Switching from Data Engineering to Data Science

Kiran Kumar completed several Omdena challenges, upon which he became an Omdena Top Talent to work on paid gigs with companies. Through Omdena, he switched from data engineering to data science and made his dream a reality.

What is your background?

I am an AI professional with over 5+ years of hands-on experience in data analytics, data science, and ML projects primarily focused on healthcare, pharma, and social media industries. I started my career as a data engineer in Infosys working on projects related to the healthcare and pharma industries. Over the years, I had a keen interest in the field of data analytics and started learning data science and ML online. The kind of real-life problems we tackle in Omdena challenges helped me a lot in my career transition as a data scientist. The collaborative way of working hand-to-hand with fellow teammates and interaction with clients/stakeholders made the overall learning curve quite interesting. I am currently working as a lead data scientist for Lingaro, Poland with areas of interest related to NLP, knowledge graphs, and time series forecasting.

When and how did you join Omdena? What was the reason?

I’ve started my journey with Omdena in 2021 when I came across a LinkedIn post describing a challenge focusing on Fighting Misinformation and Promoting Plurality by Detecting Fake News. I wanted to participate taking into consideration the severity of the problem as nowadays majority of the news consumption is via social media platforms. This news is usually in the form of blog posts and articles which are in text format. I wanted to apply my knowledge in NLP and knowledge graphs to tackle this interesting problem.

What technical solution did you build recently in a project?

In 2022, I worked on a project Automate Energy Modeling Reports related to energy modeling domain, wherein I built custom scripts in Ruby and Python to perform simulations in OpenStudio and optimize building energy models for energy consumption, life cycle costs, etc.

Some of the projects Kiran took part in:

• Building an AI-based Personalized Language Learning Model For Bilingual Children Including Immigrants and Refugees
• Improving Global Health & Aging Trends Through Predictive Modeling
• Building a Recommendation System For Cognitive Exercises and Training Programs
• Cancer Treatment: Identifying Drugs to Repurpose

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Below is an example project, Kiran worked on with a large potential impact in the healthcare sector. 

What was the biggest obstacle you have recently overcome?

One of the biggest obstacles in my career life was making a switch from data engineering to data science. The contribution to open-source projects using platforms like Omdena and DrivenData made this dream a reality and helped me connect the dots to become a better person who truly enjoys his work and sees the impact it has on him and on everyone’s day-to-day life.

How has Omdena experience helped you in your career?

The majority of the Omdena Top Talent project starts from the foundation phase wherein the client comes in with the usecase, and the participants get the chance to start from scratch. This provides them with a golden opportunity to interact with the stakeholders to understand the project domain and gather more insights related to the use case. That has helped me a lot to improve my soft skills as well as the technical skills required in a project lifecycle.

Is there anything else you would like to add to share your current life or work? 

I recently attended an AI conference in Bangalore, India called “Cypher” which covered some amazing keynotes and tech talks. I also got my hands-on midjourney.ai to generate AI art using prompts. It was pretty cool to work on this platform, and I was impressed by its creativity on the conference wallpapers and posters. Also, meeting a few of my LinkedIn connections face to face in the conference was quite refreshing after covid-times which forced all of us to work from home for a quite long time. 🙂

Ready to test your skills?

If you’re interested in collaborating, apply to join an Omdena project at: https://www.omdena.com/projects