23 March 2023
Writing your Thesis in RMarkdown
Writing a thesis or paper with code, citations, and many graphs can be a hassle using text processing programs like Word – formatting and reformatting without end…
In this tutoring session we learned about a tremendously useful solution to these problems: RMarkdown. We learned how we can use this tool to do everything in one place; coding, making plots, and beautiful tables. Making changes is made easy and formatting needs to be done only once.
Thanks for joining and learning with us, with yet another skillset acquired we feel more ready for the next paper or thesis to come!
9 March 2023
Intro to R
New semester, new coding skills! Thanks to everyone for joining our intro session to R!
We took the plunge and started learning the basics of coding in R – including getting an overview of its many tremendously useful features and usecases. Although getting started seems daunting, getting practice in is the best way to learn and build a skillset – which is exactly what we did.
Impressive progress has been made and much dedication towards learning important data science principles shown – we commend you for that!
25 February 2023
Panel Discussion: Opportunities and Risks of AI
At Open SQUARE we asked big questions about AI: how will it change humanity and our social contract, who is responsible for the misadventures of AI, which legal and governance challenges will we be facing?
With our panel of experts consisting of Dr. Veronica Barassi, Dr. Kebene Wodajo, and Dr. Siegfried Handschuh we discussed ethical, societal, legal, political, and technical aspects of AI. With many thought-provoking questions asked by the audience, an immersive back-and-forth emerged, contemplating our journey with AI.
Many thanks to the panelists and the audience for the valuable inputs, we appreciate everyone who attended to learn, discuss and further the discourse on this transformational technology!
15 December 2022
Dr. Fabian Ackermann on Quantitative Portfolio Management
Many thanks to Dr. Fabian Ackermann for giving a great keynote on developing AI-based investment funds!
Dr. Ackermann talked about the motivation behind quantitative investment strategies, the process of researching, developing and implementing strategies as well as challenges arising in practice. He walked us through the ideas and concepts behind fundamental strategies he and his team apply day-to-day. Highlighting the shortcomings of human investors, how machine learning models can avoid them, and considerations when applying complex models, he shared invaluable practical insights.
We greatly appreciate the resources Dr. Ackermann has put into this event and thank him for the valuable and practice-oriented insights!
01 December 2022
Web Scraping with Selenium
We got into web scraping in this week’s tutoring session, thank you to everyone who joined!
Focusing on the basic but most important concepts regarding what websites are made up of, how to find and identify elements on a web page, and how to extract interesting data gave us a start in web scraping. Learning to apply the powerful tool Selenium combined with a framework to approach web scraping proved to be challenging but rewarding!
Again, we appreciate the dedication to learning and the curiosity of everyone who attended and commend you for your continued efforts!
24 November 2022
Machine Learning competition: giant pumpkins
Thanks to everyone who joined our seasonally themed machine learning challenge!
The competitive but friendly environment of this mini-hackathon provided the perfect opportunity to apply the valuable insights we learned in the intro to tidymodels event. By trying to predict the weight of giant pumpkins, we learned what concepts such as cross validation, hyperparameter tuning, data leakage, and much more mean in practice. And we finally know what variables predict a giant pumpkin’s weight…
We appreciate the participation and valuable inputs of everyone who attended and contributed to the friendly competitive spirit of the challenge!
Type
Coding Competition
Place
SQUARE
17 November 2022
Intro to tidymodels
We had another interesting and inspiring tutoring session this week, thanks everyone for joining!
We learned how to create and train powerful machine learning models with the tidymodels framework. This included the basic idea behind a random forest model, what to look out for in model specification, how to impute missing values and how to avoid data leakage among other important concepts.
Having had this quick teaser of how intuitive yet powerful machine learning can be conducted with tidymodels, we are looking to seeing you all at next week’s ML hackathon!
27 October 2022
Gilbert Fontana on data visualization with ggplot2
Many thanks to Gilbert Fontana for giving a great keynote on data visualization with ggplot2!
Gilbert talked about his background and how he got started in data visualization, gradually building his skills by participating in Tidy Tuesdays and publishing for Visual Capitalist. He then walked us through a concrete example of a visualization he has created and the steps needed to arrive at an appealing result. In the subsequent Q&A we were able to pick his brain on tips and tricks on all things data viz.
Again, we greatly appreciate the time and effort Gilbert has put into this event and thank him for the interesting insights!
13 October 2022
Intro to tidyverse
Thank you to everyone who joined us for this week’s tutoring session!
We learned some of the most important functions in tidyverse, a tremendously useful package in data wrangling and visualization. We were able to replace some of the complicated notations with square brackets and dollar signs in base R and make data wrangling much more intuitive.
As promised, we will disseminate an application-focused task soon so you can further cement what you have learned in the tutoring session.
Once again, we were surprised by the progress you have made and the dedication you spend towards learning important data science principles!
06 October 2022
Intro to R – part 2
Thank you to everyone who joined us for the continuation of our intro session!
We made great strides in working with datasets, getting an initial overview over its contents and how to extract important descriptive variables. We did not shy away from some more advanced concepts such as applying functions to multiple columns at a time and other core paradigms of functional programming.
Again, we were blown away by the collective effort, the steep learning curves being climbed and also enjoyed having a chat over a beer afterwards!
29 September 2022
Intro to R – part 1
Thank you to everyone who joined us for our Kick-Off event!
We learned about some crucial concepts in R, how to get situated with different data types, and how to navigate some of the initial difficulties of learning a new programming language.
It was great meeting you, sharing some experiences and getting to know you over a beer at AdHoc after the event!