From 17 to 19 July 2023, a group of 13 high-school students from Luxembourg learned more about data science through interactive workshops and activities on Belval campus. During three days, they investigated data visualization, machine learning, probability and data analysis.
The event was introduced by Prof. Yannick Baraud, professor in mathematical statistics and course director of the Master of Data Science at the University. He presented the history and concept of data science with examples in biology and linguistic.
Then, the group had the opportunity to study in more details four main topics in data science. The workshop “Data viz superpowers” enabled students to better understand data visualization by explaining different infographics and by collecting data across the campus.
In the second workshop, the students understood how basic methodologies with directional statistics and machine learning/deep learning models could help in the detection and analysis of craters in our Universe.
By using the example of a pizza chain stores present on different campus sites and by making a hypothesis regarding their turnover, the third workshop invited the students to evaluate the quality of their estimation via regression analysis.
The last workshop was dedicated to Benford’s law and its applications, especially in fraud detection.
During their last day, they had the chance to visit the high-performance computing infrastructures of the University which compute large amounts of data for different research projects.
The event was coordinated by Prof. Antonella Perucca, professor for didactics of mathematics and course director of the Master in Secondary Education in Mathematics. The workshops were moderated by postdoctoral and doctoral researchers Gaspard Bernard, Juntong Chen, Aida Horaniet Ibanez, Ann Kiefer, Sophia Loizidou, Senthil Murugan Nagarajan and Guendalina Palmirotta.