Name:
Alkividis Vazacopoulos
Title:
Professor
Country:
United States
Organization:
Stevens Institute of Technology
Description:
Stevens Institute of Technology is a premier, private research university situated in Hoboken, N.J. overlooking the Manhattan skyline. Founded in 1870, technological innovation has been the hallmark and legacy of Stevens’ education and research programs for more than 140 years. Within the university’s three schools and one college, more than 6,100 undergraduate and graduate students collaborate with more than 350 faculty members in an interdisciplinary, student-centric, entrepreneurial environment to advance the frontiers of science and leverage technology to confront global challenges.
Awards Categories:
Challenge:
We’ve come across four main challenges on which Dataiku helped:
- Companies want to hire students who can attest that they know how to use Dataiku
This challenge is resolved with the Dataiku Academy and its certified Learning Path, and we’ve put together a special non credit course that the students can take in order to learn Dataiku.
- In our Business Analytics program for MBAs and Executive MBAs, the students do not have programming skills (R or Python)
Thanks to Dataiku’s visual interface, we have integrated Dataiku in the 600 and 610 BIA course for students to learn about Machine Learning and practice with several examples.
- Grading Python code is very tedious
Dataiku makes it more simple to track and assess progress in the Machine Learning course.
- Many times, we want to combine visual tools with Python code
This is easily handled in Dataiku, so that students can leverage the most relevant environment for each challenge.
Solution:
Dataiku has helped in many aspects:
- Collaboration, which also helps students learn from each other.
- Auto ML has helped a lot, especially with the ability for students to find if a specific data set can lead to relevant results.
- Students can improve their skills much faster thanks to the many different technologies available in Dataiku.
- Students can combine Python code with visual recipes to select the most efficient route for each step in their data workflow.
- Merging and cleaning data sets is very important for us, and made easy in Dataiku with just a few clicks.
For all those reasons, we are starting to use Dataiku in my industry capstone course!
Impact:
- Our students are currently using it for the Vaccination analytics summer project.
- Students from Fall 2020 classes I taught using Dataiku were hired by a major pharmaceutical company. Helping us teach the next generation of best-in-class data talents!
- Several projects have been completed using Dataiku.
- Undergraduate students were able to complete more advanced projects, such as sentiment analysis, and upskill with Dataiku.
