BIA Final Semester Students Help the Industry Derive Business Insights
At Humber College, experiential learning represents an essential pillar that leads to a successful career. This is demonstrated by establishing collaborations with several companies to allow students to apply their Capstone project to real-world scenarios. The first cohort of the BIA program students mentored by the leading program faculty worked on various real-life projects with a range of companies, such as Music Supervisor Inc, Record Storage & Retrieval Services Inc, The Conference Exchange, and InStore Products Ltd, etc.
Faculty Bio
Omar Wahdan
Omar Wahdan completed his M.Sc. as well as Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence at the National University of Malaysia and a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Machine Learning at Ryerson University. Currently, he serves as a full-time professor in the BIA program, at Humber College. His teaching and research interests include business intelligence, big data analysis, pattern recognition, and feature extraction.
Testimonial
Professor Omar Wahdan led two Capstone teams to work with Noebits Inc. and The Big Leaf Inc., and here is what he shared about his mentorship experience at the end of the Term:
The Noebits e-retail has the largest B2B catalog on the internet with 8+ million products and 60+ thousand categories. The manual product categorization is both inaccurate and time-consuming. BIA students were able to develop a Machine Learning solution to automatically categorize new products using text mining technology. The company founder Arvind Goel commented that “The delivered solution is impressive and I am sure that we will use the model to substitute our current processes”. A team member - Christina Pierre – said, “I learned a lot. The solution was a bit challenging to be developed and took time and research, but it was a great opportunity to improve my skillset”.
The Big Leaf Inc. is a consulting firm that provides services to a wide range of customers including investors. The company is interested in providing clients a risk measurement of the Cryptocurrencies status. The solution was to collect and aggregate data on Cryptocurrencies and suggest a risk KPI model using descriptive data analysis. The successfully implemented solution can help the company improve its brand awareness. The company’s CEO Rahi Tajzadeh remarked, ‘In the past, we asked several schools to develop such a solution. However, the provided one by the BIA students is fantastic, and it is much more than what I had been hoping for’.
As a faculty, working with students from the first BIA program’s cohort was a bit concerning. However, the great achievements demonstrate the fact that the program’s students are ready to be exposed to the industry.