E is for Eskwelabs Issue 058 - Dreaming and creating a better future with data ✨🎨
In our fifty-eighth issue, we close August and the theme “Dynamism” by looking into the most dynamic happenings in Eskwelabs and around the tech world.
We created this newsletter to keep our alums, partners, and anyone interested in learning skills for the future of work updated and connected to our ever-growing family. If you want to read our previous issues, you can check them out here.
Hi everyone, it’s Francine here! 👋 Our second August issue came a bit later than usual—yup, I am down sick with COVID, but I won’t let this dampen my spirits. 🤗 Writing this issue has been a joy and morale boost! Alrighty, we have a DYNAMIC issue for you all today, and we hope the content in here will serve as a satisfying conclusion to our August theme “Dynamism.” Happy reading!
What’s in this newsletter:
🚀 Learning about the capstone projects from the recent Demo Day
🖼️ Staying updated with the latest trends in tech (and data!)
🍵 Reflections on improving gender diversity in data science
📖 Sharing our Eskwelabs Library in honor of National Book Lover’s Day
READING TIME: 13 minutes
✨ DREAMING A BETTER FUTURE WITH DATA ✨
🚀 Learning about the capstone projects from the recent Demo Day
🌟 What in the world is “Demo Day?”
Demo day is very common in the startup industry. These are events organized by incubators and accelerators, wherein the participating startup founders pitch their ideas to a room full of potential investors, with the hope of securing an investment for their business.
In Eskwelabs’ case, Demo Day is a day of celebration—a celebration of the students’ capstone projects, which represent everything they’ve gone through in the whole duration of the bootcamp.
💼 What were the capstone projects of our Cohort 9 Data Science Fellowship students?
Every capstone project is grounded on a data science problem or question. Now, we’ll share with you the projects of the 4 groups of students who recently graduated from our data science program.
💪 “What data-driven solutions can we provide to Cabanatuan City in alleviating poverty?”
Group 1 is composed of Fellows Jacob, Jota, Jopet, Ron, and Gelo, and their project is entitled Road to Zero Poverty: A machine learning approach to alleviating poverty in Cabanatuan City.
Quick background info: In Cabanatuan City, it is known that 26.14 million people live below the poverty line with a Php 12,000 salary a month in a family of 5.
For the group to answer their main question, they came up with 3 objectives, namely:
To uncover the factors affecting poverty at household level
To quantify the factors with most impact in poverty at barangay level
To strategically allocate the solution throughout Cabanatuan City.
Topics applied from the Fellowship:
Linear regression
Clustering
Building a classification model
🌎 “How can we make our Philippine products Amazon Best Sellers?”
Group 2 is composed of Aleta, Geniston, Lacar, Laurel, and Perillo, and their project is Serving Philippines delicacies on the Global Menu: Making local products competitive on the global platform Amazon in collaboration with eCFulfill.
Quick background info: eCFulfill helps make Philippines MSME products available all over the world. However, the problem is that there is a lack of knowledge in terms of setting up and managing their products to be globally competitive.
In order for them to answer their main question, they came up with two objectives:
Identify important product listing features
Surface best seller practices
Topics applied from the Fellowship:
Using web scraping
Creating a binary classification model
Exploring the data using Natural Language Processing (NLP)
📋 “Which booking will likely be cancelled? What could be the reasons? How to approach the cancellation?”
Group 3 is composed of Fellows Anjelo, Tin, and Tan, with a project entitled BooCA, A Machine Learning Solution to deal with Booking Cancellations for Hotel Lita.
With the questions already put in place, the group came up with a solution, which is to predict the probability of each booking to be cancelled through machine learning.
Topics applied from the Fellowship:
Machine learning
🏀 “How can data science be used to better inform PBA stakeholders? What types of PBA and NBA archetypes are present in the league?”
Group 4 is composed of the Moreno brothers, Juancho and Niño, together with Kyle. Their capstone project is entitled, PLAYER ARCHETYPES, What types of PBA and NBA players are out there?
Quick background info:
In the Philippines, it’s estimated that nearly 40 million Filipinos play or have played basketball.
On top of that, the Philippines will also be hosting the FIBA Basketball World Cup in 2023.
To tackle their main question, the group collected data through basketball-reference.com and dribblemedia.com. The data consists of different quantitative stats such as points per game, rebounds per game, etc.
Topics applied from the Fellowship:
Web scraping
Data cleaning
K-Means Clustering and Soft K-Means
🖼️ Staying updated with the latest trends in tech (and data!)
Today we briefly talk about DALL·E 2, Web 3.0, and NFTs so that you have a very basic understanding of what these are all about! Let us know if you want more quick round-ups like this in future issues.🤩
What is DALL·E 2?
“DALL·E 2 is a new AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language. It can create original, realistic images and art from a text description. It can combine concepts, attributes, and styles.” (Source)
The images above are ones our team created with our access to DALL·E 2. What are your thoughts on this kind of tech?
What is Web 3.0?
In order for us to better understand Web 3.0, let’s first take a ride into memory lane, from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. Web 1.0 is only a read-only network, or also known as static websites. During this era, companies and websites such as Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, myspace, etc. dominated the internet.
