Data Science & Analytics

PACM & DSA Newsletter

November/ December
2021

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• DSA Fall 2021 Seminar Series

• DSA Alumni Spotlight

• The Meryl Streep of Mathematics

• Buffalo State Data Talk

• Data Now

• Faculty Pick 

• The DSA Coding Challenge

• Upcoming Events

DSA Alumni Spotlight

with Matthew Bergey '20

How did your experience in DSA help you find your first job?: My work with SQL and Dashboards, such as Tableau, helped a lot. All the courses also helped train and reshape the way I thought about and used data. 

What was your favorite part of program?: I enjoyed dashboards and creating visualizations the most. Geospatial programming was probably one of my favorite parts of the program. Using machine learning and pairing that with geospatial visualizations during my professional lab and internship was a highlight for me. I also appreciated all the professors I had during the program, they were amazing. 

What advice do you have for current students?: Be passionate about everything you do and you’ll eventually find your favorite one. 

DSA and PACM alumni, if you are interested in sharing information for a profile please complete this survey. 

Buffalo State Data Talk

Check out the most recent episode of Buffalo State Data Talk. Episode 12: SEO and Marketing, an interview with Nathan Hall from the Better Business Bureau  

Episode 12 features part 2 of our two-part series with the Better Business Bureau (BBB). In this episode Nathan Hall shares his experiences as a SEO analyst who uses Adobe Analytics and Google Analytics to find anomalies and investigate the reason for changes in website traffic. He also supports multiple local BBB’s helping them to make data driven decisions and update their digital marketing based on algorithm changes. Listen to this episode to hear Nathan’s thoughts on how to know if being an analyst is right for you.  

Data Now

Data science in the everyday

Faculty Pick 

Each newsletter a faculty member shares a relevant article, dashboard, visualization or video. This newsletter's faculty pick is Reneta Barneva, professor in the School of Business, SUNY Fredonia and DSA faculty.

The methods used in data science have been known for centuries, but it became a discipline playing a substantial role in our lives only when the computers acquired enough memory and computational power to apply them for finding real-life solutions. Even if nowadays data is considered as the new commodity, there is still a significant gap between the recorded and the analyzed data, which is due to the limitations of the contemporary computers.

How to increase the power of the computers? One possibility is to apply the quantum computing approach. The information in the classical computers is saved in bits, as one bit can be in only one of the two distinct states denoted with 0 or 1. In contrast, the information in the quantum computers can be saved in qubits. Qubits can be in more than one physical state at a time and thus the amount of stored information could be significantly more. But how can something be in more than one physical state? Please watch the video about the double slit experiment, which can give you an idea. You may also want to check the popular article Quantum Computing and the Future of Big Data before you start reading the scientific article recommended above.

How do you envision our life when quantum computers become ubiquitous? Will the machines become smarter than the humans? How can an electron know that it is observed and change its behavior? As Stephen Hawking said “whoever can decipher Quantum has deciphered the language of the universe."