Although this week was extremely short, I learned a lot from our guest speakers. Firstly I didn’t know that there were so many practical uses for data engineering and data mining principles. I also was fascinated by the amounts of tools they had to solve their problems and that many different industries use different tools based on set standards, as each program has their own strengths. I did not know that when it came to cleaning data, there were a lot of pre-requisites to and issues to solve before the actual cleaning. Such as checking formatting, making sure correct values are jnput, and table in general are even and data is aligned correctly.

It was fascinating to see how data could be applied to so many real world cases. Deena talked about her studies in the humanities and I was completely blown away at how you could link humanities and computer science through data studies. All this data can be further filtered and anyone who might need it in the future would be able to save a lot of time and quickly analyze texts. Last Vicky talked about her works at the museum of natural history and show cased that ‘data’ is an integral part of making sure the musuem runs. I finallly have a much better understanding of what ‘big data’ really means and how much help it is to the world.

Lastly I thought it was quite amusing, when they talked about filtering data and catching really weird edge cases. Especially when certain texts are not in UTF8 or invalid answers. This had bettered my understanding of what it means to be a data scientist.