Data Science Community to leverage for growth

The purpose of communities is to bridge the gap between people working in all the different sub-areas of data science not just engineers and scientists — but developers and students.

A tech community attracts the kind of people who are keen to help one another. So, often simply by being part of a community, many developers or data scientists find experts in everything from idea to product, to software development and legal matters to guide them along the way.

A tech community is more than just a community; it is a family.

The following are some of the benefits of being part of a tech community.

1. Access to Human and resources.
2. Networking and getting the right people on your tech journey.
3. Access to several opportunities and events
4. Support is made available 24/7
5. Belong to groups of those who are ahead of you, helping your growth.

In the space of data science, I will be discussing some platforms and communities that could give you some of the benefits of being part of a community as above.

I have only selected a few that I am familiar with and I could possibly explain their approaches and works.

There are a whole lot of platforms and communities you can leverage on, but these are my top communities or platforms, I will be discussing.

The beauty about most of these platforms is their ability to also manage a community of data scientists.

Let's check them out and how see how to join them.

1. Kaggle

Kaggle is generally known as the home of data, as boldly captioned on the URL title, to access the Kaggle platform, click here

Some of the features of Kaggle are:

1. Competition: The competition is a page to access an active competition, closed, community competition.
2. Dataset: Dataset is the bedrock of our data science journey, you can get to access data for a specific task, you can get data based on the trending dataset, popular and categories of data.
3. Code: This is one of the amazing parts of the platform, you can get to learn from other data scientists, what they are coding much better, how they are improving their model performance(s), and the approaches they are following.
4. Discussion: The discussion is the part where you interact with fellow data scientists within the Kaggle community.
5. Course: Kaggle has also made available short courses to help your data science journeys such as feature engineering, model optimization, data cleaning, and many more with practice projects.

Finally, Kaggle also has high computational power for processing your models using Kaggle kernel (TPU, CPU GPU) are available.

2. Zindi

Zindi hosts the largest community of African data scientists, working to solve the world’s most pressing challenges using machine learning and AI. They connect data scientists with organizations and provide a place to learn, hone your skills and find a job. They want to transform the African continent and showcase African data science talent to the world.

Zindi is generally known as a competitive platform. You access the here

Features of Zindi Platform

1. Competition: on the Zindi platform, you can participate in competitions for money, knowledge, and platform points. They are available based on categories, country, and problem type.
2. Learn: Start your machine learning journey, brush up on your technical skills, and learn winning approaches from the best of Zindi.
3. Talk: Discuss the Zindi platform & machine learning topics — this includes sharing feedback, asking questions, and more.
4. Community: These are people who have gotten points and rank based on performance at the competition.
5. Job: Zindi can help you find your first job or your next job. Explore your opportunities based on experience, location, and job type.

3. Machine Hack

Machine Hack is India’s №1 competitive coding platform for machine learning engineers, data scientists, data analysts, artificial intelligence engineers.

To access their platform, click here

Features available on machine hack platform.

Mocks: Right assessment gives the direction to learn and grow. Mocks provide a way to critically examine the skills they have acquired in all the platforms. They have created a list of mocks for some of the industry's certifications and interviews.

Practice: A Jupiter hosted environment to code, learn, and execute ML/AI algorithms. The flow is designed to provide the path from basic to advanced skill development in ML/AI.

Bootcamp: learning from Industry experts with the convenience to complete the tutorial at your own pace. They have listed some of the best video tutorials to upskill yourself.

Hackathons: The right way to assess the skills is also to compete with community members in a defined time. They created hackathons on several domains and verticals of machine learning, deep learning, and data science.

4. Omdena

The world’s platform for impact with AI, exclusively for impact organizations and real-world AI Engineers, starting with a new project every week.

To access the platform, click here

Features on omdena platform

1. AI engineer: The AI engineer are the ones who apply as a collaborators on a specific project. They select outstanding applicants,we can attend events, organize local chapters to solve the local problems using AI.

2. Organization: Organization can also apply for a need to solve problems with AI.

5. Data Science Nigeria

Data Science Nigeria now, Data Scientist Network after 5 years of existence with the goal to promote the big data and data science approach in solving Nigeria’s business and social developmental problems, with a vision to build a world-class Artificial Intelligence (AI) knowledge, research and innovation ecosystem that delivers high-impact transformational research, business use applications, AI-first start-ups, support employability, and social good use cases. They are committed to raising one million AI talents in 10 years and thus position Nigeria as one of the top 10 AI talent/knowledge destinations with a 20% GDP multiplier impact. They are poised to accelerate Nigeria’s socio-economic development through a solution-oriented application of machine learning in solving social/business problems.

To get access to the platform, click here

Features of Data Scientist Network platform

• Artificial Intelligence Bootcamp
• Artificial Intelligence Summer school for Grades 5–9 students

• Free AI ebooks

• AI+ Knowledge Box

• AI+ Clubs in secondary and universities

• Deep Learning Nigeria

• Artificial Intelligence for Executive

Other platforms/ communities are

Data Science Africa

Jeston NVIDIA

Note: all information about the platforms is extracted from the platform’s official website.

In this light, It is clear that if you utilize these platforms and communities, you will get the best in your Data Science journey.