Over the last couple of months, Seldon has been collaborating with a talented and enthusiastic team of students from the UCL Department of Computer Science on a research project called ETL for Data Science that focuses on loading, cleaning, analyzing and visualizing data.
The placement was facilitated by Project Placed – a platform that enables 100s of Universities to efficiently connect to and manage the placement of students across 1,000s of companies to complete vocational projects that count towards their academic grade. Initially focused on placing students from Computer Science departments into companies.
Building bridges with universities and the next-generation of data scientists and machine learning experts is super important to us. We’re delighted to see a global network of Seldon users emerging in academia, with various collaborations in discussion that we look forward to sharing at a later date.
Most of the team at Seldon studied computer science at university to BSc level or beyond. Personally, I put an enormous amount of effort into a pretend software project when I was at university. This gave me a taste of what working on a project might be like, but nothing can really compare to creating a project that serves a real-life requirements for real stakeholders. It also helps to experience how small start-up teams collaborate in real-life, with an agile SCRUM methodology using tools like JIRA and Slack to collaborate.
It was hugely satisfying for us to release Seldon’s core platform on Github under an open-source license, and we wanted the students on this project to experience the same buzz of releasing their code into the wild as a part of their project. We are delighted to share this project with the world on Github under an Apache 2.0 license: https://github.com/SeldonIO/seldon-ucl
Whenever we’re recruiting for a technical role, any form of experience working on open-source projects is a major bonus. I’m happy that this project helped the UCL team to unlock this achievement.
To find out more and keep track of this project, check out the UCL team’s project website. I also encourage you to star, clone, fork, submit issues and pull requests on the UCL project Github repo. You can also help by completing this short survey about the tools you use for data exploration, analysis and cleaning.
The experience of supporting a university project has been super positive for us, and I’d recommend it to most start-ups. If you’d like to explore a placement, speak to Tabitha Goldstraub at Project Placed.
Alex has been founding and building technology companies since 2003 across mobile, data, and machine learning (ML). Having experienced first-hand the challenges of scaling model deployment infrastructure in a recommendation engine serving billions of personalised news article recommendations, Alex created Seldon with the goal of democratising ML to solve the world’s most pressing problems. As CEO, Alex directs the company strategy and leads a world-class leadership team shaping the future of MLOps.