15^th July, 2019, Yerevan: Data Science Summer School, organized with the support of Beeline at the American University of Armenia (AUA), ended with winning team awards.

Data Science Summer School was the first such event in Armenia, which allowed specialists from different fields to get acquainted with the fundamentals of data science, basic tools and technologies, and also allowed realizing projects with real data using new knowledge gained.

The projects cover various fields of data science application, such as automatic recognition of banknotes, prediction of labor turnover, analysis of art samples, analysis of name searches of pharmaceutical products, identifying the best cancer treatment programs, large-scale analysis of travel agencies, etc. Data Science Summer School students have developed solutions to these problems using algorithmic methods of large databases and modern machine learning.

14 participating groups presented their team projects to a competent jury, and those projects were selected, which had the greatest impact, complex technical solution and best operational features.

The winners are: 1^st place - the Recommender System with Light FM project, which advises products and services, 2^nd place - the Employee Churn Prediction project, which predicts which employees are inclined to leave the company. The third place is given to a project that performs cluster and sentiment analysis of data available on the Trip Advisor platform. The winning teams were awarded cash prizes from Summer School sponsors Beeline and another partner of the Summer School Webbfontain.

“I am Karin Markides, the AUA President. I would like to thank our partners for their support. The Data Science Summer School is a very important initiative. It provides participants with the opportunity to gain theoretical and practical knowledge, and also unite and work together. We hope that in the future this cooperation will continue between the academic sector and industry as well” said AUA President, Dr. Karin Markides.

“We, as an IT company, are well aware of the importance and necessity of data science and are pleased to see the excellent results of the participants. Such practical training is a very good way to fill the labor market with specialists. I am sure that this project participants will soon have their contribution to the technological development of Armenia,” said Beeline Armenia CEO Andrey Pyatakhin.

“It is a very important initiative for Armenia and the sphere. Currently, data science specialists are among the most sought-after in the world, and the growth of this demand is already inevitable. The promotion of the development of the sphere is an important step on the part of AUA,” said summer school lecturer and scholar at University College Dublin Harutyun Shahumyan.

Within the framework of the Data Science Summer School, organized by AUA, over 70 participants, namely students, practitioners, and those undergoing change of profession, made an interesting journey from July 1 to 14 on topics and directions, where data science has the greatest impact.