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

Meet your mentor notes (private)
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

Meet your Mentor notes (private)
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.