My Impressions of Data Fest

On February 11-12, the Moscow office of the mail.ru group hosted a conference “Open Data Fest” on open data and open data science. The HSE students and the SELS staff attended the conference as members of audience. This Data Fest was the fourth event of this kind, which brought together researchers, engineers and developers engaged in various aspects of the data science. The conference program included several lectures on a range of topics, from a review of methods for analyzing big data in various areas of research, social sciences, to the latest advances in machine learning. Along with the lectures, where was an a series of practical events, like Pecha Kucha, where everyone had an opportunity to talk briefly about their research, which was followed by more detailed discussions of the most interesting cases.

Anya Golovchenko, a SESL research assistant, has shared her impressions with us:“This was our second time on a Data Fest. When we got there last time, it was almost by accident: we got there out of curiosity, and, to be honest, back then we didn’t have a clear idea of what was happening there. But at this Data Fest, to our own surprise, and to surprise of some of our colleagues, we’ve found out that our two years of studies at the Department of Sociology and one year of our minor course on data analysis have enabled us to talk to the IT experts in the same language. It’s turned out that even though their studies and working areas are very different from ours, they apply the same methods and models that we do, in our training and research projects. For example, natural language processing tools (nlp), such as thematic modeling, are widely used in studies of games, which is very close to some research topics of our Laboratory. For me, this Data Fest has become a unique event where I could learn firsthand about how it works, what other tools are there, and how they can be useful in our own research. New contacts not only help to broaden your horizons, they also inspire you for better work. Among things that were of most interest to me, there was a review of tools for text analysis presented by Anna Potapenko (graduate student, HSE, Moscow), and a master class held by Mikhail Korobov, on collecting absolutely any data from the Internet. More and more people become interested in this area, and they come into it from different fields. Last time we were among very few attendees from the St. Petersburg’s HSE, but at this Data Fest we have met many familiar faces. There was a large delegation from the St. Petersburg’s HSE, including students from the minor course, from the Dept of Economics, and students from the Master program on Data Analysis.”