Guest post by Dr. Yusuf Danisman, Queensborough Community College, City University of New York (CUNY)
This Success Story is a report on the results of the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub’s 2020 Seed Fund program.
The aim of this Seed Fund project was to Improve programming and data science skills of community college students from different majors and backgrounds. At the conclusion of the project, the fully online program consisted of: orientation, 11 weeks of online lectures, 3 weeks of individual/group project meetings, attending panels, and a talk given by an expert. Google Colab lecture notes, which include Python, Data Science subjects and projects, were created. In this program, students learned the basics of data science, how to write medium size codes in Python, and to work on a project as a team and prepare presentations. Supervised learning algorithms, Linear Regression, k-nearest neighbors (kNN), decision tree, random forest and unsupervised learning algorithms kMeans, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) were also covered.
Thanks to the Seed Fund, Yusuf Danisman’s application to Queensborough Community College to initiate the Data Science Lab for Undergraduate Research was accepted. Further, they are planning to apply for an NSF grant to continue the project with a budget amount around $100,000.
Lead PI: Yusuf Danisman
Yusuf Danisman is an Assistant Professor at Queenborough Community College. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics at The Ohio State University and worked at the University of Oklahoma before joining the City University of New York (CUNY). He is currently working on fractal geometry and its applications to the stock market.
Yusuf provides support for the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub’s Education + Data Literacy Focus Area. Yusuf is also a member of the National Student Data Corps‘ Founding Committee and in 2021 became a member of the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub Steering Committee.