NITECH ››› DEVELOPING CAREERS IN DATA SCIENCE
MEET GIAVID VALIYEV Data Scientist at the NCI Agency Giavid Valiyev received the Young Scientist of the Year award from the NATO Science and Technology Organization (STO)’s Information Systems Technology Panel for his ‘’valuable contribution to NATO’s digital endeavour’’ Valiyev is from Italy. He earned a degree in data science from Milan-Bicocca University, and joined the university’s research centre after graduation. He first joined the NCI Agency Data Science team in 2017 as an intern. He is now a full-time staff member and lives in The Hague, Netherlands.
Q What do you do for the Agency? I analyse data to highlight patterns and insights for decision-makers. My objective is to help them make better, faster data-driven decisions. The Data Science team receives a huge quantity of data, generated by NATO, and it’s our job to analyse relevant data from different military domains, such as space, defence, cyber and more. We apply algorithms and models to this data to identify patterns/trends and create solutions for the specific problems that our stakeholders are working on. We do this on a daily basis for a number of teams – Allied Command Transformation (ACT), Allied Command Operations (ACO), NATO Headquarters – to name only a few.
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The data we analyse comes in two forms: structured and unstructured. Structured data could be numerical
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tables and spreadsheets, whereas unstructured data is more text-based or images and data gathered from sensors, such as drone sensors for example. The data that we use to analyse and problem-solve come from many sources across NATO – military exercises, operations and documents. I began my journey at the NCI Agency as an intern four years ago, in 2017, when the Data Science team was just forming. I was lucky enough to be part of the development of the team and see it grow. After 2017, I worked as a contractor in the Data Science team for a few years. In March 2020, I became a NATO international civilian. The Young Scientist Award that I am receiving is in recognition of the work I have done and been a part of over the past three years in the Data Science team.
Q Why is your work important for NATO? NATO benefits from our work because we help guide and inform the strategic direction of the Alliance. We exploit and analyse data for strategic purposes and military benefit, to help decision-makers make better choices that are backed up by data. Data science in general can help NATO learn an awful lot.
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