DSA June 2017 Summer School on Machine Learning and Data Science

In the tradition of previous Africa Data Science workshops, a summer school on machine learning and data science will be held prior to the main workshop. This summer school will target graduate students, researchers, and professionals working with huge amounts of data or unique datasets.

The summer school will focus on introductory and advanced lectures in data science and machine learning as well as moderate to advanced practical and tutorial sessions where participants will get their hands wet wrangling and munging datasets and applying cutting-edge machine learning techniques to derive inference from the data. Lectures will be given by distinguished world-renowned researchers and practitioners, including researchers from Sheffield University, Amazon, Swansea University Medical School, Facebook, Pulse Lab Kampala, the AI and Data Science (AIR) lab-Makerere University, ARM, and Dedan Kimathi University of Technology (DeKUT).

The school will also involve end-to-end tutorial sessions from professionals, walking the participants through a real data analytics problem from data acquisition to data presentation. To benefit from this cours,e participants are encouraged to have some background in programming, particularly programming with Python.

School programme outline:

Pre-workshop

Stuff to install..

To ensure we hit the ground running, it is essential you install the prerequiste software and test it out and make sure it is working on your computer. The venue for the summer school will have some computers on which the software will have been installed but you are advised to come with your own laptop with the software installed.

Anaconda
Luckily all the software required has already been prepackaged in a bundle called Anaconda. You can download the various versions of the software for your laptop OS and architecture from the Anaconda website. Please download the Python 3.6 version. Instructions on how to install are next to the download links on the Anaconda website.

Stuff to do..
To ensure that the software is working fine on your machine and to get you up and running, download the following jupyter notebook (right click and ‘save as’) and do the exercises in there. To access it you’ll need to run a jupyter notebook (instructions).

Troubleshooting and comments..
Use the comment section below to (a) ask questions that are not already answered (b) help your peers by providing answers to their questions, if you can.

Summer School Day 1

The first day of the data science school will introduce the jupyter notebook and overview the use of python for analyzing data. We will introduce the machine learning technique of classification and perform lab practicals exploring these techniques.

Summer School Day 2

The second day will feature two tracks dealing with applications of data science in health and an introduction to the internet of things.

Summer School Day 3

The third day will feature a single track of lectures and practical sessions. However, there will be an opportunity for interested participants to explore building sensor systems for data collection during the practical sessions