Conlan Scientific Partners with UVA for Data Science Course
Conlan Scientific is proud to announce that it has partnered with the University of Virginia Department of Statistics to teach STAT 4559: Data Science Practicum during the Spring 2018 semester.
The Arrangement
Chris Conlan and Professor Jeff Holt will co-teach the class to a small group of students. Conlan Scientific will provide educational resources, data, speakers, and software tools to enable students to tackle their own data science projects.
The class will be capstone-style. Students will undertake individual projects using similar technologies. In pursuit of their individual goals, students will share resources to help each other.
The Students
Undergraduates with a high level of competence in programming and statistics were asked to apply to the class. The class received over 40 applicants for 8 spots.
Chris Conlan, after meeting the students, said he was "shocked with the magnitude and diversity of talent" possessed by the undergrads. He went on to explain, "The students are overall very intuitive and passionate."
From left: Sam, Anna, Youbeen, Chris Conlan, Amy, Tripti, Catherine, Anant, Jeff Holt STAT4559 in Clark Hall
The Projects
We have wasted no time figuring out where students will concentrate their time during the class. So far, we are engaged in projects in:
- Telemedicine
- Urban planning
- Dementia treatment
- Social impact studies
- Machine vision
- Disease prevention
- Quantitative finance
- Recommender systems
Readers will hear much more about these projects as they develop throughout the semester.
The Open Classroom
Students are using a proprietary project management system provided by Conlan Scientific to share information and correspond with each other. All communications are kept in this platform, which very nicely simulates the fast-paced project management pipelines used in top software engineering firms. So far, students have had a very easy time adapting to and taking advantage of the platform.
The Speakers
Throughout the semester, we will be hosting speakers and events to connect industry with the students. Our lineup for this semester includes:
Katherine Matthews - Data Evangelist
February 23rd, 2:00 p.m. at Monroe Hall, Room 130 at the University of Virginia Katherine Matthews has spoken at numerous national Alteryx events about how she uses self-service business intelligence tools to modernize the academic publishing industry.
Michael Fleming - CEO at Torc Robotics
March 23rd, 2:00 p.m. at the University of Virginia, Room # TBA Michael Fleming was a member of the original Virginia Tech team that won the 2005 DARPA Urban Challenge. He went on to form Torc Robotics from this team. Torc is now an 80 person company building autonomous driving systems for numerous public and private applications.
Janice McMahon - Engineer at EMU Technologies
April 20th, 2:00 p.m. at the University of Virginia, Room # TBA Janice McMahon is a lead engineer at EMU Technology, a company that is revolutionizing the way we think about data science problems with entirely new computer architectures.