In the series of workshops conducted under the initiative of ‘BIT Sindri Research and Development Effort’, another insightful session was delivered by Mr Aaloka Anant, a prestigious alumnus of BIT Sindri, ECE batch of 2000 to 2004. He did his post graduation in Business Administration from IIM Banglore and is currently serving at SAP, Ireland.
It was a momentous occasion for the enthusiasts of ‘Big Data, Parallel Paradigms, Hadoop and In-Memory Computing’ that was held on 6th of May under the guidance of Training and Placement Cell and Mr. Ashutosh Kumar, a distinguished alumnus residing in Singapore. This initiative solely focused to make the students familiar with the industrial needs and presenting before them new possibilities prevailing across the globe.
The workshop session commenced with an insightful presentation giving an overview about ‘Big Data, Parallel Computing and In-memory computing’. In his own words,
“Data is increasingly digital air: the oxygen we breathe and the carbon dioxide we exhale. It can be both a source of sustenance and pollution”.
Data can hence be used for ‘predictive analysis’ and to know more about the so called ‘perceived needs’: A basic methodology for sales forecasts: actionable predictions for each customer. These predictions encompass all channels, both online and off, foreseeing public response before the product launch, adverting any kind of big risk for the company. “If you predict it, you own it.” – thus proving a powerful tool to any company in decision making and market forecasting like market volatility, customer need, future sales and cash flow.
This was followed by technical sessions that covered a spectrum of topics from the basics, starting with 4 ‘V’s i.e. ‘Volume, Velocity, Variety and Veracity’ of every Big Data and its source stating the real life examples. Challenges associated with collecting, analysing and storing Big Data and dealing with it was also discussed. He also introduced the students to the most demanding programming skill for a data scientist- HADOOP (An open source implementation of Google’s Map Reduce) after SQL, followed by Python, JAVA and R.
The highlights of the session were his real life analogies along with the vast applications he stated like putting a check on terrorism and related technological evolution. In an interactive breakthrough questionnaire session he shared some of his interview experiences and answered every query pretty satisfactorily. He also shared some of the useful resources from where one can learn everything needed about Big Data from the very scrap level.
However, the basic objective of making the students aware of present industrial trends and upcoming booming sectors in order to be future ready to grab the opportunities was fulfilled. From the perspective of any organisation, data science and data analysis are the top strategic priorities and hottest job-providing technologies.
All in all, stimulating the development of a network for information sharing throughout the campus of a newly introduced topic and enlightening them about this as a career option with great scope was the primary objective that was successfully accomplished.
The slideshow presented in the workshop can be downloaded here.
Special thanks to Rishi Hazra, 2K13 and Nitya Agrawal, 2K14 for their contribution to this article.
SARJANA 