Young and talented data scientists were awarded prizes on 10 September at the C-Lab in Piazza Fiera in Trento for the second edition of the ICT Days Summer Camp, the work experience scheme focused on future jobs organized by DISI – the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science of the University of Trento with Hub Innovazione Trentino, Agenzia del Lavoro of the Autonomous Province of Trento and the STAAR network.
Engineering, Spazio Dati, Thinkinside, U-Hopper were the business partners in the initiative.
About fifty students from the advanced classes of Trentino high schools worked intensely for a whole week, from 3 to 10 September, with creativity and intelligence, to solve a real issue.
The four business partners presented four problems that needed a solution, four "challenges": the participants had to use their problem solving abilities, creativity, and IT skills to solve them.
Here are the names of the winning teams in each challenge: the BusBoss team solved the "Real Time Transport" challenge launched by U-Hopper; the SecurityTeam won "A prova di hacker" launched by SpazioDati; WorkInProgress found a solution to the "Lavoro 4.0" problem, presented by Trentino Lavoro, the webpage of Agenzia del Lavoro, with Engineering; the Wonderparks team solved the "RiParco da Trento" challenge by the ICE project of UniTrento.
The jury also awarded a number of special prizes: the GGroup won the prize for the most effective presentation, the Hubus team the one for teamwork.
As for the technical awards, the Security Team developed the best demonstration, the BusBoss team wrote the most thorough report, while the WorkInProgress team was the most creative in using data and instruments.
The purpose of the ICT Days Summer Camp is to introduce high school students to the jobs that will be increasingly sought after on the labour market, many of which are in information and communication technologies. It's not all about software engineering anyway, IT jobs require a set of soft skills too. Knowledge and skills across various disciplines will be more and more required, from economics to sociology, from science to engineering.
The work experience scheme was designed by DISI, for the second year in a row, bearing this in mind. The participants were asked to work in group on real problems, using their knowledge in information technology (including statistical analysis, data mining, machine learning, distributed calculus) and their soft skills, like their problem solving and communication abilities. The task was to design and implement an instrument to analyze the data collected by the four business partners. The students designed the whole data flow, working together for an entire week in which there were also training sessions, data analyses, meetings with business representatives and group work with expert mentors.
Data Science
The term was created in 2001. Today, it is a multidisciplinary field comprising statistical analysis, data mining, machine learning and distributed calculus. Based on a 2017 LinkedIn report, Data Science skills are among the most demanded on the labour market globally. According to Sns Research, hardware and software services and professional services for the collection, management and analysis of data represent a market worth 57 billion dollars that will increase to over 70 billions in 2020. This expansion is involving more and more companies, of different size and across various sectors. Because of this boom in big data, professionals who can effectively use, organize and manage information are in high demand.
For more information read the press release