The Swiss Data Science community recently met at SDS|2015, the 2nd Swiss Workshop on Data Science. It was a full day event organized by ZHAW Datalab, with inspiring talks, hands-on data expeditions, and an excellent provision of space and atmosphere for fruitful networking. The conference took place on the 12th of June at the premises of ZHAW in Winterthur. It attracted people with a wide range of skills, expertise, and levels from doers to managers, and had very strong support from industry, hence showing the huge potential and scope of the subject.

Review

Jan-Egbert SturmAfter having the workshop kicked-off by the President of ZHAW, Dr. Jean Egbert Sturm, Professor of Microeconomics & Director of KOF Swiss Economic Institute at ETH, gave an insightful keynote talk on The use of ever increasing datasets in Macroeconomic forecasting. He explained to the audience the way to do economic forecasting using simple and standard analytical techniques. It was specifically very interesting for data analytics experts to see such a methodology that successfully uses down-to-earth analytical techniques integrated with in-depth knowledge of Economics. Continue reading