SKA South Africa and partners host first Big Data careers event for 25 Sol Plaatje students
SKA South Africa and industry partners ran the country's first Big Data Careers event for 25 BANKSETA-funded Sol Plaatje University students, with Microsoft training and Tracker Connect-sponsored...
The Square Kilometre Array South Africa (SKA SA) and industry partners ran South Africa's first Big Data Careers event to show how data skills link radio astronomy to jobs in finance and technology.
Partners at the event included Tracker Connect Pty Ltd, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and Capitec Bank. The Banking Sector Education and Training Authority, BANKSETA, funded places for 25 first-year BSc Data Science students from Sol Plaatje University in the Northern Cape to attend.
SKA SA estimates the SKA will need at least 50 data scientists to manage, analyse and distribute the very large volumes of data the telescope will produce; SKA SA illustrated the scale by saying data collected in a single day would take nearly two million years to play back on an iPod.
Microsoft ran a hands-on session demonstrating data-analytics software. Students worked in teams on a data project during the event and presented their results; prizes for the best projects were sponsored by Tracker Connect Pty Ltd.
SKA SA's careers days aim to combine presentations with practical work: earlier Big Data Careers events run by SKA SA have included short practical project sessions with partners such as Cisco (hardware and Internet-of-Things exercises), Google (introductions to cloud analytics such as BigQuery) and Microsoft (Power BI and Azure Machine Learning), giving students hands-on experience with the tools employers use.
The event sits inside a wider human-capacity effort led by South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO). SARAO's Big Data Africa programme, running since 2015, has provided training to young Africans at South African universities and in eight SKA African partner countries. SARAO says its wider Human Capital Development work, which began in 2005, has supported more than 1,500 grants to postdoctoral fellows, postgraduate and undergraduate students and vocational trainees, and uses industry partnerships and national support to build a pipeline of people with data and engineering skills.
The SKA Organisation (SKAO) and SARAO have also signed a memorandum of understanding to cooperate on skills and student exchanges; the SKAO says the agreement will provide opportunities for African students to study and train at leading universities and to take part in skills-development programmes.
Dr Bonita de Swardt, project officer for strategic partnerships and human capital development at SKA SA, said the idea for the event grew from the partnership with BANKSETA. Paulette Bourne, manager of work integrated learning and bursaries at BANKSETA, said the event would not have been possible without the partnering organisations and that banking-sector partners had shown strong interest.
Student Heidi Hlungwani of Sol Plaatje University said she hopes to work one day as a data scientist at SKA SA or a large research organisation, and that the students were grateful for the opportunity and would take its inspiration back to Kimberley.
SKA SA said it is considering making the Big Data Careers event an annual programme and invited further partnerships.
Newzroom dot Africa has reached out to Sol Plaatje University for comment and is awaiting a response. This story will be updated when they respond.
Source: SARAO
