Hi, my name is Indira. I am a senior data
scientist with Brillio. I started off my career
as an application developer at IBM, a few
months in Accenture and then I moved on to
Harman. My entry into data science happened
in the year 2014. So I still remember the
first time that a senior member from my team
came and spoke to me about the titanic data
set, titanic problem. She said I can predict
if you would have survived the Titanic crash.
I just laughed it out on her face. She was
damn serious but I was like how can you even
do that? So that’s when she started explaining
to me what machine learning is, about what
data science is. So that kind of piqued my
interest in this field of machine learning
and data science. So I was into .NET back
then so I had my deliverables and projects
and all that but then I was in my heart I
was convinced that I should be doing this.
I should have to, even if I don’t succeed
it’s fine but I wanted to try this out and
find out if it is for me. So that’s the
day I decided and I started putting my effort
into learning r, I have a pretty good programming
background. I am a computer science engineer,
so I started learning r. I went back 10 years
through my career and I started learning maths
and statistics and fundamentals of calculus,
algebra, linear algebra and all that. So believe
me it was not an overnight thing. I took almost
one year to actually start thinking like a
data scientist, looking at data like how a
data scientist would look at data in order
to get things. So slowly it so happens that
I was lucky enough to get an opportunity within
my own project. They introduced the analytics
component into my project and I slowly started
getting involved in their team meetings and
stuff like that. And at some point when I
was able to prove, my manager believed that
I could go further in it. So that is my journey
into machine learning. To all those people
who are aspiring to be data scientists, like
I said it’s not an overnight job, you have
to work hard, you have to work smart, you
will be there one day.
Hi this is Chirasmita, I have been working
in the field of data science from last 5 years
and I started my career with healthcare insurance
and moved to people analytics, semiconductor
analytics and then healthcare R&D and now
I have moved to smaller roles where I am trying
to set up teams, data science teams for different
start-ups across Bangalore. The journey has
been pretty rewarding for me like it basically
stemmed out from the fear of missing out,
from like I didn’t want to go for an IT
role when I was graduating from an engineering
background. So that’s when IBM was launching
into big data, it was just a catchphrase and
it just caught me and I wanted to know more
about it. So I just went for a The Grace Hopper
Celebration scholarship and then that’s
when it really started that I pursued a Yahoo
researcher who took me as an intern and we
built a recommendation system as part of my
internship. And post that I got my first job
offer with opera solutions and it was into
healthcare consulting and I think I have been
challenged to work as day to day in various
aspects of problems using tech data, very
messy data, noisy data and using lot of imaging
problems. So learning to apply and adapt and
see where the industry is heading has been
pretty challenging. And it’s like you really
need to be on your feet all the time so there
is this always like, you are like in a start-up
environment all the time. So I think that
part, the adrenaline rush to address a problem
also have the foresight to see that how your
business is actually ending up with lots of
value out of it. How you are saving time,
how you are saving in your revenue that gives
a lot of satisfaction. Because you see that
your work impacts a lot like a huge amount
of people. So I prioritize to choose to work
on important problems which really affect
different segments of people across.
