ConfPad

The field of data science can appear intractable and overwhelming, often leaving newcomers at a loss for knowing where to begin. However, once you learn basic principles and workflows, you will see many opportunities where these techniques can help you in your projects. You can better understand your users, embed a recommendation engine into your application, or easily ship dashboards including statistical summaries and stunning visualizations. The rise of Node.js and Electron are powering a new era where JavaScript continues to expand beyond the browser and becomes a critical component of server and desktop applications. With JavaScript being everywhere, one of the emerging next frontiers for JavaScript world domination is data science. In this workshop, Athan Reines and Philipp Burckhardt will demonstrate how to utilize the JavaScript open-source library stdlib for various data science tasks. Through a series of brief exercises, attendees will get a hands-on introduction, ranging from machine learning to exploratory data analysis and visualization. After completing this workshop, attendees will have a solid understanding of what kind of problems they can approach by which techniques. The speakers will close by outlining future steps for data science in JavaScript and identify opportunities for community development of next-generation tools.