SDS|2014 Review

SDS|2014, the 1st Swiss Workshop on Data Science, took place on the 21st of March, 2014 – and we organized it. You can find an excellent summary of the talks on Frank van Lingen’s blog “ITelligence Insight” (Frank attended the workshop, but is not affiliated with us – so its ought to be a fair review), and the slides are available under the first link above.

So instead of repeating Frank here, I want to do two things: give you some impressions of the day itself, and draw some conclusions:

Impressions

(Please find the links to the talks and more information on the speakers on the workshop homepage)

Conclusions

Planning SDS|2015 already started, and also we are still in the process of preparing all the detailed feedback and writing up our lessons learned, quite a few conclusions begin to emerge:

• When we started thinking about that workshop roughly one year ago, we didn’t know what to expect. Would there already be a community of Swiss Data Scientists? Would there be the need for one? Who would come?
  Frankly, we have been very much positively surprised by the response and the participation in SDS|2014. We expected roughly half the number of participants, and we are very glad to have such generous, good feedback from all (of course, plenty of areas for improvement exist also).
  What I am pleased with the most is the response to the call to join the “Swiss Data Science Who is Who” – an exaggerated term for the list of participants that has been distributed among all who opted in to appear on it. This somehow displays the demand for a Swiss Data Science community, and we are honored to contribute to it.
• We definitely had two somehow different groups of people attending the workshop: Data Scientists, and managers in need of Data Scientists (to keep the distinction simple). We are currently looking for ways to adapt the programm of next year’s conference to better serve both groups.
• We are very happy for the support of our sponsors, of the wider analytics community (who distributed flyers, sent emails to members etc.), and of the great team at ZHAW who helped make this happen. For next year, there will probably be new ways to participate actively in the workshop on several levels. If you are eager to get involved, please contact us.