Depok — On February 7, 2026, the Faculty of Science and Technology (FST) at Universitas Islam Internasional Indonesia (UIII), hosted its first workshop, an online session titled Applied Machine Learning: Real-World Modeling Workflow. Speaker Pararawensy Indarjo, M.Sc, led the session, kicking off what would become an ongoing workshop series at the faculty.

The workshop series grew out of a simple realization: not everything can be taught to students through classes alone. According to Muhammad Al Atiqi, PhD, Head of the Study Program, the faculty began supplementing coursework with workshops on various topics. Along the way, they realized that people outside the university could benefit as well, so the workshop was eventually opened up to the general public too.

Broadly, the material covered an introduction to machine learning, basic data cleaning, and how to understand the way a predictive model works. To make things more relatable, Indarjo used TOEFL scores as an example. He explained that by studying data, one can find out which factors influence a person’s TOEFL score.

From there, one can also identify which matter most and which matter least. Ultimately, this kind of analysis can be used to estimate what someone’s TOEFL score might be. So, who was this workshop mainly for, and why does it matter to them? Al Atiqi explained further.

“The workshop is targeted primarily for our own students but we are open to the public too. For participants outside the program, we got different profiles. Firstly, some students from other faculties who want to learn data science topics. Secondly, future aspirants for our program. And lastly, researchers or lecturers from other universities who have genuine interest in the topic or want to develop further collaboration with us.”

It’s been a while since the workshop took place, but it still says a lot about FST’s approach: reaching beyond the campus community to anyone curious enough to learn. It also set the tone for the workshops that followed.