The concept of read-only changed into interactive in the Web 2.0 era. Unlike with Web 1.0, users can now upload their own text, pictures, videos, and other content on the platform. Basically, the users in this version are no longer passive recipients of content, but can now create content and communicate with other users as well. This is also where social networks emerged, such as Facebook and Youtube.
Now, Web 3.0 represents the next generation of decentralization and gives value to users. We won’t be going deep with the decentralization, but in a nutshell:
Centralized system - systematic and consistent concentration of authority on the center to survive
Decentralized system - distribution of functions and powers, in which points has a high degree of autonomy and own decision-making process
Web 3.0 is a decentralized blockchain platform, and an open-source project, meaning anyone can contribute to it. One of the main features of Web 3.0 is that it allows users to control their own data rather than having a centralized authority control it. This of course in return increases privacy, while also promoting innovation and creativity.
In simple terms, a blockchain is a shared ledger. You can connect and transact through the blockchain, this is where transactions are recorded. What are examples of blockchains? The most popular ones right now are Bitcoin and Ethereum.
What is an NFT?
These three letters side by side have blown up all over the internet in the past months. NFTs stand for non-fungible tokens. Dissecting the term, we have “non-fungible,” meaning not replaceable. There’s just 1 original copy of it, cannot be duplicated and cannot be replaced. Next term we’ll dissect is “token.” It’s an item, associated with either a physical or a digital asset (Ex: Tweets, artwork, music, etc.), stored on blockchain. And like what we mentioned earlier, a blockchain is a shared digital ledger.
Interestingly and what’s worrisome is the negative environmental impact that NFTs have. Since an NFT is actually a unit of data, this data has to be stored. The servers where these are stored consume a lot of electricity.
🎨 CREATING A BETTER FUTURE WITH DATA 🎨
In the United States, August 26 is National Women's Equality Day. And while Eskwelabs is a Manila-based startup, we believe that learning is universal so of course we are synced with the international calendar and our global community. Cheers to our learners abroad!
“How do you think we can inspire more women to become data scientists?” —Eskwelabs
As few as 15% of data scientists today are women. And that lack of diversity is a serious issue. AI algorithms are susceptible to bias, so building them requires a team that includes a wide range of views and experiences.
We dive into these issues in this blog post called, “Improving Gender Diversity in Data Science.”
Issue #1: The STEM talent pool of women is already limited
Issues #2: Perception of data science is mixed amongst women
Issues #3: Lack of information about a data science career
“As a male-dominated industry, why should we have more female voices/perspectives in data science?” —She Talks Asia
Angela Chen, Eskwelabs CEO and Co-founder, answered, “Algorithms are involved in big and small decisions in our lives, including what we see on our social media feed, all the way to whether or not we are approved for a loan. While 50% of the population are women, only 15% of data professionals globally who build these algorithms are women.” She cited this source from BCG.
Read this feature from She Talks Asia that profiles 3 remarkable women in tech: Audrey Pe (WiTech), Steph Naval (Empath), and our very own, Angela Chen.
📰 More articles about machine learning and algorithmic bias:
Machine learning can’t fix algorithmic bias. But humans can (Quartz)
Can machine-learning models overcome biased datasets? (MIT News)
Humans Are The Cause Of Bias In AI, But We're Also The Solution (Forbes)
📚 It all begins with learning…enroll in our flagship programs today
🖥️ Data Science Fellowship
The Data Science Fellowship prepares you to enter the data science industry long-term or to upskill yourself in your existing company with industry relevant tools. By the end of the program, you would have completed and presented 5 data science projects to data science experts.
Cohort 11 starts next year 2023
Assessment exam coverage: View here
📊 Data Analytics Bootcamp
The Data Analytics Bootcamp is focused on teaching data analytics, storytelling, and visualization, as well as tools like Power BI, SQL (Google BigQuery), and Google Data Studio to help current and future professionals answer business questions with data.
Cohort 8 starts on October 10, 2022
Assessment exam coverage: View here
Deadline of assessment exam: September 21, 2022 (Multiple choice)
Review Session 2: September 13 (Tuesday) | 7:00 - 8:00 PM
📖 ESKWELABS LIBRARY 📖
Eskwelabs Book Recommendations
Book Lover's Day was this August 9! Raise your hands (and reply with a comment) if you are a bookworm too. 📚
Here's a list of books that we recommend for you to thrive and stand out in the future of work:
💪 For habits
Atomic Habits by James Clear
Elastic Habits by Stephen Guise
🧠 For mindset
Think Again by Adam Grant
Emotional Agility by Susan David
Beginners by Tom Vanderbilt
The Practice of Groundedness by Brad Stulberg
❤️ For connection
Digital Body Language by Erica Dhawan
The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker
You’re not Listening by Kate Murphy
Social Chemistry: Decoding the Patterns of Human Connection by Marissa King
📊 For being data-driven
The Data Detective by Tim Harford
Making Numbers Count by Chip Heath and Karla Starr
What do you think? Should we start an Eskwelabs Book Club? 😉
That’s it for our fifty-eighth issue of the newsletter! We hope you enjoyed it. 💖
What did you think of this format? Let us know here. We appreciate you so much for reading!
💌 Cheering you on always,
Francine
Learning Community Manager at Eskwelabs