
COMMUNITIES
DiSCo
ABOUT DiSCo

BGU's Data Science Community
Who We Are
DiSCo is a data science community at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. We are a community with a goal of overall development and growth of students and professional enthusiasts in Beer-Sheva in the areas of data mining, data science, and machine learning. DiSCo meetups act as a platform to provide hands-on experience in data science tools and techniques, while networking and having fun. We are all about learning, snacks and friendship.
Our Motivation
Data science, also known as data-driven science, is an interdisciplinary field of scientific methods, processes, and systems to extract knowledge or insights from data in various forms, either structured or unstructured, similar to data mining. Harvard Business Review called it "The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century."
The motivation of this club is to serve as a platform for BGU data science enthusiasts to pursue their interests in data science to learn, network, collaborate, create, and innovate.
EVENTS
ALUMNI PANEL
We invite you to join us on a panel with Ben-Gurion University graduates who are currently working in the industry in Data Science positions or are PhD students.
During the event, the graduates will tell us about themselves, their day-to-day, job challenges, how to properly prepare for job interviews and with what tools to get into the industry. The panel:
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Yafit Zohar Laadan, Data Scientist & NLP Researcher at retrain.ai, Master's degree in Software and Information Systems Engineering.
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Igal Mazor, Senior Manager, Data Science at Genesys, Master's degree in Industrial Engineering - Machine Learning
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Ran Taig, Lead Data Scientist at Lusha, PhD degree in Computer Science.
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Racheli Abo, Senior Data Science at Riskified, Master's degree in Industrial Engineering
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Liel Cohen-Lavi, PhD. student in Bioinformatics and Data Science, Master's degree in Industrial Engineering - Artificial Intelligence.
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SUNDAY, JUNE 12, 2022 AT 19:30, Zoom
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83235109705?pwd=VlVQRVJUMXNRbU91NVhXdWZUd1RiZz09
PAST EVENTS

Natural Language Processing - GPT3
In the last two years, we have seen some amazing breakthroughs in natural language processing and generation. But do computers really understand language? In this lecture, I would explain how computers understand language what is so special about GPT3 and other recent language models, the cool things we can do with them and what might be the future of the area.
Amit Mandelbaum is the Co-founder and CTO of Embie, the #1 platform for fertility treatments. He holds a Ms.c. in CS from the Hebrew university and has worked as a leading data scientist for the past 8 years.
TUESDAY, MAY 17, 2022 AT 19:00, Zoom
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89067841288?pwd=MFJza1BnREhKbzgwaWhUdTNYQ2M2dz09

University Research VS. Industry Research
What will be discussed in the lecture:
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Where do you get your data?
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The skill set you actually use: programming? statistics? math?
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How to research in teams?
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Does the data scientist deliver reports or products?
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The workspace: Python, R, Pycharm, Jupyter, VScode,...
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The type of employers: startups, big-tech, growth, ...
Jonathan Rosenblatt is a Senior Data Scientist at Pagaya.
Previously, he was an Assistant-Professor of Statistics at Ben-Gurion University.
SUNDAY, MAY 1, 2022 AT 19:00, Zoom
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83612338818?pwd=cWJ4aUVjcFozNWc1cEk5QWdkVjhFUT09
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Introduction to PU Learning
PU Learning is a semi-supervised classification learning scenario. PU classification involves a training set in which just part of the data is labeled as positive, while the rest is unlabeled - containing both positive and negative data in unknown relative ratios. In this talk we will discuss how this scenario is defined formally, why traditional classification techniques do not translate to it naturally, and how - using some basic assumptions - both metrics and model learning can be adapted to (partially) overcome the challenge PU learning poses.
Shay Palachy is a machine learning consultant and a VP data science at LeO
SUNDAY, APRIL 10, 2022 AT 19:00
Zoom
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Git Workshop
Git is software for tracking changes in any set of files, usually used for coordinating work among programmers collaboratively developing source code during software development.
This workshop demonstrates some of the key features of Git. It does so via a set of straightforward examples for possible uses and basic commands.
This is a hands-on workshop.
Assaf Sapir worked for about 6 years at Microsoft and has just started working at Tabnine as a Core Engineer.
SUNDAY, MARCH 27, 2022 AT 19:00
Zoom
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Anomaly Detection on Big Data
Anomaly detection is a well-studied area of research; however, anomaly detection techniques often underperform while dealing with big data. The high-volume, high-velocity, and high-dimensionality make many of the anomaly detection algorithms obsolete. This talk will present how we overcome our data challenges by training billions of simple models to create a distribution approximation to search for anomalies in the number of observations across billions of different groups.
Andres Asaravicius leads a team of experienced Data Scientists in Riskified. Over the years, he has led end-to-end researches and has been a key player in building the data science infrastructure. Even though his background is in Social Sciences, he is passionate about Machine Learning technologies and infrastructure.
SUNDAY, JANUARY 9, 2022 AT 19:00
Zoom

