
women in data science zagreb 2020
Women in Data Science in Croatia is something we've supported and participated in since its beginning in Croatia in 2018. Year after year, and in 2020, we've been proud sponsors of the conference with two experts of our own who shared their expertise on the conference day.
Data science event in zagreb
This year's
event was organized by the two ambassadresses in Croatia - Andrea Knez
Karačić and Marija Drašković. Both come from the data & tech world, and we are lucky that one of them, Marija, has as of recently
been part of Mercury PSI's Data Governance team.
The whole
event lasted for 2 days – 4th and 5th March.
The second
day was planned for various presentations and one panel discussion on a very
important topic called “Less talk, more data – do we really understand what
data science brings?”.
The second
day was planned for various presentations and one panel discussion on a very
important topic called “Less talk, more data – do we really understand what
data science brings?”.
The
presentation topics were extremely interesting. The topics varied from using
data in commercial to health-related issues, but all had one thing in common –
to show how data can profoundly help in improving and even saving lives.
Read about
the whole conference here.
Data in payment processing
Data in payment
processing is a world of its own and we had two experts, Jelena Kolega and Darja
Barišić, who familiarized the audience with the data gathered by a
payment processor by explaining what it is that we do.
By
processing payment transactions, we gather enormous amounts of data every
second. While data flows in incessantly, extrapolating it in the right ways for
creating advance reporting is much more complex than is sounds. And
delivering advance reports is exactly where Jelena and Darja worked together.

Source: WiDS Zagreb 2020
More
precisely, they worked on implementing PSD2, the payments regulation issued by
the EU which mandates delivering demanding fraud reports that each
EU bank needs to submit to its National Bank.
The
reporting, like all things, came with its challenges. One of them
was understanding which data to extrapolate and what level of
data quality is required by the PSD2 regulation.
All in all,
we manage to deliver them in time, but we did learn valuable lessons, as Jelena
and Darja told us.
These were
primarily the issues of understanding what specific data is needed for certain
products and, of course, time constraints.
Both being
engineers, they found a solution in exactly that – engineering. By forming a
team of expert engineers that can go back to the “sandbox” and play and
experiment on data, they stand certain this will result in better
understanding.
They called
this proof of concept and compared the process of sorting data to
creating Lego structures.
The more
data we have and the better we know and understand it, we can build better and
more complex structures. Just like with Legos - the more you have them, in different
shapes and colors, and if you know how to sort and use them in a proper way, the
better the structures you can build.

We created
one such product called Lynx- our in-house fraud prevention
system where we used data to build scoring models.
After the
conference Darja and Jelena shared their impressions and opinions on why these
conferences are important both for women in tech and for data science:


Data saving lives
When it
comes to using data in health-related issues, one particular presentation
caught everyone's attention. Ana Dumić, a data scientist from
Hrvatski Telekom, gave an account of a very personal story where collecting and
analyzing data saved her child who has a very rare genetic disorder.

Source: WiDS Zagreb 2020
From the
first day when the child was diagnosed and when the epileptic-like seizures
began, Ana and her husband started collecting data on what triggers these
seizures.
Collecting
data and further analyzing it made them realize that food was one of the main
triggers and are now completely dedicated to making a unique diet along with
standard therapies. With the help of collecting data, from having 10 seizures a
day, currently their child is seizure-free.
What will data science bring in the future
With all of
this in mind, we can see that data has a lot to offer and, as the conference's
slogan says, “Data has a better idea”. What exactly does data science bring to
our lives and work was the topic of the panel discussion.
Mirjana
Domazet-Lošo, Sanda Martinčić-Ipšić, Lucija Iličić and Kristina Reicher were on
the panel and they discussed the terms “data science” and “data analytics”,
education needed to become a data analyst, but also tackled the issue of
the automation and future of jobs.
This is what one of the pannelists, Kristina Reicher, Business Intelligence Consultant at Koios Consulting, said:

It is very important to address this issue because jobs have been automated in the past and there are still people whose jobs rely partly on automation especially in data science.


We also had a few words with one of this year's ambassadresses - Marija Drašković, Data Governance Specialist from Mercury PSI - about her motivation behind getting into WiDS Zagreb:
What motivated you to join WiDS Zagreb?
I was a visitor at WiDS Osijek 2019 where I found out what Croatian companies were doing in the field of data science and advanced analytics, from ML to AI (e.g. Mercury PSI data scientists and fraud). Since I decided to recommend Ana and her data analytics success, I contacted WiDS Stanford with a mail asking if there would be a WiDS Zagreb event.
They said Osijek wouldn't be having another
one but connected me with Andrea Knez Karačić who brought WiDS to Croatia in
2018 and proposed we agree on organizing WiDS Zagreb 2020.
How did you join the initiative?
The
motivation for being part of the WiDS Zagreb 2020 organization was the personal
data stories I heard and the data science field I'm really fond of in terms of
real-life and business benefits it can bring. I have a friend and an ex-coworker
from the telecom part of my career, with whom I worked on data mining solutions
& churn prediction modeling – Ana Dumić had a tough family situation with
her baby son who had severe epilepsy seizures.
I had already
known how important data was for health journals (my personal experience was
with our family dog with canine epilepsy and with my daughters' allergy diet
tracking) and had also had some insight into how data improved her son's daily
life and mitigated the risk of new seizures.
WiDS was a chance for me to share her story with a broader audience and other experts and maybe help somebody else in a similar situation.
Why do you think initiatives like these are important?
First of
all, the WiDS Stanford initiative gives great support to all new and old
ambassadors and the license has clear rules in terms of the format of the
event, local logo, type of lectures (non-commercial oriented) but gives freedom
for the organization in terms of funding (size of the budget, entrance fee) and
creativity (visual design, gifts), which was really important to us (we had
graphics & art – two students that helped in that part).
Aside from the experience of organizing and attending a conference, this kind of initiative brings data science knowledge to the community and raises data awareness. It also gives companies a chance to support the field and scientists from it, provides great networking opportunities and in the end – we hope it makes our society better and less superficial. Data has a better idea and this was our way to showcase how it can change the world.
Coincidentally,
there was a severe earthquake in Zagreb area on March 22nd and,
since we did have a data science lecture in the field of seismology by a
lecturer from Rijeka, WiDS Zagreb taught us about predictors of earthquakes too,
although she concluded the quake itself could not have been predicted.