Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

Big Community, in collaboration with MMU and MDEC, organised a career talk on Data Scientists yesterday at MMU’s Faculty of Creative Multimedia here in Cyberjaya.

The event, which was in high demand and fully booked a week earlier, had received a 50/50 turnout between students and working adults. There were many still on the waiting list on the event day. The success of the event would be largely attributed to the line of speakers scheduled to speak from MMU, MDEC, our very own Big Community CEO and finally the Keynote Address, Kam Lin Mah, Director of Data Science from Maybank.

A few students who arrived early for the talk spoke of their interest in Big Data and how they were looking forward to learn from this event.

One student Nick who has been researching a lot about Data Scientist and currently doing machine learning, was hoping to find out what the prospects for a Data Scientists in Malaysia. “I am very excited about the future of data science in Malaysia.”

His friend Raj who is doing a degree in computer science and looking to select his 2^nd major, came over to find out what was data science about as he says data science is something new to him.

Melina Hwang, General Manager and Publisher of Big Community, AOPG, kicked off the talk by introducing the topic, giving a quick break down of the areas concerning a Data Scientist and Big Data. According to her, there were many other job opportunities available in the eco-system, such as Chief Data Officer, Data Wrangler and Data Analyst to name a few.

Another area Melina touched on was of the salaries of all those involved with earnings that start from 75,000 USD all the way to 170,000 USD. This however is an estimate that can be easily achieved and even surpassed, as was later pointed out from real world experience speakers.

MDEC’s Dr Karl was on hand to inform the attendees how the government is supporting and pushing for more involvement into the Big Data initiative from the private sectors as well as universities. He mentioned among other universities they have even been involved with, was Harvard Business School as well as USM in efforts to bringing their targets to fruition.

Their aim is to have 1500 Data Scientists by 2020 and it seems to be on track as they currently have achieved 150 Data Scientists this year. “We have doubled our Data Scientist number already this year since we only had about 70 last year” Dr Karl said.

Key note speaker Kam Lin Mah whose talk was highly anticipated, did not disappoint in the least. Her talk gave everyone in the room, including those just starting out or wanting to know more, much to ponder.

Although we can’t go into detail of what was shared by Kamlin due to corporate sensitivity, one part of the topic that got everyone perked up was about how she would handle satellites and park them in orbit. 36,000 km in the atmosphere. She gave the example of having to park a car while other cars you are parking next to, are still moving. Also, unlike NASA with their big visuals, she has nothing but notes and graphs to facilitate her communication with the satellite. So alternatively she had to supplement the lack of resource by using her imagination to visualise the satelites just from the data. This gave us all a clear indication of how much a Data Scientist has to endure and compute through numbers in order to complete their task.

The closing speaker, Dr Poo, Senior Lecturer at MMU and Chairperson of the Data Science Institute, focused mainly on Machine Learning and Big Data. He was very thorough in describing the workflow around it and how it will contribute in the Big Data eco-system.

CEO Melina Hwang’s and Dr Poo’s presentation are available for viewing on the Big Community portal.

Participants registering themselves.

Participants paying close attention during the talk.

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