Being in the welfare and healthcare sector, full stack developer, Chayan Paria, wanted to create chatbots for the elderly, who for most times are the victims of isolation and abandonment. And it is this philanthropy that introduced him to the world of data science and machine learning, as he enrolled for the Global Certificate in Data Science and AI (GCDAI) program at INSAID.
In this interview, lets see what Chayan loves about to data science and how he plans to use data science to help the geriatric people in need.
Question 1: Which program & batch are you part of at INSAID & tell us more about your current work profile?
Chayan: I am a student of the Global Certificate in Data Science & AI (GCDAI) program, May 2019 batch. I am a software engineer, currently working as a full stack developer in TietoEvry India Pvt. Ltd. I work in the welfare and healthcare domain and our product is used by the municipality of Sweden and Finland for the elderly care people.
Question 2: Walk us through your career journey & what got you interested in Data Science and Machine Learning?
Chayan: I worked for the welfare and healthcare domain in my company. In Sweden, loneliness and social isolation are two major issues. Elderly people don’t get proper care. In several cases, they have both health and financial issues that further aggravates this sense of isolation and estrangement.
So to remove that sense of abandonment and provide them with medical opinions, we thought about something like chatbots in my early days in the company. At that time chatbot was newly launched. And it was quite interesting. But not all people in my company had that knowledge.
So I trained myself on Python and started exploring around the code for chatbots. But I realized it’s quite difficult as I could not understand the logic behind the codes. So I explored more and got to know about machine learning concepts. That’s how I got my interest in data science and machine learning.
Question 3: What all tools and packages in Data Science & Machine Learning have you mastered in your Data Science and AI program at INSAID so far?
Chayan: I have not been able to master myself in any tool because I am really new to Python and it’s not used in my day to day work. So, after office, everyday I revised what was being taught in class and went through some codes to understand it better.
Question 4: What were some of the initial challenges when you got started on your Data Science journey and how did you overcome it?
Chayan: Initially it was really tough to get along with the EDA and everything. Python is quite easy. For EDA and ML1, I have gone through the recording quite a few times and practiced some of the codes with datasets. So I got some ideas. But I know it is not quite adequate. I have to practice more.
Question 5: Who is your favorite faculty at INSAID and what did you learn from him the Most?
Chayan: My favorite faculty is Mr. Deepesh Wadhwani. He is really good at making us understand the concepts as well as it’s practical applications. Also, he guides us how to proceed with any ML problem in simple ways.
Question 6: Which are some of the blogs that you follow?
Chayan: I follow several blogs around Data Science and Machine Learning. Some of them include Analytics Vidhya, Kaggle, Trifacta, Techsee, Towards Data Science, etc.
Question 7: What is your advice to anyone wanting to start a career in Data Science?
Chayan: I will first advise you to gather some basic information on Python and statistics before anyone goes through the data science course. One should join an institution in which they can be guided properly about the required concepts. Apart from that, practice a lot from Kaggle and UCI dataset, create a great profile in Github, play around the newly learned concepts and maybe apply them in one’s current organization to create something innovative!
This was the wonderful conversation with our GCDAI student, Chayan Paria.
If you want to read more student interviews, check out INSAID Spotlight.
