This semester, The Sutardja Center created a new course, Data-X, which allowed students to team up to tackle technically complex problems. In the course, students identified real-world problems, collected data, and created applications to find solutions.
Click on the picture below to check out this year’s Data-X course!
Data-X was taught by Ikhlaq Sidhu and student instructors Kevin Bozhe Li, Alexander Fred Ojala, Nathan Cheng and Sam Choi. Teams used what they learned throughout the course to present their Final Project Demo on May 11th, which ranged from topics such as estimating stock prices to automated thickness detection for 2D materials.
The course model was outlined for students to:
- Brainstorm a problem
- Propose a low tech solution
- Execute and Iterate BMoE (Berkeley Method of Entrepreneurship) Reflections- To help students get in the right mindset of incorporating innovation with technology
- Present Final Presentation
After just these fourteen weeks, students used their understanding of concepts such as filtering, prediction, classification, decision making and much more to demonstrate their team-based data application project.
During the Final Demo, all teams first posed a problem that could be solved using Data-X analysis. Following this, they showcased what their research and collection of data led them to and how they were able to then find a solution. Whether the approach was a one-step or two-step problem, the teams each recorded their project outcomes and what they intended to use as a user interface.
The teams were then able to set up an architecture for their solution by compiling and scraping data, processing it, and finding a regression model that tested their outcomes. As a result, each team summarized what their results were and some even evaluated future predictions of how their solution can be used in a more effective way.
Several teams expressed that there was a learning curve while taking the course. Because each team was trying to solve computationally intensive problems, they had to find other ways of using what they learned in the class to move forward with their data collection.
All in all, each student was able to grasp an understanding of what Data-X is and how it can be used within a short time frame of only three months. On the May 11th Final Demo, students successfully applied the frameworks they learned throughout the course.
“Sidhu’s class is great because he shows you all the cool things that people are doing with data science and the goal is not really for you to understand a 100% of the material like we traditionally do in Berkeley classes, but to understand as much as you can and try to contextualize it. You don’t have to be an expert to take this class but you will learn a lot of it”
– Rohan Punamia
To learn more about Data-X please see:
https://scet.berkeley.edu/data-x-course/
https://scet.berkeley.edu/data-strategy-working-hard-enough/