And now, I want to introduce other lecturers of this course.
Alexander, Dmitry, Mikhail, and Marios.
Mikhail is aka Cassanova,
the person who reached the very top of competitive data science.
I will tell you a couple of thoughts about the origins of the course.
In year 2014, we started our win in data science by joining competitions.
We've been meeting every week and discussing the past competitions, solutions,
ideas and tweaks what worked and what did not,
this exchange of knowledge and experience helped us
to learn quickly from each other and improve our skills.
Initially our community was small,
but over time more and more people were joining.
From the format of groups of discussion.
We moved on to the format of well organized meetings.
Where a speaker makes an overview of his approach and ideas in front of 50 people.
These meetings are called machine learning trainings.
Now with the help and support of Yandex and get a hundred of participants.
Thus we started from zero and learned everything by hard work and collaboration.
We had an excellent teacher,
Alexander D'yakonov who was top one on Kaggle,
he took the course on critical data analysis.
In Moscow state university and there we're grateful to him.
At some point we started to share our knowledge with
other people and some of us even started to read lectures at the university.
So now we have decided to summarize everything and make it available for everyone.
Together. We've finished and procesed in about 20 different competitions
only on Kaggle and just as many on other not so famous platforms.
All of us have a tremendous amount of skill and experience in
competitive data science and now we want to share this experience with you.
For all of us,
competitive data science opened a number of opportunities
as the competitions we took part were dedicated to a large variety of tasks.
Mikhail works in e-commerce.
Alexander builds predictive model for taxi services,
Dmitri works with financial data,
Mario develops machinery learning frameworks and I am a deep learning researcher.
Competitions, without a doubt,
became a stepping stone for our careers and believe me,
good comparative record will bring success to you as well.
We hope you will find something interesting in this course and wish you good luck.