The National Science Foundation (NSF) being the premier institute in fostering STI in Sri Lanka facilitates leveraging the performance of research, development and innovation (RDI) with an emphasis on capacity building, knowledge generation and cross boarder knowledge transfer. The NSF fosters capacity building of not only researchers but also of vocational education and skills development sector on emerging fields such as IoT, blockchain, big data as these fields provide opportunities especially in developing economies with potentially profound impacts to learn and get experience on business growth and upskill the local labor force addressing the industry demand.
Out of said emerging fields, data science is one of the emerging and demanding fields in the global sphere and the role of a data scientist has become the most sought-after profession due to the increase in data and its connected industries. While the demand for data science professionals is all-time high, there is a substantial demand-supply imbalance due to scarcity of qualified people. Addressing the above gap and with the objective of capacity building of lecturers/instructors in skills development and vocational training institutions in Sri Lanka, the NSF organized an online workshop on Data Science. This was held on 22nd November, 2022 with participation of two expatriate resource persons and one from home namely Dr Rasika Rajapaksha, Postdoctoral fellow of University of Wyoming, USA & Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Computing & Technology, University of Kelaniya, Dr M. A. Danushka Bandara, Assistant Professor of Fairfield University, USA and Dr Charini Nanayakkara, Research Fellow of Australian National University.
The workshop addressed a content covering key sub-topics: data science, phenomena with respect to real-world data, data science applications for effective decision making, data preprocessing, descriptive analysis, insights from descriptive analysis, privacy and ethics of data handling, machine learning and their main algorithms along with live demonstrations. The beneficiaries around 70 will get further assistance through NSF to explore and link up with the expert panel to become data science experts.