Leslie Albert

Seminar Series: Data Science for All

Leslie Albert’s interest in data science grew out of interactions with cybersecurity industry partners at SJSU’s Center for Organizational Resilience. This led Albert, who teaches courses in Information Security and Assurance Management, and three colleagues to expand data science knowledge among SJSU students through a series of free “Data Science for All” seminars.

The team developed and delivered eight seminars during the spring 2019 semester, including Statistical Foundations for data science (Subhankar Dhar), Python Foundations for data science (Esperanza Huerta), Spark & Jupyter Notebooks (Scott Jensen), and Exploring Graphs in Neo4j (Scott Jensen). They also hosted a seminar titled Demystifying AI, presented by special guest Harlan Findley, Director of Consulting and Strategy at Google.

Above: Subhankar Dhar, Esperanza Huerta, Scott Jensen, and Leslie Albert

"We developed the seminars so that students could explore the topic in a fun and nonthreatening environment,” Albert explains. “Our goal is to pique the curiosity of all students, regardless of major, about data science and provide them with some basic, but highly sought after, data science skills.”

Any community college or four-year institution can adopt the seminar series by accessing the materials developed by the team, including student bundles, seminar lessons, and pre- and post-seminar exercises hosted on Merlot and GitHub. The seminar series will be presented again in the upcoming fall and spring.

Harlan Findley, Director of Consulting and Strategy at Google.

Management Information Systems, Lucas College and Graduate School of Business
Sponsor: National Science Foundation

SJSU Research Foundation 2019 Annual Report