DATAMIN – Unveiling the World’s Biggest Online Data Science Quizzing Platform

We are thrilled to announce the launch of the world’s biggest online data science quizzing platform: Datamin!

Do you feel some of your peers just do better in their data science career for reasons you can’t explain? 

With all the interest of industries, venture capitalists, governments and various other functions, data science has expanded to a very wide domain. With this expansion, data scientists’ today need to demonstrate a huge array of skills to excel in the role.

A person would need to be:

• A statistician to interpret probabilistic inferences
• An expert programmer to code AI
• An efficient presenter to present complex ML techniques in front of business audience
• A person with strong quantitative skills to size and prioritize new opportunities
• A domain expert to integrate AI with business processes
• A data architect to comprehend complex data models etc.

The list keeps on getting bigger as the domain expands. This informative image captures this multi-faceted role:

There’s both good news and bad news here.

The Good News is that you can pick up any skill you want if you have the right mindset, the discipline and the determination to practice it daily. The Bad News? Well there are broadly two main challenges aspiring data scientists face:

• They often can’t figure out and pinpoint the area(s) in their skillset which needs improvement. The ambiguity is dangerous to your career trajectory in the data science field
• There might be certain skills you will initially struggle to pick up because of a lack of experience with it

The second challenge, of a person coming from a non-data science background, is all too common. I have seen people give up halfway to their goal because they feel they won’t ever improve their existing skillset. For instance, a person with no engineering background might feel he/she might never become an awesome data scientist because he might never become good at programming.

Sounds like a familiar situation?

So, how do we overcome these 2 challenges?

Here are a couple of solutions for these challenges that I will explain with relatable analogies:

Everyone knows Vitamins are essential for our body. If you struggle with any physical/mental illness, do you simply start taking Vitamin pills? No, right? You get your diagnostic tests for various Vitamins and then start the cure.

Similarly, a data scientist needs to master a set of skill elements. To understand which element is impeding his/her growth, the data scientist needs to go through a rigorous diagnostic test on various data science aspects.

Once you identify your knowledge gap, now what? What if the skill you need to master looks unachievable or simply takes too much time that you don’t have?

Turns out that the time to learn a new skill OR improve on an existing one is mainly dependent on our state of mind.

Looks too abstract? Let me illustrate. In your lifetime, when do you think you had the steepest learning curve? Probably you would have guessed right – when you were a toddler. Can you think of a reason? The main reason was the state of mind. At that age, every new lesson was a game. And learning through a game turns out to be the fastest way you can learn any new skill regardless of your age.

We at Analytics Vidhya, combined these concepts and leveraged our expertise in data science to create a new product called Datamin – Your Daily Dose of Data Science. We are now ready to test the waters and launch the Beta version of the product. 

Here’s Analytics Vidhya’s Founder and CEO with the launch announcement:

Datamin – Your Daily Dose of Data Science

Datamin is a unique data science quizzing platform that has been designed by industry experts. Datamin will:

• Evaluate you on various data science dimensions
• Accelerate your learning by giving relevant feedback on each user attempt
• Engage you with live community chat and features like challenge your friend, and
• Identify in real-time your opportunity areas with reading suggestions

These quizzes will be a week long with almost no limits on the number of questions you attempt. If this was not enough, every competition ends with prizes worth INR 200,000 (USD 3000).

The questions you will face will test you broadly on three main categories that are most relevant for data scientists:

• Machine Learning
• Statistics
• Programming

The beta platform comes with a lot of community engagement levers and modes of giving us LIVE feedback.

Rules of the Game

1. You can register anytime of the week while the quiz is running. We recommend you register as early as possible to get maximum number of attempts
2. You can answer unlimited number of questions. We have only put a limit on your daily attempt at a very high number to restrict any bots.
3. Every right answer gives you +3 points and wrong answer gets you -1
4. Time you get to answer any question is 90 seconds
5. You can check your standing on the leaderboard at any time
6. Skipping a question does not get you any penalty or reward
7. Top positions on the leaderboard after each week competition will be rewarded with cash prize and job opportunities

Gear up for the launch of Datamin

DATAMIN goes LIVE at 3 pm IST on 25 July 2019 (Thursday). Wear your data science hat, get your gaming self together and get ready for a super fast learning drive.

Make sure you register as soon as possible to allow yourself maximum time and maximum attempts. Note that there are no limits on the total number of questions you can attempt, so the only way to maximize your score is to maximize your attempts with high accuracy. Best of luck and happy learning!

Tavish Srivastava

Tavish Srivastava, co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Analytics Vidhya, is an IIT Madras graduate and a passionate data-science professional with 8+ years of diverse experience in markets including the US, India and Singapore, domains including Digital Acquisitions, Customer Servicing and Customer Management, and industry including Retail Banking, Credit Cards and Insurance. He is fascinated by the idea of artificial intelligence inspired by human intelligence and enjoys every discussion, theory or even movie related to this idea.