Beginning data scientists at your service

Coursera is currently taking a course on Introduction to Data Science from the University of Washington, during which students will be taught how to work with large data arrays, statistical analysis, data mining, machine learning algorithms and other such things. The authors of the course invite organizations (commercial, non-commercial, and even just individuals) to whom help in working with data will be useful to take part, throwing students to solve problems from real life.

The scheme is approximately as follows: the organization formulates the problem and provides the data (own or from open sources), the students solve it and write a report. The report is then evaluated by other students, plus the organization gives its feedback on the work.
In the black, everything is: the organization gets brains for free, and the student gets experience.

About a dozen tasks have already been published: from linguistic analysis of social networks to visualization of fire statistics. But those who want to solve them are much more, so your participation will be very welcome.
About 100 Russian-speaking students enrolled in the course (and these are only those who checked in the group at the forum), and in general there are more than 74,000 people from all over the world.

What students can do:

• Solve forecasting tasks (on a set of data, develop a method for predicting how values ​​will change in the future).
• Visualize the data and the relationships between them (for example, like this ).
• Find answers to questions about the data (eg, “How did changes in advertising campaigns last month affect the amount of donations”).

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The course is limited in duration (ends June 26), so there are some restrictions on the tasks:

• The project should be relatively short.
• The task should be isolated and well formulated (not require deep knowledge in a specific subject area).
• The task should not contain restrictions on the technologies used for the solution.

How to participate

1. Sign up for a course
2. Read the details (see the link below or the “Optional Real-World Project” page on the course website)
3. Post a task in the course forum in Organizations Seeking Assistance

Original invitation and details: coursolve.org/courses/datascience

Why all this to your humble servant? I myself am engaged in this course and also want to “scratch my teeth” about real tasks, and the more they are, the more interesting. ;)