We are in exciting and challenging times. The pace of change in data science industry is increasing by the day. It is difficult to understand the kind of impact data science would make to our life. I happened to be in my home town on the new years eve and caught up with some old buddies. One of them was a Chartered Accountant (CA), another one had his own clothing business and one of them was in professional education.
Surprisingly, none of them realized the impact data science and automation would have on their work. The CA believed that accounting requires too many human interventions to be automated even in next 5 – 10 years, the friend running clothing business had not heard about Internet of Things and the one in professional education said that professional education can not be moved to Open Courses as they don’t make people industry ready. None of them was thinking data either as an opportunity or a threat.
You could imagine how the next few hours would have gone with me being in the room!
The changing landscape
Take a step back and think what all happened in 2016. AlphaGo defeating Lee Sedol, Tesla adding self driving capabilities to its cars, chat bots revolutionising the way we interact with our customers, TensorFlow grew in popularity, early AI assistants in form of Google Assistant, Alexa, Cortana & Siri – these are just a few examples which come to top of the mind.
I am sure 2017 would be even more eventful. Data generation and number of connected devices would only increase. We would see better IoT platforms and their mass usage later in the year. We will see increasing number of AI bots coming out which can act as meaningful assistants. We are still some time away from a generic agent, but there are enough specific applications for an AI assistant. Sales of Amazon Alexa Dot during Christmas goes on to show some early signs of success.
The bottom line is irrespective of whether you like it or not, data science, machine learning & artificial intelligence will change your life and 2017 would be the first year when a layman start realizing the depth of this impact.
2017 for Analytics Vidhya
This changing landscape means a huge opportunity for Analytics Vidhya. Not only we will see more and more professionals entering in the industry, but we will also see the increased pace of up-skilling. Which means that we will continue to help our community members learn about the new tools and techniques. You will see more guides and tutorials coming on new areas like IoT, Artificial Intelligence and other data related domains.
But this year, we will take our engagement with you miles ahead. We will challenge you to participate in various competitions, skill tests and hackathons. And we will continue to find you the best jobs for you in the industry. We will provide you more opportunities to interact with the industry experts – our meetups, webinars and learnups will continue to do this for you.
This year, we will not measure our success on our penetration or the traffic on the website. We will measure our success by the number of users we engaged with and made a difference in their career.
Kickstart January 2017
We are all set to define the momentum for 2017 this month. We plan to bring you awesome guides, hackathons, jobs, webinars and meetups for you in January. You can check out the contests coming up here.
We will start the year with Skilltest on SQL and a Offline workshop in Chennai. SQL is a must have skill for every data professional and the event in Chennai is meant to provide mentorship and guidance to beginners in Chennai.
Later in the month, we have Strategic Ball and Deep Learning skill test. If you are a student from India, do check out Data Tales competition from Great Lakes Institute of Management.
What are you doing in 2017?
I am sure we will get you started with your learning and agenda. But, we would want to know, what are your plans for 2017? What areas do you plan to learn? Which tools and techniques will you plan to learn? What kind of competitions are you looking out for?
Do let us know through the comments below and we will make sure that we help you out in every possible manner through out the year.
Hope you have a rocking year 2017!
Learn, compete, hack and get hired!
Kunal is a post graduate from IIT Bombay in Aerospace Engineering. He has spent more than 10 years in field of Data Science. His work experience ranges from mature markets like UK to a developing market like India. During this period he has lead teams of various sizes and has worked on various tools like SAS, SPSS, Qlikview, R, Python and Matlab.
