Probabl, a spin-off company that emerged from Paris’ famed Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (Inria), has announced that it will partner with Kryterion to deliver a first-of-its-kind certification programme for data scientists.
Kryterion is a UK/US-based digital proctoring and certification platform. Probabl is the official operator of the scikit-learn brand, an open-source software library for machine learning (ML) in the Python coding language that has over 1.5 billion downloads and has been used to help build household names like Spotify and Booking.com.
Together, they will deliver the certification programme targeting millions of data scientists in the scikit-learn community.
“Delivering a global certification programme to scikit-learn users is paramount to recognising and validating the hundreds if not thousands of hours data scientists across the world have spent mastering the framework,” said Yann Lechelle, co-founder and CEO of Probabl.
The company says it aims to set a gold standard for helping data scientists deliver more value in ML and artificial intelligence (AI).
“We are happy to work with Kryterion as our strategic partner in this ambitious and responsible initiative,” Lechelle added.
Within the last couple of years, the launch of industry-shifting AI models such as ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Meta’s Llama, have only exacerbated an already (extremely) shallow pool of available data scientists.
According to a 2023 study by the Oxford Internet Institute, workers with AI skills can command salaries at anywhere between 21% and 40% higher than the average worker. All the more reason to brush up on AI skills.
The scikit-learn project was started 17 years ago by David Cournapeau as part of a Google Summer of Code project. The open-source Python module grew from there thanks to contributions from around the world.
In 2010, researchers from Inria took leadership of the project and in February of this year, the Probabl spin-off launched out of the research institution.
At the time, Probabl’s CEO hinted at its future in ML certification, telling TechCrunch‘s Romain Dillet, “We are a software publisher, but our first commercial offerings will include professional services, training and certification, specifically around scikit-learn.”
The company has tapped one of the digital proctoring and certifications most well-known names, Kryterion, to help them with this endeavor. The company develops SaaS testing solutions for global assessments and certifications online.
“This collaboration aligns perfectly with Kryterion’s commitment to responsible and accountable AI development, ensuring that data scientists are equipped with the necessary skills while maintaining the highest standards of candidate experience and exam security,” said Kryterion CEO William Dorman. “By providing certification to millions of professionals, we’re not only advancing AI expertise but also reinforcing the importance of trust, integrity, and security in this growing and critical field.”
