Harsharan Singh Kohli has been working in the supply chain industry for 22 years. Now, he is deeply interested to know about digital supply chain tools and how he can leverage them through data. So, without any further delays, he decided to upskill and enrolled for the Global Certificate in Data Science (GCD) program at Accredian.
In this interview, let’s see what he thinks of the future of data science and how his experience has been at Accredian.
Question 1: Which program & batch are you part of at Accredian & tell us more about your current work profile?
Harsharan: I am part of the Global Certificate in Data Science (GCD) program at Accredian, April 2020 batch. I am a supply and planning professional with 22 years of experience. I ensure all suppliers of varied materials in different areas have the required goods in time without stretching the logistics cost.
Adhering to the Category plan, we ran excellent operations, interacted with respective stakeholders and complied to all work methods. Right now, I am much interested in digital supply chain tools.
As a project controller, I led and managed multiple projects and achieved the set goals and even contributed to establishing new businesses and products.
Question 2: What tools and packages in Data Science & Machine Learning have you mastered in your Data Science & AI program at Accredian so far?
Harsharan: To upskill in data science, I learned to use tools like GitHub and Jupyter Notebook and Python packages like Pandas and Numpy.
Question 3: What are some initial challenges when you got started on your Data Science journey, and how did you overcome them?
Harsharan: There has not been any significant challenges per se but I faced difficulties in getting acquainted with Jupyter Notebook and the processes of data cleaning and pre-processing in Python.
However, I overcame these challenges during my data science upskill program by interacting with other students and referred to Accredian’s case studies. All in all, the journey has been quite impressive with useful learnings.
Question 4: Who is your favorite faculty at Accredian, and what did you learn from him the Most?
Harsharan: My favorite faculty at Accredian has been Suchit and Deepesh.
Suchit was instrumental in introducing me to Data Science and giving me a platform to share my domain experience with other cohorts, and enriching me with some excellent discussions.
Deepesh has been a good teacher of ML intermediate and advanced chapters. He encouraged me to share my Data Science learning in the larger group.
Question 5: What is the goal of Data Science?
Harsharan: The goal of data science is to construct the means for extracting business-focused insights from raw data. This requires the understanding of how value and information flow in a business and how to use that understanding to identify business opportunities.
Question 6: In your view, how has Data Science evolved in the last few years?
Harsharan: Statistics and the use of statistical models are deeply rooted in the field of Data Science. Data Science started with statistics and has evolved to include concepts/practices such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and the Internet of Things, to name a few.
In the past ten years, Data Science has quietly grown to include businesses and organizations worldwide. It is now used by governments, geneticists, engineers, and even astronomers. Data science‘s use of Big data was not merely a “scaling up” of the data during its evolution. Still, it included shifting to new systems for processing data and the way data gets studied and analyzed.
Data science has become an essential part of business and academic research. Technically this includes machine translation, robotics, speech recognition, the digital economy, and search engines. It has expanded to include the biological sciences, healthcare, medical informatics, the humanities, and social sciences in terms of research areas. Data Science now influences economics, governments, and business finance and that is why a formal course to upskill in data science has become so necessary for professionals nowadays.
This was a conversation with one of our GCD students – Harsharan Singh Kohli.
If you want to read more such interesting student interviews, check out Accredian Spotlight.