MLOps workshop with Amazon SageMaker
Amazon SageMaker helps data scientists and developers to prepare, build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly by bringing together a broad set of capabilities purpose-built for ML.
In the workshop we will cover an end-to-end ML pipeline using Amazon SageMaker, from data preparation and feature engineering, tracking and management of the training process to deployment of the model as a REST API.
Based on: https://github.com/aws.../amazon-sagemaker-mlops-workshop
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 30, 2021 AT 4 PM – 6 PM

Opening Event - The Israeli AI Ecosystem
By Uri Eliabayev
Uri is consulting companies that want to add AI capabilities to their services\products. He is working with big organizations and helps them to choose and implement the best AI solution for their needs. In addition, Uri has founded the biggest AI community in Israel called “Machine and Deep Learning Israel”. The community has more than 25,000 members who are the leading AI talents in Israel. Moreover, Uri is part of the national committees that are responsible for
establishing the Israeli strategy in the field of AI. Alongside that, Uri is a member of the INSS committee which examines AI in national security aspects.
In this lecture, he will review the artificial intelligence ecosystem in Israel and introduce the main players in it. We will learn about which startups operate in the field, about the top-of-the-line universities, and even which units in the military use AI technology.
Sunday, October 31, 2021
20:00 PM
Zoom

Opening Event
Uri Eliabayev, Founder and CEO of the Machine and Deep Learning Israel community, is coming to DiSCo for an opening lecture!
Uri Eliabayev founded the largest AI community in Israel, "Machine and Deep Learning Israel" which has more than 20,000 members of the leading AI talents in Israel.
In addition, Uri is part of national committees responsible for determining Israel's AI strategy AI. He advises large companies in Israel, he's an international lecturer, and his clients include Google, Haaretz, the International Bank, Elbit and many more.
He comes to DiSCo to help us understand a little more about AI and the basic terms in the field. Uri will talk about the main topics and tools that exist in the field of AI today, what the differences between them are, and give examples of uses in the industry.
The lecture will answer the difficult question of what are the differences between a Data Engineer, a Data Scientist and a DATA Analyst.
Tuesday, November 10, 2020
15:00
Zoom

Introduction to NLP
Have you ever wondered if computers can understand human languages?
Since 1950, people have been trying to crack the secret of understanding the human language. In his famous Turing test, Alan Turing defined conversation between a human being and a computer as a criterion for intelligence. The complexity of understanding the human language can prove his argument. In this lecture, Gal will explain how to deal with textual data, cover the main architectures for analyzing text and show how things work in practice.
About Gal,
Gal Hever is a graduate of the "Meitar" program in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management in Ben-Gurion with a specialization in data science. Today, she is a Data Scientist at VisionMap. Gal initiated and established the DataNights track in the Datahack community. For those of you who are unfamiliar, this is a track with excellent online lectures in the field of Data Science. In addition, Gal is currently a mentor for women looking for a job in the high-tech and data science field in the Facebook group Coming and she has lots of tips to share with us.
Tuesday, November 24, 2020
19:00
Zoom

Mirror of Erised: How to See What You Desire in Your Data
Asya Frumkin is a senior algorithm developer, specializing in computer vision and currently working in the field of medical imaging. She comes to DiSCO to talk to us about the data exploration phase in research, which is a crucial element in data science projects. This step allows the data scientist to better understand the data and the task at hand. In this lecture, Asia will introduce different techniques for this step and show us how it can be applied to a medical dataset to predict a cardiac event.
Subjects:
Why is EDA important?
Know your data
Analyze your data
*Descriptive statistics
*Visualizations
*Correlations
*Outliers
Wednesday, December 9, 2020
19:00
Zoom

