3rd December: ASU Police Alert
Although Tempe is a very safe place to live, some things can happen. This thing was a once in a blue moon event. I received an ASU Police Alert of some robbery suspects roaming in Tempe at night around 11:00 PM. I don’t know what happened next, but I am sure this was not a piece of big news the next day. Rest assured, Tempe is a very safe city.
4th December: Data-Driven Quality Mgmt. Final Exam
Our Professor had already informed us that the difficulty of the test would be similar to the midterm exam (which was damn tough), but this time he will give us ample time to solve the problems. And this time, it did go comfortably. Everyone was able to finish the paper on time. I felt it was not as severe as the previous one. Anyway, it’s always relative grading in such cases, so it’s okay.
It’s a good thing to get done with most exams early on. We don’t have a Final Exam for Intro to Applied Analytics, so only Data Mining 1 Final Exam is pending. Considering the time constraints for covering the Data Mining 1 classes, which is a quarter based subject, it gets essential for Professor to cover more topics in less time. So the final teaching class was Today. And the Finals will be on 13th December. Data Mining 1 is a straightforward subject if you can understand it. Back in 2013, I had completed the Coursera’s Machine Learning course, so this subject went very smooth for me at least. For aspiring Data Scientists and Data Engineers, this is the most crucial subject.
7th December: Intro to Data Science Event
Although I am already aware of the basics of Data Science, the “Intro to Data Science and the ecosystem” event was worth it because it was hosted at the Amazon’s office in Tempe. The office is near the Tempe Lake where most corporate buildings are present. It’s a 20-minute cycling distance from McCord Hall. And yes, there was Pizza, a lot of it, so much that I ended up taking a whole box of a Large Pizza with me back home. (Because there was a lot, and it would have been trashed out otherwise). It was an excellent opportunity to network with some Amazonian’s as well.
Today, I got a crucial lesson to learn from the Data Science Practitioner, who was the speaker Today. The experience is to focus more on feature selection and feature engineering and less on the algorithm, because if your input features are not that good, no matter what algorithm you use, you won’t have the best output. Even many Data Science practitioners focus on the algorithm rather than the features, which is very, very wrong. Important lesson learned Today.
Returning home on a cycle with a large box of Pizza in the blazing cold temperature of 11-degree celsius is hard. Life is Hard.