23.05.2023
The students are part of the master's program "Artificial Intelligence for Business and Finance" at the Faculty of Economics at Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski". The course offers training opportunities for specialists in the field of artificial intelligence who are ready to meet the challenges of the business world and implement technological solutions. This is the second year of the program, and the lecturers have included experts from the Data & AI department of the company: Aleksandra Angelova, Data Engineer, Dr. Dimitar Ivanov, Data Scientist and Slav Yolov, Data Scientist.
Over twenty students have successfully completed the course which covered the following topics: Aleksandra Angelova presented the topic of “Platforms for Big Data Processing”. The lecture answered the following questions – what a big data processing platform is, what criteria a big data processing platform meet and what platform engineers do. Good practices in software development in an enterprise environment were discussed, including the use of software repositories (GitHub) and systems for continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) of software. The lecture also had a practical component in which Google Colab was used to present Spark – one of the most widely used tools for processing big data in an enterprise environment.
"Introduction to Causal Inference" – Causal Inference includes a set of new techniques that allow us to answer causal questions based on observational data. Dimitar Ivanov gave an introduction to the field with a particular focus on structural causal models. He explained how to create, test, and use causal models and demonstrated an application using the Palmer Penguins data set.
Slav Yolov presented a case study developed for the "Data Science in Business and Finance" course under the supervision of Pencho Dobrev – Head of the Data & AI team at Schwarz IT Bulgaria. He highlighted a real business problem that requires an integrated implementation of appropriately selected analytical techniques for processing and modeling big data. After the case study presentation, the students formed teams to work on developing innovative solutions under the guidance of Assoc. Prof. Boryana Bogdanova and Slav Yolov until the end of the semester. The goal is to create a prototype solution that recommends purchasing additional items based on the previous behavior of Kaufland's customers (Recommendation Engine). All teams will have the opportunity to present their achievements to the Schwarz IT Bulgaria team at the end of the summer semester.
The program of the course enhances students' knowledge by offering present-day case studies, international experience, the latest technologies in the sector, and up-to-date information.
Schwarz IT Bulgaria is the main partner of the program. The company supports educating highly qualified specialists in the field of artificial intelligence, provides modern facilities for conducting interactive and state-of-the-art training, and participates in the tutoring process with guest lecturers.