by Steven Worthington
During J-term, IQSS hosted the DataFest2019 conference—a two-day series of workshops focusing on teaching best practices for analyzing, visualizing, and managing data throughout its lifecycle. The conference was a collaboration among many Harvard institutes and centers. This year, DataFest expanded to comprise 34 different hands-on and lecture-based sessions and was rewarded with its largest attendance to date, with over 200 people brushing up on their data science skills over the two days. A new feature this year was the inclusion of six data use-cases, in which distinguished Harvard faculty members walked through the process of working with different types of data from various research domains.
Highlights included Prof. Jeff Lichtman (Molecular and Cellular Biology) explaining how to analyze at scale the enormous datasets produced by modeling the brain, and Prof. Dustin Tingley (Government) showing how analyzing data from Harvard courses and lab sessions could be used to better inform teaching offerings and increase student engagement with material. This year, the hands-on workshops were extended in length and included several more advanced sessions. Of particular note were the popular Bayesian Modeling, D3 Visualization, and Machine Learning Workflow sessions. During session breaks, posters from various Harvard institutes and centers helped inform attendees about the diverse range of Harvard Data Science resources available to them.
For more information, visit the DataFest website.
Photography credit: Dwayne Liburd
