Understanding Data science is becoming one of the most demanded skill sets in the 21st-century job market. Data are flowing everywhere in ever-evolving magnitude. Storing them is costly, and business better finds ways how to turn them into profit. In some industries, the so-called ‘trickle-down’ effect is slowly observable, as medium-sized companies are now trying to surf the Big Data …
Archive: 2019
Book Review: Code Complete by Steve McConnell
Let’s be honest: here at Profinit we really do like Steve McConnell. Our internal methodology of estimates is pretty much based on the principles listed in his book Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art. Moreover, we are always willing to defend the cone of uncertainty, and his programming bible ‘Code Complete’ has become an integral part of our internal career …
3 common pitfalls in building a Data Science team
by Petr Paščenko, Head of Data Science at Profinit In the last few years, I have seen several attempts to build a good data science/machine learning team both at Profinit as well as with our clients. Over time, I have observed several notorious anti-patterns, which tend to be very common in the field. Here are the three most noteworthy examples of such pitfalls: …
Passenger Terminal Expo 2019 in London
Passenger Terminal Expo is rightfully called the biggest and most important conference in the airport industry. Where else could you listen to the visions and opinions of significant innovators in the field, or pose direct questions to leading IT engineers of the world’s biggest airports? The three days long event has a 20+ year record of annual meet-ups. People from all …
Big-Data.AI Summit 2019 in Berlin
A conference review. Last week, Berlin became the focal point of all things Big Data & AI. The summit brought together a rather diverse bunch of 8000+ visitors: from students, AI enthusiasts, small start-ups, and journalists all the way to research scientists, big data companies and business stakeholders from various industries (banking, telco, automotive to name a few). The main themes of …
4 most important applications of Data science in Banking
The Banking/Financial sector is just one of the many industries, which benefits hugely from data science-driven insights. With a natural affinity for numbers and quantitative methods, it surprises no one that it was one of the early adopters of Data Science, Machine Learning, and AI to generate more revenue. While applications are endless and the research questions will be different in …
Review: DataWorks Summit 2019 in Barcelona
Last week, our Head of Data Science, Petr Paščenko, and Data Scientist Sergii Stamenov attended the DataWorks Summit #DWS19 held in Barcelona. Here are some of their brief impressions: As the event was hosted by Cloudera, the upcoming merge with Hortonworks was a hot topic. For a data scientist, it is positive to hear that the plan is to keep Hadoop available …
What is Data Science? or How to explain data science to your grandma?
Despite being one of the most hyped-up job titles of the 21st century, explaining what a data scientist actually does so that your grandma would understand can often be challenging. There is still a vast proportion of the population out there that have never even heard this term before. Whether you are an aspiring data scientist or someone whose job description still …
Unused riches at your fingertips
Have you ever tried digging deeper into your company data warehouse? Perhaps you found one or two skeletons in the cupboard, but maybe also a hidden golden vein. If you haven’t, then it’s about time you roll your sleeves up and start the data mining! We live in the age of information and it has been said often enough that data …
Database Systems in Practice
As every year, at the end of summer I updated the lectures for the course called Database Systems in Practice that we teach at universities. This time I decided to radically update our computer workshop material. For my students, I have the same environment prepared on various database servers. The students look for errors in the relational model, write scripts for changes in …