Ingenuity Launches New Data Science Classes to Help NM Companies Stay on Competitive Edge

Nowadays, a company that’s not analyzing and using its data wisely is at a competitive disadvantage. That’s why CNM Ingenuity is now offering an intro to data science course for business leaders that want to get their companies up to speed.

“For years, many businesses have made decisions on intuition or based on how they’ve always done things, but that doesn’t work anymore,” says Cliff Lewis, the Data Science instructor. “If you want to stay competitive, you have to use data science. Data is crucial for creating an impartial baseline recommendation for how a company should proceed.”

The business leader class, which takes place on Saturday mornings from Oct 10-31, is targeted at the people running companies and designed to show them the power of data science so they can figure out how data science best fits into their company. 

“We’re targeting the decision makers who will then hire data scientists at their companies,” Cliff says. 

Topics the course will cover include optimized decision making, little data versus Big Data, and data-driven decisions using machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) tools. As an example of machine learning and AI, Cliff says many companies are using these tools to help with customer service and logistics. A retail company, for example, might use machine learning to help automate and analyze its customer-facing help desk. A logistics company might use machine learning to optimize routes. 

In addition to the business leaders class, Ingenuity is also offering a new, two-week Natural Language Processing (NLP) bootcamp that runs Monday-Thursday from November 9-19. This advanced class, which is also taught by Cliff, tackles an emerging field and looks at how data can be extracted from text.

More specifically, Cliff says people often think about data as something that fits nicely in a spreadsheet. That’s called “structured data,” but there’s also “unstructured data,” or data that’s not so straightforward to analyze. The data in texts (emails, medical records, web pages, books) is all unstructured but can be combed through and analyzed with NLP.

As an example, the Google search function uses NLP because it has to figure out what the user is searching for and then comb through mountains of textual data to find the most appropriate results. A chat bot uses NLP because it has to interpret what the user is saying and then find an appropriate way to respond. Translation programs use NLP because they analyze and then compare texts in two different languages.

Companies that work with web searches, AI-based customer service, emails, advertising, language translation and medical reports can all use NLP to their advantage. But the net extends even farther. Cliff says a vast majority of the world's data is unstructured and can likely be analyzed using NLP.

“The uses are nearly endless,” he says.   

You can learn more about other CNM Ingenuity programs such as Internet of Things, Full Stack Web Development, and Digital Media by visiting their website.