Jonathan Dinu Co-Founder, Zipfian Academy

jonathan@zipfianacademy.com @clearspandex

@ZipfianAcademy

Modern Education in a Post-Modern World

July 21st, 2014

Today

• The current (modern) State of Education

• Our (post-modern) Methodology

• Productionizing the Products (i.e. the industry)

• GraphLab in the Classroom

• Our School

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Disclaimer:

This presentation contains strong opinions that

you may or may not agree with. All thoughts are

my own.

* I love higher education, and am grateful for everything it has given me. And for the tireless hours professors spend to make sure that their students understand.

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Cultural Studies

A Short Interlude…

Source: https://blogs.lt.vt.edu/rpstephens/2012/09/14/modernism-vs-postmodernism/Questions? tweet @zipfianacademy

Modernism

mod•ern•ism: a philosophical movement that, along with

cultural trends and changes, arose from wide-

scale and far-reaching transformations in Western

society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ModernismQuestions? tweet @zipfianacademy

The Reverend

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_BayesQuestions? tweet @zipfianacademy

Universities

Universities are incentivized to produce high quality professors…

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Universities

Who do cutting edge research and write (well cited) papers in peer

reviewed journals

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Universities

And give good grades?

Graduation and retention rank 6-year graduation rate

Average freshman retention rate

Source: http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/Questions? tweet @zipfianacademy

UniversitiesAnd give good grades?

Source: http://www.gradeinflation.com/Questions? tweet @zipfianacademy

Universities

Source: http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/

To Exceptional students…

Student selectivity rank Financial resources rank

SAT/ACT 25th-75th percentile Alumni giving rank

Freshmen in top 10 percent of high school class Average alumni giving rate

Freshmen in top 25 percent of high school class

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Employment

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But this is at odds with what (many) students want

Employment

Source: Mckinsey Report (http://mckinseyonsociety.com/downloads/reports/Education/Education-to-Employment_FINAL.pdf)

% o

f Gra

duat

es

0

0.25

0.5

0.75

1

Students Employers Schools

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Entry level Preparedness

Employment

Source: Kim Polese (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6Q0nkRjD80)Questions? tweet @zipfianacademy

Employment

Source: http://www.nerdwallet.com/nerdscholar/grad_surveys/highest-employment-rates

University of Massachusetts-Amherst School of Nursing

98%

Georgetown University McDonough School of Business

94%

Michigan State University College of Nursing

92%

Syracuse University School of Architecture

90%

University of Massachusetts-Amherst Isenberg School of Management

90%

Michigan State University School of Hospitality Business

89%

New York University 88%

Boston College Connell School of Nursing

88%

Boston College Carroll School of Management

87%

Case Western Reserve University Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing

86%

Highest Employment Rates (2012)

1. Princeton University

2. Harvard University

3. Yale University

4. Columbia University

5. Stanford University

6. University of Chicago

7. Duke University

8. MIT

9. University of Pennsylvania

10. California Institue of Technology

U.S. News and World Report Ranking

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Postmodernism

Post•mod•ern•ism: a late-20th-century movement in the

arts, architecture, and criticism that was

a departure from modernism.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostmodernismQuestions? tweet @zipfianacademy

Our Methodology

• Outcomes focused

• Project-based curriculum using real datasets

• Guest lectures from leaders in the field

• Mock interviews and hiring preparation

• Full instructional staff + personal mentorship

Questions? tweet @zipfianacademy

Our Methodology

Commun

ity Education

Industry

Meetup

Student Groups

Corporate Training

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Students program. Python for 10hrs/day

Our Methodology

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Students program Python. for 10hrs/day

Our Methodology

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Students program Python for 10hrs/day.

Our Methodology

Questions? tweet @zipfianacademy

Students program Python for 10hrs/day.

SQL

Our Methodology

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Students program Python for 10hrs/day.

UNIX

SQL

Our Methodology

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Students program Python for 10hrs/day

UNIX

SQL

to solve data science problems.

Our Methodology

Questions? tweet @zipfianacademy

Students program Python for 10hrs/day

case studies.

UNIX

SQL

to solve data science problems.

Our Methodology

Questions? tweet @zipfianacademy

Students program Python for 10hrs/day

case studies.

projects.

UNIX

SQL

to solve data science problems.

Our Methodology

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Industry

But we can all learn from each other…

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Industry

Questions? tweet @zipfianacademy #pydata Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernism

But we can all learn from each other…

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Industry Student Projects

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Production

Questions? tweet @zipfianacademy Source: http://graphlab.com/products/create/overview.html

Pipeline

Acquisition

Parse

Storage

Transform/Explore

Vectorization

Train

Model

Expose

Presentation

requests

BeautifulSoup4

pandas

pymongo

Flask

yHat

scikit-learn/NLTK

Questions? tweet @zipfianacademy

Acquisition

Parse

Storage

Transform/Explore

Vectorization

Train

Model

Expose

Presentation

requests

BeautifulSoup4

Flask

Questions? tweet @zipfianacademy

pandas

pymongo

yHat

scikit-learn/NLTK

Pipeline

GraphLab

Acquisition

Parse

Storage

Transform/Explore

Vectorization

Train

Model

Expose

Presentation

requests

BeautifulSoup4

Questions? tweet @zipfianacademy

Flask

Our Methodology

Questions? tweet @zipfianacademy #pydata Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernism

• Outcomes focused

• Project-based curriculum using real datasets

• Guest lectures from leaders in the field

• Mock interviews and hiring preparation

• Full instructional staff + personal mentorship

Questions? tweet @zipfianacademy

The Programs

Questions? tweet @zipfianacademy

Program Data Science Immersive

Data Science Fellowship

Data Engineering Immersive

Duration 12 Weeks 6 Weeks 12 Weeks

Prerequisites• Programming

Experience

• Quantitative Background

• Data Science Experience

• Knowledge of Machine Learning

Software Engineering Experience

Curriculum

• Stats/Probability • Machine Learning • NLP • Anomaly Detection • Social Network Analysis

Capstone Project

• Distributed Systems • ETL Pipelines • Databases • Stream Processing • Scalable Algorithms

Price $16,000 FREE! $16,000

Timeline

STRUCTURED CURRICULUM

HIRING DAY

CAPSTONE PROJECT

GRADUATION

0 8 10.5 12

INTERVIEWS

Data Science Immersive

Data Fellowship Start

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!

• Working knowledge of programming

• Background in a quantitative discipline

• Comfortable with mathematics and statistics

• Child-like curiosity

What We Look For

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!

• Working knowledge of programming

• Background in a quantitative discipline

• Comfortable with mathematics and statistics

• Child-like curiosity

What We Look For

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!

• Present a guest lecture or share a data story

• Donate datasets and propose projects

• Sponsor a scholarship

• Attend our Hiring Day (July 31st)

Get Involved

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!

• Full-time & Part-time Instructors

• TAs

• Data Scientist in Residence

• Mentor (volunteer)

We’re Hiring!

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Thank You!

Jonathan Dinu Co-Founder

jonathan@zipfianacademy.com @clearspandex