Beginners data scientists at your service

The Coursera is now undergoing an Introduction to Data Science course from the University of Washington, during which students will be taught how to work with large data arrays, statistical analysis, data mining, machine learning algorithms and other such things. The authors of the course invite organizations (commercial, non-profit, and even just individuals) who will benefit from assistance in working with data, to take part, throwing students to solve problems from real life.

The scheme is approximately the following: the organization formulates the problem and provides data (either from its own or from open sources), students solve it and write a report. The report is then evaluated by other students, plus the organization gives its feedback on the work.
Everything is in plus: the organization receives free handsbrains, and the student experience.

About a dozen tasks have already been published: from linguistic analysis of social networks to visualization of fire statistics. But there are many more willing to solve them, so your participation will be very welcome.
About 100 Russian-speaking students enrolled in the course (and these are only those who noted in the group on the forum), and in general there are more than 74,000 people from all over the world.

What students can do:

• Solve forecasting problems (develop a prediction method for a set of data on how values ​​will change in the future).
• Visualize data and the relationship between them (for example, like this ).
• Find answers to questions regarding data (for example, “How did the changes in advertising campaigns last month affect the size of donations”).

The course is limited in duration (ends June 26), so there are some limitations on the tasks:

• The project should be relatively short.
• The task should be isolated and well formulated (not require in-depth knowledge in a specific subject area).
• The task should not contain restrictions on the technologies used for the solution.

How to take part

1. Enroll in a course
2. Read the details (see the link below or the Optional Real-World Project page on the course website)
3. Post a task on the course forum in the Organizations Seeking Assistance section

Original invitation and details: coursolve.org/courses/datascience

Why all this to your humble servant? I myself am engaged in this course and also want to "scratch my teeth" about real tasks, and the more there will be, the more interesting. ;)