The DUT’s Department of Information Technology (IT) under the helm of the Faculty of Accounting and Informatics and in partnership with the DUT Library, KZN eskills CoLab and NEMISA are hosting a series of free technology workshops in December 2018.
One of the four strategic focus areas at the Durban University of Technology (DUT) is to build sustainable student communities of living and learning by providing innovative teaching, and enhancing the quality of graduates as well as deepening the innovative use of technology to improve the quality of learning.
With this core focus area in mind, the DUT’s IT Department are hosting the free technology workshops to be relevant, responsive and resilient.
According to IT’s senior lecturer Ebrahim Asmal, as part of the department’s community engagement drive, the IT department are running these exciting, pilot project workshops in a bid to upscale learners, students, teachers and parents to be techno-savvy and to also create a keen interest in the latest technologies.
He also added that the IT department has bought R350 000 worth of IT and cyber equipment and encourage those who are keen to understand more about research design or programming, to come along and learn, and play with the techno gadgets.
“The idea behind these courses is encourage participants to like the Internet of things (IoT), which is the network of physical devices, software, and connectivity which enables these things to connect, collect and exchange data. We plan to go to schools and aim to bring at least one school every Saturday to learn about IoT at the DUT. The idea is to create innovation and see what projects come out from these workshops and we would also like to drive this initiative nationally and internationally, depending on the response we receive,” he said.
For those who are keen to register, the workshops being offered are Software Carpentry, Data Carpentry, Internet of Things (Hackathon), Cybersecurity, Forensics Workshop and Python.
Software Carpentry aims to help researchers get their work done in less time and with less pain by teaching them basic research computing skills. This hands-on workshop will cover basic concepts and tools, including programme design, version control, data management, and task automation. Participants will be encouraged to help one another and to apply what they have learnt to their own research problems.
The requirements are to bring a laptop with at least 4 gigs of Ram.
The workshop dates are on 3 December 2018 to setup of laptops. On 4/5/6 December 2018 is the training, at the Ritson Campus, Durban University of Technology.
Invitation:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1maA1S_Th7nh1f7tMJ1TmzkcCE96v3uVQADbpyQKgqBw/edit?usp=sharing
Registration Link: https://tenet-rccpii.github.io/2018-12-04-DUT-DC/
Data Carpentry develops and teaches workshops on the fundamental data skills needed to conduct research. Its target audience is researchers who have little to no prior computational experience, and its lessons are domain specific, building on learners’ existing knowledge to enable them to quickly apply skills learnt to their own research. Participants will be encouraged to help one another and to apply what they have learnt to their own research problems.
A pre-requisite is that you have to be a Post-Grad student. The requirements are to bring a laptop with at least 4 gigs of Ram.
The workshop dates are on 3 December 2018 to setup of laptops. On 4/5/6 December 2018 is the training, at the Ritson Campus, Durban University of Technology.
Invitation:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1AUtoMGMccSEBtqB94u2lFmalR3VBTVJEZD2OVJ-U8_Q/edit?usp=sharing
Registration Link : https://tenet-rccpii.github.io/2018-12-04-DUT-DC/
Internet of Things (Hackathon)
The Cisco Networking Academy’s IoT provides students with an understanding of the Internet of Things (IoT). It develops foundational skills using hands-on lab activities that stimulate the students in applying creative problem-solving and rapid prototyping in the interdisciplinary domain of electronics, networking, security, data analytics, and business. The student-centric approach translates into the student being able to ideate, design, prototype and present an IoT solution for an identified business or society need.
The workshop date is on 11 December 2018, at the Department of IT, 2nd Floor, B Block, Ritson Campus, Durban University of Technology.
Registration Link : https://goo.gl/fk1YAG
Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity explores the field of cybersecurity, specifically the importance of cybersecurity, data confidentiality, best practices for using the internet and social media safety, and potential career opportunities in this growing field.
The workshop date is on 12 December 2018, at the Department of IT, 2nd Floor, B Block, Ritson Campus, Durban University of Technology.
Registration Link : https://goo.gl/rWSmB2
Forensics Workshop
This competition will be centred around the role of cyber security analyst working at a Security Operations Centre (SOC). Each group will be working independently on a scenario and will have to analyse a pre-loaded packet capture in order to detect what has happened in that network. At the end each team will share its findings and recommendations.
Requirements for the course is a laptop with at least 8 gigs of RAM. The workshop date is on 13 December 2018, at the Department of IT, 2nd Floor, B Block, Ritson Campus, Durban University of Technology.
Registration Link : https://goo.gl/zDQVpC
Python
Learn the basics of the world’s fastest growing and most popular programming language used by software engineers, analysts, data scientists, and machine learning engineers alike.
In this course, you’ll learn the fundamentals of the Python programming language, along with programming best practices. You’ll learn to represent and store data using Python data types and variables, and use conditionals and loops to control the flow of your programmes. You’ll harness the power of complex data structures like lists, sets, dictionaries, and tuples to store collections of related data. You’ll define and document your own custom functions, write scripts, and handle errors. Lastly, you’ll learn to find and use modules in the Python Standard Library and other third-party libraries.
The workshop dates are 5 and 6 December 2018, at the Department of IT, 2nd Floor, B Block, Ritson Campus, Durban University of Technology.
Registration Link : https://goo.gl/DVr4uw
Deep Learning
Deep Learning is an artificial intelligence specialisation or field that mimics how the human brain processes data when creating patterns for decision making. Deep learning applies a number of complex algorithms to model high-level data abstractions via model architectures. The algorithms take input data and pass it through a series of nonlinear transformations before it becomes output. In this course, we will cover deep learning hardware and software (CPUs, GPU, TPU, PyTorch, Tensorflow, etc), image classification, convolutional neural networks (CNN), CNN architectures (AlexNet, VGG, GoogLeNet, ResNet, etc), recurrent neural networks (RNN, LSTM, GRU, etc), semantic segmentation, object detection, and more. Tensorflow will be used for the hands-on exercises.
Pre-requisites are Python. The workshop dates are 11 and 12 December 2018, at the Department of IT, 2nd Floor, B Block, Ritson Campus, Durban University of Technology.
Registration Link : https://goo.gl/k6hFek
Machine Learning
Machine Learning is a first-class ticket to the most exciting careers in data analysis today. As data sources proliferate along with the computing power to process them, going straight to the data is one of the most straightforward ways to quickly gain insights and make predictions.
Machine learning brings together computer science and statistics to harness that predictive power. It’s a must-have skill for all aspiring data analysts and data scientists, or anyone else who wants to wrestle all that raw data into refined trends and predictions.
This course will provide you a foundational understanding of machine learning models (logistic regression, multilayer perceptrons, SVM, etc) as well as demonstrate how these models can solve complex problems in a variety of industries, from medical diagnostics to image recognition to text prediction.
The pre-requisites are Python. The workshop dates are 11 and 12 December 2018, at the Department of IT, 2nd Floor, B Block, Ritson Campus, Durban University of Technology.
Registration Link : https://goo.gl/rRWDV9
Picture credit: http://www.smart2zero.com/news/deep-learning-ai-evolves-beyond-internet-cloud/page/0/1
Waheeda Peters
