The Data Science Initiative hosted its first, official Data Science Night, or “hack night,” on November 6th, 2017. The kickoff brought together over 100 attendees, including undergrads, grad students, postdocs and faculty, as well as some high school students and community members. Attendees heard from Adam Miller, LSSTC Data Science Fellow at CIERA, who gave an interactive presentation on using python and scikit-learn for developing a basic machine learning workflow.
After the presentation, attendees broke out into smaller groups led by Data Science Scholars, Fellows, and other Northwestern community members. These groups began to work on projects using data science tools to investigate data on City of Chicago employees, Oscar winning movies, and Bob Dylan’s lyrics. In other groups, attendees got started on learning to use APIs and preparing for Kaggle competitions. In future months, these groups will reconvene and new learning and project groups will emerge.