Bringing Data to Life
Data Scientist, Eli Lily & Co.
Vinod Rao says the capstone practicum project in Illinois Tech’s Data Science program showed him how to apply data to solve a real-world problem.
Vinod Rao (M.A.S. DATA SCIENCE '18)Vinod Rao chose Illinois Institute of Technology because of the Data Science program’s uniqueness. The hands-on faculty provide a personable experience to the individual student, the departments collaborate with industry businesses in innovative projects, and the coursework is aligned with the demand of today’s technology in areas such as computer vision, natural language processing, and statistics.
Rao says, “The foundational theories of machine learning, statistics, and probability from the classroom are always helping me to analyze data and [perform] estimation.”
The required capstone practicum project matches student teams with businesses to find solutions to economic, industrial, and environmental concerns. Rao’s auto insurance project, for example, involved forecasting a near-future event based on existing patterns. Using a recurrent neural network, the team built a machine-learning model in Python programming language.
“That helps also to learn deeply,” adds Rao. “The real data science comes into life when we solve problem in industries. Then actual learning starts.”