Opening Event
You are invited to join the first lecture of the series with Dr. Eyal Gruss who will give an introduction to Deep Learning and an overview of state-of-the-art technologies in deep learning and deep neural networks.
Deep learning and deep neural networks have in recent years become the forefront of machine learning and artificial intelligence, and their performance is sometimes compared to that of humans. In this introductory lecture, we will review the latest uses and innovations of these methods in computer vision, language understanding, synthetic media and more.
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Eyal Gruss is a New Media Artist, Artificial Intelligence Researcher and Dr. of physics.
Monday, December 16, 2019
18:00
Building 15, Room 300.

Data Visualization Workshop
Join us for an exciting workshop with a number of case studies in which we will go over graphs and take them from a "nothing" defective state to a "something" state. The workshop will take place in Python in a Jupiter workbook environment.
*****
Boris Gorelik is a freelancer and lecturer in the field of data science and data visualization. Boris has a PhD in Computational Chemistry and a Pharmacy degree. Boris Gorelik's personal website: https://gorelik.net/
Sunday, April 5, 2020
17:00
Zoom

Stop Being a Git!
In this workshop we will learn what Git is, why it's good and how to use it as a team, while adhering to industry standards and sharing tips.
Prerequisites:
During the workshop we will use git and github so it is recommended that you install the software beforehand.
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Guy Warburg, Developer Paul Stack at Datree, a git based policy engine.
During his work at the company, Guy was exposed to many practices with Git in particular and various technologies in general.
Enjoys developing smart, comfortable interfaces, playing Ultimate Frisbee and staying home with his wife
Sunday, April 12, 2020
17:00
Zoom

Winning Kaggle WIDS Challenge & Feature Engineering
Dan Ofer (WiDs 2020 Winning team) will lecture about :
- His WiDS 2020 1st place solution
- General tricks for winning Kaggle competitions
- Ways to approach time series forecasting + feature engineering.
Thursday, April 30, 2020
18:00
Zoom
GOALS

Meet Experts
Meet experts from the industry and learn about real-world data science challenges


Learn
Compete
Learn and acquire skills using data science tutorials
Participate in online competitions and practice what we learn


Connect
Have Fun
Form groups and networks for future collaborations
Well, we don't need to explain this :)
THE PEOPLE
Yarden Hochenberg
Yarden is an M.Sc. honors student in Industrial Engineering and Management in the "Meitar" excellence program at Ben-Gurion University, specializing in Data Science.
In her thesis, she is developing a phenotypes prediction algorithm based on interaction between genes, using machine learning methods on genome big data. The thesis is under the joint guidance of the department of IEM and the department of SISE. In addition, she works as a teaching assistant at Ben-Gurion University. Yarden is highly self-driven, a self-learner, creative and excited by the Data Science field.
Ophir Gal
Ophir is an M.Sc. student in Industrial Engineering and Management in "Meitar" excellence program at Ben-Gurion University, specializing in Data Science.
Ophir's research is about safety analysis of signalized intersection data acquired by video analytics, in collaboration with NoTraffic, a company providing a traffic management platform. In addition, he works as a teaching assistant at Ben Gurion University. He is eager to expand his knowledge in the data science field and to learn new things.
Gil Shenderovitz
Gil is a Master's student of Data Science at Ben-Gurion University, conducting his thesis at The Malware Lab at the university’s Cyber Security Research Center (CSRC). .
Gil’s research is about developing novel machine learning based methods for the detection of malicious files. This is done primarily by leveraging the time domain (dynamic analysis).
Shaked Tal
Shaked is an M.Sc. honors student in Industrial Engineering and Management, specializing in Data Science.
Shaked studies in the "Meitar"program - a fast track for a master's degree at Ben-Gurion University. In her thesis she investigates user behavior in mobile phones. In addition, she works as a teaching assistant at Ben-Gurion University. Shaked is יhighly motivated and curious to learn and develop in the world of data science.