The foyer of Vilhelm Bjerknes´ hus was filled with data scientists, food, drinks, stands and a bar (thanks to Realistforeningen!), when this web portal and the data science community at the University of Oslo were launched on Friday June 16th 2017. In order to make everybody sit, the program took place in the auditorium, where dean Morten Dæhlen marked the opening with a short speech and skilful cutting of the red ribbon.
The first group of students just completed the first pure data science course at the University of Oslo, STK-INF3000/4000 Selected Topics in Data Science, and some of the students presented their semester projects in groups.
The impressive projects were about city bikes, train delays, traffic jam and phone calls, among other things. The project 'Time is Money' was awarded the Norsk Regnesentral Prize for Best Presentation, decided by a jury consisting of Morten Dæhlen, Håvard from the Oslo Data Science Meetup, and Nikolai from the Norwegian Computing Centre. Dirk Hesse has been responsible for the course and has done an excellent job both with the lectures and with the various student projects.
After the student presentations, Christophe Best from Google in Munich gave a talk about big data and data science. The whole event, including the student presentations, was streamed live, and is now available on Youtube.
More information can be found here: