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The Data Science Education Consolidation
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The Data Science Education Consolidation

Top Stories of the week by Analytics India Magazine

Analytics India Magazine
Jun 6
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The Data Science Education Consolidation
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On the one hand, edtech companies like BYJU'S and upGrad are gearing towards consolidation, acquiring smaller data science and tech-focused firms. On the other hand, traditional brick and mortar training institutions like NIIT and Aptech seem to be lost in the mists of time.

Last year, BYJU'S acquired ten companies for a whopping USD 2.5 billion. Like its parent company, online higher and professional education provider Great Learning – acquired for USD 600 million last year – is also looking at acquisitions. Recently, the company acquired Singapore-based Northwest Executive Education in a cash and equity deal.

Meanwhile, upGrad acquired INSOFE for USD 33 million last month. The edtech firm has also acquired TalentEdge and KnowledgeHut.

"These business movements will accelerate cost-efficiency and empower us with a wider audience reach for further cementing our leadership position in India's lifelong learning market," said Mayank Kumar, co-founder of upGrad. He said upGrad's analytics vertical has witnessed revenue growth of 50 per cent last year. 

It's not just big companies upping the merger and acquisition game in the data science education space; smaller companies are also making great strides. 

Bengaluru-based edtech startup Scalar Academy acquired learning platform AppliedRoots for USD 50 million to strengthen its data science, and AI/ML offerings. This is its third acquisition after Coding Elements and Coding Minutes last year. 

Three years back, Manipal Group acquired Jigsaw Academy. Two years ago, the National Stock Exchange's education arm – NSE academy – acquired Talentsprint, a prestigious name in AI/ML, data science and analytics education.

The list goes on and on.

What’s in store? 

Answers to this question lead us to market consolidation. Once an industry is formed, it goes through four stages of consolidation – or disappears.

upGrad's Kumar said the edtech sector has been consolidating over the last year. However, he believes this might slow down now, given the current circumstances. 

KnowledgeHut founder Subramanyam Reddy said the data science domain growth leads to a balanced growth of the data science edtech industry. Citing pandemic and various government policies, he said the edtech industry is likely to remain bullish in the coming months. "The need for data science has never been more relevant, and we feel it will continue to drive overall growth in this sector," said Reddy. 

Old school, new school

Training institutes like NIIT and Aptech had the run of the IT education space until a decade back. Every major city and town had such training institutes where students could get certified in a range of computer skills. Today, most of these physical institutes had to diversify or move to digital platforms to survive.


Top stories of the week 

The shape of things to come: Analytics Everywhere

What do we think a PhD in Physics does? It turns out that many of them are academics; however, not all are in academia. Some of them could be found developing algorithms used in equity trading, while others have gravitated towards data science.

It is not unusual to find a Physics PhD training some data scientists on using TensorFlow to build machine learning algorithms. So why do Physics PhDs find it more interesting to develop algorithms to power financial trades or decipher customer propensity scores?

Can ONDC deliver?

In many ways, the problems dogging Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) could be the ones that were attached to past projects involving Nandan Nilekani. AADHAR has been mired in controversies around identity and privacy. 

While AADHAR took six years to be implemented, ONDC might materialise much faster considering the rate of progress. The only question is, to what end? 

An unusual marketing strategy for TCS

TCS' association with marathons began in 2008 when they became the junior sponsors for the Mumbai Marathon. In a decade, the company has emerged as the major sponsor of long-distance running events in India, Canada, New York, and London.

The role of 'God' in the 'Matrix'

Ancient Greeks imagined their gods to be capable of building robots. Hundreds of years have passed since the collapse of the greatest civilisation, yet the human pursuit of developing something in their image continues unabated. Thanks to the advances in AI, we now have the means to create human-like robots.

Read the complete story here. 


People & Technology

The science behind Intuit's customer-centric products

Intuit is home to products that include TurboTax, QuickBooks, Mint, Credit Karma, and Mailchimp. What makes all of these products special is that they have successfully integrated AI and data on the side of their customers. In an exclusive interview with AIM, Prashanth Seshadri unveils the science behind their state-of-the-art products. Check out the complete interview here.

En Route: India

Slack's great Indian dream

Earlier this month, Slack officially launched in India, announcing its mission to help companies navigate the transition to a hybrid workplace by establishing a digital headquarters.

Read the complete story here.


AIM Videos

AIM Podcast with Pradeep Sukumaran, Vice president AI & Cloud software at Ignitarium

In this podcast we discussed --- AI industry as a whole; strategies for implementing and scaling AI projects; the biggest misconceptions related to artificial intelligence; Ignitarium's AI strategy for 2022-24 and some relevant use cases.


Data Science Corner 

Data science hiring process at Zomato

Zomato has been heavily investing in AI/ML, data science and analytics to offer a personalised experience to its customers, driver-partners and restaurants. The company has about 20+ members in its data science team and is looking to hire more in the coming months. 

Read the complete interview process here.


Startups, Apps & Tools 

Entropik Tech

Based in Bengaluru, Entropik Tech builds emotion AI technology to understand human emotions by facial expressions, gaze, voice tonality, and brainwaves. 

Layer AI 

Layer is a collaboration-first ML platform that enables developers to build, train, track, and share their ML projects with just a few lines of code. 

Hypotenuse AI

Automatically generates copywriting for your e-commerce website in seconds. 


Research & Papers 

Evaluating Multimodal Interactive Agents

In this paper, DeepMind researchers assess the merits of existing evaluation metrics and present a novel approach to evaluation called the Standardised Test Suite (STS). It uses behavioural scenarios mined from real human interaction data. Read the full paper here. 

Artificial Open World for Evaluating AGI: A Conceptual Design

Chinese researchers have proposed an Artificial Open World evaluation method, aiming to jump off the trap. Check out the full research paper here. 


Events in Focus

MachineCon 2022 

Just three weeks to go! 

India's largest machine learning conference is just around the corner. Scheduled on June 24, 2022, in Bengaluru, MachineCon is an invite-only event where participants get to network with top industry practitioners. 

Click here for more details. 


Top News of the Week 

  • Facebook AI Research Goes Through Massive Restructuring

  • German automobile company ZF opens second tech centre in Hyderabad

  • Tesla's Humanoid Robot Prototype May Be Ready By September

  • India Post Uses Drone To Deliver Mail For The First Time

  • Bengaluru-based analytics firm nFactorial shuts down after 7 years

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