Data science education has gone through a lot of innovation. Right from data science MOOCs and offline training are available for people who want to learn a new technology. There are also choices when it comes to what level of training one needs. There is a new way to learn how you can now code machine learning systems: your mobile phones. There is a new combination of tools that let you learn to code and monitor machine learning models using your mobile phones only. These tools are:
- CoCalc, is a sophisticated online workspace that lets you do mathematical calculations on the cloud and share your projects efficiently.
- Juno is a Jupyter client for iOS helps developers and researchers to connect to a notebook server on your phone.
CoCalc has many features like collaborating on projects, and many teachers using CoCalc have used the tool for creating courses. People can chat using CoCalc which enhances learning and collaboration. Juno has been built especially for mobile, has awesome keyboard support, supports multi-screen multitasking issues and also supports code completion for Python. There have been many issues that are reported when people try to learn data science online. One of the major difficulties is the ability to take out time to learn.
Juno is largely free for all users, which makes it more attractive for learning demographic. Alex Staravoitau of Juno said on a blog post, “Juno is still available for free, with an optional in-app purchase to unlock Juno Pro if you want to connect to an arbitrary Jupyter server, or use your cloud computing service account — you only purchase it once for all of your devices. However, we did our best to make a free version of Juno fun as well: you can play with introductory notebooks on Jupyter, Python, NumPy, Matplotlib and SciPy right out of the box without paying anything, those notebooks will be launched on a temporary server just for you using Binder service. We plan to keep adding new introductory notebooks in order to keep things interesting.”
The combination of the above tools can come as a respite for working professionals. Professionals can work on data science assignments while travelling or doing regular chores. Udacity and Coursera tried to make machine learning courses available on mobile phones, but they failed. Hence for working professionals or young students who are more comfortable working on mobile phones, rather than stick to laptops.
Talking about the experience of working on these tools, Gregory Ferenstein writing for Forbes wrote, “CoCalc’s customer service is pretty responsive, too. When an artificial intelligence course on Udacity wanted me to use Pytorch, a Facebook-supported language for machine learning, I emailed the CoCalc team and they installed the software for me.”
