The College of Agriculture and Food Science (CAFS) held a two-day online workshop titled, “Intro to Data Science; Data Visualization” on 7-8 July 2021 via Zoom. Dr. Jomar Rabajante, Dean of UPLB Graduate School (GS), spearheaded the lecture and workshop facilitation, with CAFS faculty and administrative staff in attendance.

The basics of data science and Google Data Studio were the topics of the first day webinar. Dr. Rabajante discussed the definitions and processes in data science, highlighting the importance of insight and what he called ‘data storytelling’. “When we talk to people, hindi lang dapat nagpapakita ng graphs, we need to tell a story. We need to humanize our numbers”, he emphasized.

Following the lecture is the introduction to Google Data Studio, a data reporting and visualizing tool of the Google Marketing platform. Dr. Rabajante showcased some of its features, such as inputting data and viewing real-time results. After the demo, the participants explored Google Data Studio themselves, tasked to visualize a sample data in groups under one hour and report their results.

Orange, a data mining and visualization software, was the focus of the second day webinar, including a short demonstration of Microsoft Excel. Dr. Rabajante showcased how to perform the basic tasks of Orange, such as uploading data, creating scatter plots, and linear regression. The participants returned to their previous groupings and tried using Orange. Similar to the Day 1 workshop, they presented their results after one hour.

Dean Elpidio M. Agbisit, Jr. opened the data science webinar, highlighting his enthusiasm to kickstart data science initiatives for CAFS even before the pandemic. He shared that through these data science initiatives, he hopes the participants will help different sectors and influence policy-making in their respective fields of study. (CLRDelosSantos)