New Startup Data Origami Offers Online Education to Aspiring Data Scientists

Data Origami, a new startup focused on developing learning techniques, tools, libraries and common solutions that data scientists and analysts can use everyday through hands-on-keyboard videos, has recently launched its first series of screencasts. The aim of Origami’s project is to help users develop a more profound knowledge of data science on which they can base well-informed decisions.

“I think the most important thing is understanding uncertainty,” The founder of Data Origami, Cam Davidson-Pilon explained recently in an interview with VentureBeat. “It’s not believing what your eyes see. Too often, people make inferences — not even doing statistics, but just, like, mental inferences that are wildly off.” This uncertainty could be resolved, by devoting some time to watch the start-up’s screencasts. As the demand for data scientists is increasing, there’s many options to get into the field, such as UC Berkeley’s Online Master’s program, open online course sites like Coursera or training programs in cities like San Francisco, Berlin or New York. Data Origami supplies its users with the necessary knowledge to later get into new tools, designed to improve collaborations and speed in data science.

Each month the start-up releases two new screencasts on Python libraries, including Patsy, Bayesian A/B testing, and other topics, created by Davidson-Pilon. A subscription, which includes access to all screencasts as well as applicable code and data, is $9 per month and the subscriber numbers have been promising since the launch of the website.

There is the potential of more content being produced by Data Origami in the future, venturing into other topics such as SQL for data analysis, or or the open-source Spark engine and tools for data processing. Davidson-Pilon, who has also written the e-book “Probabilistic Programming and Bayesian Methods for Hackers” (in collaboration with other authors) and invented Lifeline, a Python library for survival analysis has also mentioned plans to expand the website’s services through cloud-based technology. So far, users work with the screencasts and downloaded IPython notebooks that contain the lessons. Despite the success, David-Pilon is not planning to quit his day-job as the product analysis team lead of commerce company Shopify just yet. But once he can start to work with self-acquired knowledge on more specific topics and there’s more clients involved, things could become more interesting.