Report on " Journey from Data to Data Product "

An international Webinar was hosted by the IT Department of UTAS-Nizwa today 19th Feb 2025. The resource person Dr. Neha Sharma who is working with Tata Consultancy Services is also a Founder Secretary of Society for Data Science. Prior to this she has worked as Director of premier Institute of Pune, that run post-graduation courses like MCA and MBA. She is an alumnus of a premier College of Engineering and Technology, Bhubaneshwar and completed her PhD from prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, Dhanbad. She is a Senior IEEE member and Executive Body member of IEEE Pune Section. She is an astute academician and has organized several national and international conferences and published several research papers. Besides, she is the brain behind conceptualizing International Conference of Data Management, Analytics and Innovation (ICDMAI), which has become landmark conference in the field of data science. She is the recipient of “Best PhD Thesis Award” and “Best Paper Presenter at International Conference Award” at National Level.

Dr. Naha spoke about Journey from Data To Data Product where she explained more about the APIs published by Netflix, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook etc are the examples of data product. The lecture emphasized on the journey of data from being raw to getting converted to data products. Data products are typically referred to in the business space, meaning any application of data that is of value to the business. Typical data products are predictive, descriptive or prescriptive models, as well as insights. Those data products that can help a business generate revenue, optimize costs, mitigate risk, improve compliance... make up a large part of what the whole data value chain - from data sourcing to value creation - should strive to achieve. After all, data, its associated effort and its associated technology investment is all a waste of time and money if it does nothing for the organization's stakeholders. The lecture would focus on how raw data, after pre-processing, applying statistical analysis and building models, gets converted into a fully developed product.

Ms. Maha Al Anqoudi the HoD of IT Department appreciated the talk and also invited more such talks in the international arena. The HoS Ms. Alice Lontok also motivated the staff to attend the webinar and gain insight into the world of Artificial Intelligence. Mrs. Sonia was the moderator of the program.

Writeup by Mrs. Sonia V. Soans