My colleagues and I have another interesting project that I want to introduce you to as well. It’s called Big Data University and is an online educational site that provides free courses on data science, big data, and programming.

As just mentioned, the courses don’t cost you a thing. All you need to do to take them at your own pace, at your place (as some like to say) is register with the site.[1]

Though not an accredited university, certificates of completion are issued, and if you complete a series of specific courses, Open Badges backed by IBM are awarded. They do indeed look good on your site, LinkedIn, or even your resume. 🙂

Above all, you get the education contained within for free and from the comfort of your own home.

We offer a variety of data science and big data courses. The Scala for Data Science learning path includes a handful of courses created for BDU by Lightbend (the company behind Scala). I find those courses to be remarkably good. I do recommend however that you check out all our Learning Paths.[2]

Getting to the point of today’s post title, our ambitious goal is to educate a million data scientists around the world. And we do mean around the world. We are targeting students from Africa, China, India, South America, Europe, et cetera. And of course, North America as well.

At this point in time, we have hundreds of thousands of members, but our aim really is to have at least a million people engaged in learning, taking courses, and practicing data science.

We believe in the transformative power of education, which can truly improve the world.[3] And as such, I want to cordially invite you to join us and help us spread the message.

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However, technology changes quickly and so has my job over the years. I’m still a software developer and technical evangelist, but my team’s name, scope, and goals have evolved over the years to keep up with the rapidly changing technological landscape.

In recent times, my attention has been focused on two projects, The first, a tool for data scientists, will be discussed in this post, and I’ll introduce you to the second in next week’s post.

This first project is called Data Scientist Workbench. It’s an all-in-one solution for programmers, data engineers, data journalists, and data scientists who are interested in running their data analysis in the cloud. Oh, and it’s absolutely free, no catches or strings attached.

It includes Jupyter notebooks (often simply known as IPython notebooks amongst Python developers), Apache Zeppelin notebooks, a web version of RStudio IDE, OpenRefine to clean messy data before processing, and Apache Spark to handle large volumes of data.

Being a well-orchestrated collection of Open Source tools, your notebooks and data are not locked and can be exported for offline use whenever you want.

Python, R, and Scala are supported at the time of writing. Your workbench runs in a virtual machine which currently provides you with 100 GB of disk space, and 16 GB of RAM. This leads to processing that is faster than most people’s laptops. Thus you don’t have to mess your laptop up, slow it down, or spend hours installing anything. Instead, everything can be handled conveniently from a browser, from anywhere you find yourself.

Speaking of adding things, many libraries can be installed independently by you within the notebook through a command such as !pip install. If your library has OS dependencies that are not installed within your instance, you can ask our Toronto-based team for help. We are attentive and responsive to user requests and feedback, and will try to accommodate most reasonable requests in a timely manner.

On top of the usual features you might be familiar with, if you have played with, say, Jupyter notebooks, the Data Scientist Workbench adds a host of nice features such as drag and drop to upload of files, sharing of notebooks (including publishing them as Github Gists), the ability to import such links by just pasting them in the search box, and pre-created sample tutorials.

These tutorials can be imported with a single click, so that you can learn not only about DSWB (as we like to shorten it), but also familiarize yourself with the data science, big data, and machine learning technologies covered within.

So far the feedback I’ve received from people at meetups and data science hackathons I’ve been involved in has been universally positive. This is not to say that it’s perfect, of course, but it is a genuinely useful tool that is provided, again, entirely for free.

Above all, our small team launched it as a startup would. We created an MVP (Minimum Viable Product), and set it free, iteratively improving it quickly, incorporating user feedback, including both praise and complaints, as much as possible.

I think it’s a cool product that you’ll enjoy and I would like to personally invite you to try it out. Specifically:

1. Register here.
2. As you use the workbench, please give us feedback. Click on the question mark at the bottom of the page or click on one of the many options we provide for you to contact us (see sidebar, under Resources).

We have big plans for DSWB, so it’s important that we get as much user feedback as possible, and definitely part of the reason why I’m sharing this here with all of you. Stay tuned for next week’s post about my second focus project. Even better, subscribe via RSS feed or by email.

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The gist of it is that these meetups are hubs for developers and technologists who are interested in cool, innovative technologies related to Cloud computing, big data, analytics, mobile, wearable devices, social media, and so on (and of course IBM’s portfolio of relevant products.)

The first events have been very well received, but due to the geographical location of my team (Toronto), the focus thus far has been centered on Eastern Canada (specifically Ontario and Quebec). I, on the other hand, work from Penticton, BC so I happily offered to cover Western Canada starting with Vancouver. Depending on the interest level we receive out west, cities like Calgary and Edmonton may soon follow as well.

If these topics tickle your fancy and you reside in British Columbia (or travel here regularily), please consider joining the Vancouver SMAC meetup.

The first event will be held on June 9th, at 6pm at the Launch Academy. You can RSVP here.

The main topic of this first event will be Codename: BlueMix. IBM describes it as follows:

Codename: BlueMix is an open-standards, cloud-based platform for building, managing and running apps of all types (web, mobile, big data, new smart devices). Capabilities include Java, mobile backend development, application monitoring, as well as capabilities from ecosystem partners and open source — all through an as-a-service model in the cloud.

In practice, it’s a really cool developer playground to build and deploy apps in the Cloud with innovative components that are both IBM products/services such as BLU Acceleration and third parties such as Node.js, Redis, RabbitMQ, Twilio, and Square to name a few. If you played with Heroku before, the idea behind this platform shouldn’t feel alien to you.

During our first meetup, we will give you an overview and demo of this cool technology that’s currently available in beta. Fear not though, we’re not about to try and sell you anything. This isn’t a timeshare presentation afterall. 🙂

In fact, we want these events to become an opportunity to network and show and tell what the local community has been up to in the SMAC space. (Those who are interested in presenting should get in touch with me for future events.) And if you needed any more incentive to take part in this exciting event, free pizza and pop are also included.

If you’re intrigued, I suggest you join this SMAC meetup here, even if you can’t make it to the first meetup, so as to receive notifications about future events that you might be able to attend.

I really look forward to seeing you there!

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