πŸ§‘β€πŸ« Week 01 Lecture

Welcome to DS205 + the ASCOR Dataset

Author

Dr Jon Cardoso-Silva

Published

20 January 2025

DS205 course icon depicting data engineering concepts

Last Updated: 20 January 15:40 - Added TPI presentation slides and Nuvolos guides.

Welcome to DS205, your gateway to professional-grade data engineering capabilities.

πŸ“ Session Details

  • Date: Monday, 20 January 2025
  • Time: 10:00 am - 12:00 pm
  • Location: KSW.1.01
  • Guests: Sylvan + Valentin from TPI

⚠️ IMPORTANT As this is a new course, we will be learning and adapting as we go. If you notice something that is not working super well or if you have any suggestions, please let me know!

πŸ—£οΈ Lecture Structure

In our first ever DS205 lecture, we’ll cover the following:

  1. Course Overview: Understand the core objectives and themes of DS205 and how TPI will serve as real stakeholders for us. I will also discuss the structure and timing of our assessments. Those who joined this course from DS105 will find that it will be fairly similar.

  2. Introduction to TPI and ASCOR: Sylvan and Valentin from TPI will introduce their work and they will do a special β€œdeep dive” into ASCOR. This dataset will be our primary focus throughout the course. We will discuss the dataset’s structure, its relevance to TPI’s mission, and how what we learn in this course will be directly applicable to their work.

  3. Hands-on with the ASCOR data: We will then apply key pandas functions to real ASCOR data. This should serve as a brief recap of pandas and a way to bridge theory with practice.

🎬 Lecture Slides

Here you will find the slides used during the lecture, both mine and the ones presented by Sylvan and Valentin.

Jon’s Slides

Use keyboard arrows to navigate. Select the slides below or view fullscreen.

πŸ“Š TPI Centre Presentation

Click on the button below to grab the slides presented by Sylvan and Valentin.

Brief Practical Demonstration

During the final 30 minutes of the session, I covered:

  • VS Code environment setup
  • ASCOR website navigation
  • Jupyter Notebook data exploration

Final Thoughts

After we heard from Sylvan and Valentin, I demonstrated how we use VS Code in this course, I showed you around the ASCOR website and I started to explore one of the files from this dataset on a Jupyter Notebook.

You’ll practice these skills in Tuesday’s πŸ’» W01 Lab with Alex and I will post solutions to the lab afterwards, too.

πŸ‘‰ Essential Actions

  1. Join our Slack 1 - our primary communication hub.
  2. Access your dedicated cloud development environment:
  3. Review the πŸ“” Syllabus and the ✍️ Assessment Structure.
  4. Prepare for Tuesday’s πŸ’» W01 Lab

Development Environment

We will be writing a lot of code throughout this course and we will be using VS Code and Jupyter notebooks for most of our work. We have a dedicated Nuvolos workspace for you to use. However, if you prefer to work locally on your own machine, you will have to make sure you have a few tools installed.

Here are the two options:

Option 1: Nuvolos Platform

Access our Nuvolos - First Time workspace. This cloud environment comes pre-configured with all required tools.

Option 2: Local Setup

If you prefer working locally, ensure you have:

  • Python 3.10+
  • VS Code
  • GitHub CLI
  • Git (installed and configured)

πŸŽ₯ Session Recording

Typically, the recordings are made available on Moodle in the afternoon. However, the lecture recording was nowhere to be found! I have asked Eden Digital for help. It might be that new Moodle courses need to be linked somewhere internally in some LSE systems and it wasn’t active yet.

I’ll keep you posted.

Jon 20 Jan 2025, 2.04pm

Footnotes

  1. The Slack link is private and only available on Moodleβ†©οΈŽ