Data-X Lab Launches Data-X Online, Democratizing Access to its Popular Course
The University of California, Berkeley Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology (SCET) has redesigned its popular course, Applied Data Science with Venture Applications, (or Data-X for short) to provide free access to its videos, slides, code, and resources on a single website.
Students around the globe can now teach themselves the latest data science, tools, and approaches for creating cutting-edge innovation data projects. (See examples of past data science projects produced by students in the course at Data-X.) Additionally, educators at colleges and universities can utilize the content to create their own custom course to teach their own students Data-X.
With this development, Data-X has become more than a course, it is now a platform that allows students, companies, and global universities to each bring their skills, data, and perspectives. It enables everyone to work together on collaborative projects.
“My guiding principle for developing Data-X was to create a course that I would personally want to take. We want to give students the most useful approaches that are used in industry today and let them practice these approaches by creating a truly innovative project,” says Prof. Ikhlaq Sidhu, founder of Data-X and SCET’s chief scientist and faculty director. “By making our Data-X content freely accessible online, we now make a bigger impact with the course and can help more students learn this critical skill for nearly every worker in the 21st century.”
To ensure that the projects are relevant to today’s technology challenges, Data-X works directly with companies who can gain new perspectives on their pressing data and AI challenges by partnering with Berkeley students to produce data science innovation projects. (Companies interested in collaborating with the Data-X platform can learn more here.)
The new platform was developed with the support of UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering in an effort to ensure high-quality remote learning experiences for students taking the Data-X course.
“We are pleased to see the Sutardja Center adapt its rigorous Data-X curriculum to fully online format while maintaining a high-quality student learning experience. It is especially exciting that this curriculum is publicly accessible, so that it can have worldwide impact,” says UC Berkeley College of Engineering Dean Tsu-Jae King Liu.
The project was the result of the effort of faculty, students, industry mentors, and staff in the Data-X Lab, including Rajarathnam Balakrishnan, Elias Castro-Hernandez, Nathan Cheng, Niki Collette, Kunal Desai, Alexander Fred-Ojala, Sudarshan Gopalakrishnan, Priya Kamdar, Sana Iqbal, Sindhuja Jeyabal, Jenn Jia, Kevin Li, Wenxi Li, Nikhil Mane, Fellipe Fernandes Cardoso Marcellino, Keith McAleer, Arash Nourian, Amit Palekar, Joshua Sanchez, Ikhlaq Sidhu, Yash Wagh, Chad Wakamiya, Jocelyn Weber, and Debbie Yuen.