A scientific symposium was held on "Data Science Day" at Khatam University

a scientific symposium was held at Khatam University in Tehran on Data Science Day by Tehran Institute of Advanced Research (TEIAS). This event took place with the participation of a group of experts, researchers and enthusiasts in the field of data mining.

According to the website of Khatam University, on Data Science Day, a scientific symposium was held on Wednesday, November 22^nd, 2023 at Khatam University in Tehran. This event was held by Tehran Advanced Research Institute (TEIAS) with the presence of a group of specialists and enthusiasts in the field of data mining, professors and students of this field at Khatam University and some of the country's scientific and research centers. This symposium included several presentations of diverse and new articles, along with a question-and-answer session.

The first speaker of this symposium was Dr. Behnam Bahrak, a professor at Khatam University, who presented an article entitled "Diversity Issues: Examining Gender and Nationality Bias in the Admission of Graduates in North America's Top Universities in Computer Science."

He announced that this paper was a joint work of him and two of his students and will be published in October, 2023. He also said: “The main idea of this paper was presented by one of my students who was applying 3 years ago, and while doing the steps related to the application procedure, he came to the idea that Iranian professors had responded to his emails better than non-Iranian professors.

Bahrak added: “Every year, a large number of students from different parts of the world contact the professors of North American universities to apply and receive responses from them. In this research, we wished to know if these professors have a special tendency and inclination in accepting their students. He also discussed the questions they had in this research study namely, are these professors more willing to accept students of the same gender as theirs or the opposite? Are they more inclined to attract students with the same nationality as theirs or there is no specific direction in this regard? if there are biases in this regard, have these biases increased or decreased over time?

This professor of Khatam University added: “The first task was to use a dataset. However, in this case there was no specific dataset, and we had to collect data, which had many challenges, and of course, in the end, what convinced the referees of the journal was the collection of these data.”

He further added: “Our focus in this study was on the computer field and we selected the top 25 universities in Canada and the United States for the study, and the period of time we chose was from 2021 to 2022. Then, we started analyzing the data. Other data we used were people's resumes (students/professors), their LinkedIn, Google Scholar accounts and professors' websites, and the tools we benefited for data analysis were Selenium (for LinkedIn data analysis), Google Search, Google Map, API and Name2GAN.

Dr. Behnam Bahrak continued: “Finally, we collected and analyzed the data of 14,000 students and 740 professors from 25 universities in North America (USA and Canada). The evaluation of the data displays that the third place in the number of computer science students in North America, after China and India, belongs to Iran. This issue also applies to the professors of these 25 universities; That is, the third rank of computer science professors in North America after China and India belonged to Iran. These two findings from our research demonstrate that our bright young generation and intelligent work force have been leaving the country for a long time.”

This faculty member of Khatam University added: “In the analysis of data related to gender, it was found that there is no gender bias, but there was an obvious bias regarding nationality; In the sense that a Chinese professor prefers to accept a student from his own country, an Indian professor accepts an Indian student and an Iranian professor prefers an Iranian student. Even if they do not accept students from their own country, they do so from neighboring countries, which is a representation of the existence of nationality bias.

He also discussed: “In addition, the evaluation of the data shows that the ratio of professor/student with the same gender is decreasing over time with a very mild trend, and on the other hand, the ratio of professor/student with the same nationality is increasing over time.”

Dr. Bahrak emphasized: “The data also displayed that gender diversity in all of these universities (25 North American universities) is increasing and, on the other hand, nationality diversity is decreasing; Especially from 2017 to 2020. It seems that a number of nationalities are being eliminated in the process.”

According to the results of his research, in the process of accepting students from other countries in North American universities, there is no gender bias, but there is a nationality bias. Additionally, gender diversity has increased and nationality diversity has decreased over time. Besides, this recent issue (reduction of nationality diversity) has helped the success of scientific groups.

In the next part of the data science symposium programs at Khatam University, Dr. Sadegh Ali Akbari from Shahid Beheshti University gave a speech entitled "Introduction to Process Mining" and said: “Business processes are a set of activities that are performed by individuals for achieving a specific and valuable goal for the whole team.”

He also added: “In other areas, new applications for the process of mining have been created. For example, in searching on the web or web browsing, we may come to the conclusion with macro analysis that users generally follow a certain pattern in web browsing, the results of which can have many valuable applications.”

Next, Fateme Ghasemi presented an article in the field of coding and deep and automatic learning, and Zahra Sadat Delbari, a data science student, presented an article entitled "Hate speech on Persian Twitter".

Moreover, Dr. Yadollah Yaghoubzadeh, a professor at Tehran University, in his remarks about ChatGPT, while examining the history of NLP (Natural Language Processing) from language construction to the formation of translation and ChatGPT, discussed about its future and said: "Definitely, the future cannot be predicted, but one of the fields that seems to be gaining popularity is ChatGPT for every individual; which means that you can have your own ChatGPT, and that's definitely exciting.”

In the following, Dr. Mahmoudi, an expert in the field of machine learning, discussed the issue of privacy in this field and said: “Many people would like to not have their private information posted on social networks all the time, and if they ever want to, they can delete it and, more precisely, restrict others' access to it. This concept brings us to the issue of "right to be forgotten", which led to the adoption of laws in the European Union for the first time.”

The Data Science Symposium ended its ceremony by holding a question-and-answer session between the invited professors and the audience present in the program.

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