021 Since the advent of the technological age, as constant scientific breakthrough became the norm, the unknown future of a world changing more rapidly than ever more has captured the minds of countless artists, poets and writers. The future could no longer reliably be considered the mere extension of the past. Old knowledge was no longer secure in its vault. Anything could change at any moment. Could humankind journey to the centre of the earth? The bottom of the sea? The surface of the moon and the outer rim of space?  |
Essential Skills Checklist for Aspiring Data ScentistsPublished 28 Sep 2020 So you want to get hired as a data scientist, but just what skills do you need to qualify for the job? At DataSoc, we care about you and your career opportunities, and we want you to get your dream job in your dream field (assuming it’s data science. This might not be the blog post for you if you’re an aspiring screenwriter). So, today, we present a checklist of essential skills for every data scientists.  |
Natural Language Processing: The Love Child of Machine Learning and LinguisticsPublished 09 Sep 2020 Languages are, at their basis, systems for organizing smaller, less meaningful components into larger, more meaningful components. A string of sounds is a word, a string of words makes a sentences, a series of sentences becomes a paragraph, and enough paragraphs make a book, an essay, a speech, or whatever other form one might envision. Language – text, speech, tweets and so on – is one of the most common forms of data we are exposed to and produce. It’s one of the primary forms of human communication – but while we understand each other perfectly fine, is it possible for the computer to understand, and even participate, as well?  |
How people lie to your face – with factual numbers.Published 17 Aug 2020 “Numbers don’t lie…but people do.” As data-literate individuals in a data-drenched world, we need to keep our wits about us and retain our critical thinking when people present us with studies and visualisations that seem to have all the answers. Here’s why, with some examples.  |
Why bother with Uni Societies?Published 18 Jul 2020 Societies are a polarising subject among students - depending on who you ask, you may hear that “You have to participate in a uni society for your career!” or “Societies are toxic and cult-like”. So what’s the big deal? What are societies, why should you get involved, and why shouldn’t you get involved? In other words, Why bother?”  |
The Laborious Process of Pinning Down Data Science: A Tragedy in Five ActsPublished 18 Jul 2020 As a society whose name and purpose revolves around the field of data science, it seems fitting to take a step back and examine data science itself. What constitutes this degree and this career? It might be ‘the sexiest job of the 20th century’, but sexy is hardly precise or specific, especially when the subject is an academic field rather than the aesthetic appreciation of the human (or non-human) body.  |
Data Science and Data Analytics: What’s the Difference?Published 18 Jul 2020 More often than not, anything to do with data processing gets grouped under the umbrella term of data science. This can lead to bewilderment when terms such as data analytics come up, which, while sometimes used interchangeably with data science is in actuality reference an interconnected but distinct field. Both areas ripe with opportunity and worthy of study, it is important and useful to distinguish between them, and the differing skillsets they require and roles the play in the industry.
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