Becoming a Senior Data Engineer at Accenture and a DeepLearning.AI Ambassador

Armielyn Obinguar from the Philippines has completed several Omdena challenges, including a model for assessing gender equality in organizations, and a forecast model for endangered species populations. Her real-world experience on Omdena projects helped her to get a job as a data scientist at Accenture, where she is now a senior data engineer. In addition to boosting her career, the experiences also helped her to overcome being an introvert and taught her soft skills like leadership and organization.

You have a very impressive background. What are some of your proudest accomplishments?

I’m one of the youngest product owners and lead machine learning engineers at Omdena. I’m also a student ambassador at Women in AI, where I help to promote inclusivity in the tech community. I’m the founder of Google Developer Student Clubs on my campus to help bridge the gap between theory and practice. Last year I became a DeepLearning.AI ambassador.

Which DeepLearning.AI Courses did you take?

I’m currently taking the Machine Learning Specialization. I enjoy it because it has easy-to-understand concepts and offers a path toward venturing deeping into more detailed lessons. Deeplearning.AI offers a great deal of knowledge, and its ambassador program has helped me to connect with other fellow ML practitioners! I’m also a big fan of Andrew Ng!

What was one of your favorite projects?

About a year ago I joined a team of 50 AI changemakers, and together we collaborated on building AI models for conservation. These automated methods allowed for the identification, collection, and sorting of different organisms in the food web. It helped scientists get a better understanding of biodiversity and population data. 

How has the Omdena experience helped in your work career?

I joined my local Omdena chapter last year in October 2021. I started with no experience in data science projects, and even machine learning was not my forte back then. But because of the resources, courses, and projects offered by Omdena, I got the chance to leverage my skills and be able to become a junior ML engineer during my three months at Omdena. Then I became a machine learning engineer in the next 3-4 months, a product owner, and a lead ML engineer in two of the Omdena AI core challenges. 

What have Omdena and DeepLearning.AI helped you to accomplish? 

I got accepted for a role as a data scientist in Accenture while working on the Omdena project Identifying School Locations in Sudan from Satellite Imagery with UNICEF. 

I have also been awarded by FutureLab.my as one of the Top 50 FutureLab Mentors in Southeast Asia. It all started with an interest, passion for community, and mentoring students, aspiring data scientists, and analytics professionals. I hope to see more Filipinas pave their way to bridging the technology gap on campus. I think there is potential for hundreds of thousands of other students in the Philippines to grow their careers using Omdena and DeepLearning.AI. 

How else has being part of Omdena it change your worldview? 

I’m an introverted person. But in the year and two months that I’ve been part of Omdena, I have been able to build my soft skills. I’m now a founder & chief executive officer in Google developer student clubs at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines. 

“Sometimes you just have to jump in and try things that you have never done before. Sometimes, being a beginner is an advantage for you to learn things in data science, ML, and AI.”

 

Read more about some of Armielyn’s projects! 

• Building an Organisational Gender Equality Assessment Functionality Using Machine Learning
• Developing an AI System to Identify Ecosystem Services and Automate Data Collection for Endangered Species
• Building A Recommendation System For Cognitive Exercises and Training Programs
• Modeling Food Web and Forecasting Populations for Endangered Wildlife Species