Big Data for Data Scientists: Apache Spark Hands-on Workshop

As the major banks in Canada have built their own data science teams and started to carry out proof-of-concept projects, data scientists who are able to use big data tools, like Hadoop, Hive, Scala, and Spark have become one of the most in-demand and highest-paying jobs in Canada.

On Saturday, Shaohua Zhang, co-founder and chief instructor of WeCloudData, who's also a data scientist at Kik, will share his experience on how he employed big data technology to build up customer taste graph from end to end.

In this introductory workshop, we will help you get started with Big Data Technologies.

Topics covered:
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- Introduction to Big Data
- Big data use case sharing

Prerequisite:
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- Basic Python knowledge

Our Speaker

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Shaohua Zhang

Shaohua Zhang is a practitioner and thought leader in applied data science and big data technologies. He has over 11 years of experience in applied data science and has built a strong reputation for constructing high-performance data scientist teams in the past. Shaohua is currently the co-founder and CEO of WeCloudData, Canada's leading Data Science Education Accelerator, where he works on bringing more Data Science and AI talents to the Canadian job market.

Prior to co-founding WeCloudData, Shaohua worked as a senior data scientist at Kik Interactive and also helped build a high-performance data science team at BlackBerry that focused on building innovative data science solutions for marketing, CRM, and product teams. He is specialized in user interest graph modeling, targeted advertising, scalable location intelligence, and large-scale recommendation engines for mobile personalization.

He has also collaborated with Ryerson’s Data Science Lab on several big data research projects and helped develop the big data course at Ryerson University in 2015, where he trained over 150 professionals on big data technologies. He is a Data Growth Coach at Communitech and the lead facilitator of the Communitech Academy Data Science Fundamentals Bootcamp.