Data Science Society

Christian revealed that R started as an academic-oriented project but has been gaining popularity in the business circles lately. This is due to the plethora of extra packages developed on the fly by enthusiasts, the widely available support by the community, the quality of its charts and the opportunity to code every step of the analysis process in its programming language, which is fully customizable.

Yasen started by explaining what NLP is all about – enabling computers to derive meaning from a text. This is at the heart of Google Translate, Google Search and Smartphone assistants as Siri. A more specific application is classifying text into different categories – this is how e-mail services as Gmail and Yahoo detect spam e-mails, and lies in the core of sentiment analysis.

The goal is to bring the tools and techniques of the science of Cybernetics into the portfolio management process. To do this, the authors reformulated the investment portfolio problem as a cybernetic system where the investor is the controlling system and the portfolio is the controlled system.

Georgi guided his audience in a classroom at the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics through the path leading to a better algorithm for image recognition by computers. As often happens with important discoveries, it is a path of trial and error, of gradual improvement and, as Georgi reminded us at the end of the lecture, of contributions made by outsiders to the field.