A Professional Big Data Master s Program to train Computational Specialists

Size: px

Start display at page:

Download "A Professional Big Data Master s Program to train Computational Specialists"

Rose Lamb
8 years ago
Views:

1 A Professional Big Data Master s Program to train Computational Specialists Anoop Sarkar, Fred Popowich, Alexandra Fedorova! School of Computing Science!

2 Education for Employable Graduates: Critical Questions Definitions of Training, Education and Employability.! What skills, knowledge and capabilities are needed for good employability?! Have they been formally defined?! Who defines them?! How do we define the relevant BDA curricula?! How do / should we deliver the courses?! What can we learn from our experience?!

! What skills, knowledge and capabilities are needed for good employability?

3 Overview Our goal is to train computational specialists who can construct models, develop algorithms and write software that can extract actionable knowledge from Big Data.! Graduate Program! targeted at students who have completed their undergraduate studies in an information technology or scientific field, including professionals! Small cohort taking 16 months including co-op! Traditional graduate course delivery (5 courses) plus specialized lab work (4 courses)!

targeted at students who have completed their undergraduate studies in an information technology or scientific field,

4 Areas covered: the five pillars Systems! for storing, computing and managing large-scale data! Algorithms! well-versed in highly efficient algorithms for processing massive data! Machine learning! Data mining! extract patterns from large-scale data and machine learning! Visualization! present the information obtained from the data to users who can act on this information!

Machine learning! Data mining! extract patterns from large-scale data and machine learning!

5 Areas covered Analysis of scalability of algorithms to big data.! Data warehouses and online analytical processing.! Efficient storage of big data including data streams.! Scalable querying and reporting on massive data sets.! Scalable and distributed hardware and software architectures.! Software as a service. Cloud Computing (e.g. Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine)! Big data programming models: map-reduce, distributed databases, software for implementing streaming and sketching algorithms.!

! Scalable and distributed hardware and software architectures.! Software as a service. Cloud Computing

6 Areas covered (continued) Dealing with unstructured data such as images, text or biological sequences.! Scalable machine learning methods such as online learning.! Data mining: methods for learning descriptive and predictive models from data.! Distributed algorithms over very large graphs and matrices.! Social media analysis.! Visualization methods and interactive data exploration.!

! Data mining: methods for learning descriptive and predictive models from data.

7 Hardware and Software Environment Premium workstations and displays! wide range of commercial visual analytics software! in the Vancouver Institute for Visual Analytics (VIVA) lab.! Amazon compute cloud EC2 / Google Compute Engine.! Local Hadoop cluster for programming assignments.! Other cloud computing experimental testbeds already in use at SFU for research.!

in the Vancouver Institute for Visual Analytics (VIVA) lab.

8 Tuition Domestic students program cost is CAD $26,000 / USD $23,400 over 16 months.! International students program cost is CAD $31,280 / USD $28,150 over 16 months!

9 Education for Employable Graduates: Critical Questions Definitions of Training, Education and Employability.! What skills, knowledge and capabilities are needed for good employability?! Have they been formally defined?! Who defines them?! How do we define the relevant BDA curricula?! How do / should we deliver the courses?! What can we learn from our experience?! Graduate training on core technical technology and hands-on application to real world problems.

! Who defines them?! How do we define the relevant BDA curricula?! How do / should we deliver the courses?

10 Education for Employable Graduates: Critical Questions Definitions of Training, Education and Employability.! What skills, knowledge and capabilities are needed for good employability?! Have they been formally defined?! Who defines them?! How do we define the relevant BDA curricula?! How do / should we deliver the courses?! What can we learn from our experience?! Five pillars foundational work plus lab work and co-op. Will evaluate curriculum after each cohort.

11 Education for Employable Graduates: Critical Questions Definitions of Training, Education and Employability.! What skills, knowledge and capabilities are needed for good employability?! Have they been formally defined?! Who defines them?! How do we define the relevant BDA curricula?! How do / should we deliver the courses?! What can we learn from our experience?! Conducted research and market study. More work needs to be done here.

12 Education for Employable Graduates: Critical Questions Definitions of Training, Education and Employability.! What skills, knowledge and capabilities are needed for good employability?! Have they been formally defined?! Who defines them?! How do we define the relevant BDA curricula?! How do / should we deliver the courses?! What can we learn from our experience?! Traditional classroom plus tutorial based labs.

! Have they been formally defined?! Who defines them?! How do we define the relevant BDA curricula?

13 Education for Employable Graduates: Critical Questions Definitions of Training, Education and Employability.! What skills, knowledge and capabilities are needed for good employability?! Have they been formally defined?! Who defines them?! How do we define the relevant BDA curricula?! How do / should we deliver the courses?! What can we learn from our experience?! In progress. Very popular, and attracting high quality applicants.

14 A Professional Big Data Master s Program to train Computational Specialists Contact Anoop Sarkar (anoop@sfu.ca)! or Fred Popowich (popowich@sfu.ca)!

TEL778.782.3042 FAX 778.782.3080. date 8 January 2014 Wade Parkhouse, Dean ofgraduate No. GS2014.01 ^2>s. &&- Studies

SFU Dean of Graduate Studies S.14-32 Maggie Benston Student Services Centre 1100 8888 University Drive Burnaby, BC Canada V5A 1S6 TEL778.782.3042 FAX 778.782.3080 rcport-dgs@sfu.ca CiradStudies MEMORANDUM