Key industry stakeholders across different sectors of the Nigerian economy will converge on the 12th of October, 2017 at Oriental Hotel, Victoria Island, Lagos to have extensive discussions around the application of data science in driving the socio-economic developments in Nigeria.
Some of the industry heavyweight that will attend the event tagged “National Summit on Big Data Economy” include Olumide Olayinka of KPMG (Partner), Juliet Ehimuan-Chiazor of Google Nigeria (Country Director), Babafemi Ogungbamila of Interswitch (CIO), Dipo Faulkner of IBM (Country Manager), Olufemi Awoyemi of Proshare Nigeria (CEO), Ayotunde Coker CEO Rack Centre and Bernard Kijie Ewah President/Chief Creative Officer, keoun.ng
Others include Dr. Tunji Adegbesan of Gidimo, Nadayar Enegesi of Andela, Dr. Sulaimon Afolabi, Babajide Ogunsanwo of Leadership-By-Data, Dele Tejuoso of Wifi Combat Academy, Steve Babaeko of X3M Ideas, Oluseun Onigbinde of BudgIT, Ngozi Dozie of OneFi, Adetayo Bamiduro MAX.ng. Also, the summit will showcase some experts like Shingai Manjengwa of Fireside Analytics Canada, Samuel Odeloye, Dr. Jacques Ludik and Emeka Okoye of Cymantiks.
The Statistician General of the Federation Dr. Yemi Kale has already been confirmed as the keynote speaker.
According to the Convener, Bayo Adekambi, MTN Nigeria Executive, the summit will be part of the Data Science Nigeria Bootcamp which is already attracting global attention.
The four-day boot camp will aim to bridge the capacity gaps in Data Science for intermediate and expert-level Nigerian professionals, and students will have in attendance experts around the globe to teach machine learning, R or Python programming languages, and Statistics for advanced data analytics.
The boot camp will include face-to-face teaching, virtual online classes, and a hands-on hackathon using the Kaggle platform. The sessions will be facilitated by leading local and international PhD-level data scientists, in the industry and the academia.
“This is part of an effort to make Nigeria the Data Science outsourcing hub for Africa before 2019 and to create 1 million new jobs during the next ten years”,
The free residential boot camp comes with an explicit requirement. The entire world-be participants are expected to complete three courses on DataCamp or Microsoft Professional Certificate Track in Data Science.
This will be followed by a Kaggle competition to select the best participants for the intellectually stimulating and career-enhancing boot camp.
“Best participants at the boot camp can access internship and mentoring opportunities provided by KMPG, Microsoft 4Afrika, and OneFi while DataCamp shall offer free access to its learning platform.
The boot camp will also include a very competitive hackathon aimed at using Nigeria-centric data to explore, extrapolate and explain local socio-economic issues.”
