Hyderabad, 22 January 2021: The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) held the session on Data Sciences and Machine Learning facilitated by Prof. (Dr.) Surajit Ghosh Dastidar, Chairperson, Centre for Analytics at IMT Hyderabad. Keynote speakers were Dr. Manish Gupta, Principal of Applied Scientist Microsoft India, Adjunct faculty at IIT-H and Visiting Faculty of ISB, and Mr. Chirantan Chatterjee, Chief Scientist and CEO of Omion Fusion Technologies & Py’s Artificial Intelligence Labs. The session generated insights from the speakers on the entire landscape of deep learning, machine learning, and data sciences career opportunities.
The first speaker for the session, Mr. Chirantan Chatterjee had 26 years of experience in multiple leadership roles in companies like Wipro Technologies, Cambridge Technologies, PriceWaterHouse Coopers (PwC), Tech Mahindra, Vodafone, etc. He started his address by talking about the importance of adapting to the changing technological environment and data science's relevance as a domain to cater to the changing needs. He spoke about balancing various skills and experience expected in data science professionals such as quantitative skills, IT architecture skills, business skills, and soft skills. He also mentioned the business aspect of the said domain by highlighting that 90% of the business opportunities come from data processing. He also mentioned the benefits of the domain-specific knowledge and the emerging roles of data specialists in the specific domains which can provide a plethora of opportunities for various data science professionals. The multiple roles mentioned were: Junior Associate Data Scientist for entry-level positions, Data Scientist and AI Engineer for Mid-Level positions, and Director of Data Science for Advance Level positons. Citing the recent report by Gartner - Hype Cycle for Digital Workspace and Artificial Intelligence, 2020, he further explained the relevance of the data science industry in various fields such as Quantum Learning, event stream processing, etc.
The second speaker in the line, Mr. Manish Gupta, gave an overview of Data Sciences and Machine Learning's latest developments. His goal was to provide the audience with various real-life instances where data learning has created an impact and changed the way things are done today. He described how, because of advancements in technology and new understanding, many new things like image segmentation, object detection, and image annotation has come up and made
lives easier. He gave various live examples and illustrations to explain his points, which made the session very creative. He also emphasized how there are so many vision problems that were once difficult to tackle, but now, because of the tools we have, it's not only easy to solve them, but we can also find the relationship between those objects. Talking about these mechanisms' accuracy, he described the new era we live in where data science has taken over almost everything and explained the way recent advancements in deep learning have enabled a lot of retrieval use cases.
Both the speakers relayed vast insights on the emerging deep learning technologies. After completing their addresses, they held an interactive question-and-answer session with the attendees. Dr. Manish Gupta recommended that students should register on Google Colab and open a Kaggle account to work on programming and practice learnings from the classroom. Both speakers agreed that students should enjoy all activities, roles, and responsibilities. A positive attitude to learn is a substantial factor for employability than bare degrees. To emphasize this, Mr. Chiranjan said, "Find a job you love, and you would never have to look for a job again."
Prof. (Dr.) Surajit Ghosh Dastidar proposed a vote of thanks where he acknowledged students' diverse backgrounds and thanked both speakers for sharing their vast experience to refine the understanding of the data science industry in which students aspire to be a part. The session was concluded by Ms. Arunava who also proposed a vote of thanks to both speakers and the Dean, Academics Prof. (Dr.) Sriharsha Reddy for supporting the CII session
