Mentoring for Czechitas

In spring 2022 I started volunteering with Czechitas as a mentor for their Digital academy.

I wanted to try this role as something completely new yet something I’ve been familiar with as I was supervising theses as post-graduate at Masaryk University before.

Autumn 2023

This run I supervised two teams.

Lucia Škrdlíková and Milada Borrow analyzed borrows and reservations from Moravská Zemská Knihovna. They were able to find some interesting patterns; you may check it in their final write-up.

Vlada Grigorieva and Oksana Taras compared Czech villages using a list of criteria resulting in the ranking of all Czech villages.

Both teams were very active and it was fun to work with the datasets they’ve chosen.

Spring 2023

Mentees: Andrea Daněčková, Iva Křečková
Topic: data analysis of insolvency in Czech Republic using a graph-based database (neo4j)

This year, the girls wanted to play with graph databases. As I was playing with Neo4j at Merlon, it was a natural match during the mentor-mentees matching event.

The problem was the dataset. After some thinking I prepared an export from ISIR database we are maintaining with Radek Hábl and the girls combined that with ARES dataset of Czech companies.

The final write-up.

I unfortunately couldn’t attend the final day but I was pleased to learn that they were awarded with technology unicorn as Katka and Jana the last year.

(Photo by Czechitas.)

Autumn 2022

Mentees: Kateřina Fafílková, Jana Hrbačáková
Topic: text analysis of messages from Instagram

The mentor-mentees matching call was wild. We parked in Cortina d’Ampezzo and I hoped for the battery in my wife’s laptop to hold since our main LiFePo4 battery¹ was broken. Unfortunately, in the middle of the call, the battery failed and I had to switch to my mobile phone.

Eventually, I’ve been matched with Katka and Jana ↑. They’ve chosen to work with a dataset of messages from Instagram for non-profit Konsent.

We prepared the dataset in advance before the hackathon where we tried to label the data (messages on IG) with sentiment and categories.

I couldn’t make it to the second hackathon on Faculty of Informatics so we did our own in a tearoom and then another, online via Google Meet.

The final write-up.

Spring 2022

Mentees: Lucia Otiepková and Michaela Szilvásová
Topic: an analysis of articles before and after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The final write-up from Lucka and Michaela.

An article mentioning the results.