Big Data and Information Systems

Catalog description

Data and analytics are changing the world and the way we are making decisions, thanks to the enormous and increasing amount of data available to us. Behind this vast amount of data lies the greatest potential to understand reality and predict future events. As this potential is being realized, more organizations are investing substantial amount of money in this discipline that is collectively known as Big Data. Yet, we are facing several challenges, both technological and organizational. From a technology perspective, we see an increasing need of collecting more data from sources both internal and external. This is widening the analytical gap within the organization due to the inability to properly address the volume, variety and velocity of the data. Moreover, organizations are struggling to streamline their advanced analytical capabilities and unable to efficiently respond to the needs of the business of making better decisions faster by converting data into insight. This course will explore the multifaceted reality of Big Data and students will not only learn the underlying principles of data analytics, but also the organizational challenges that Big Data poses to an Enterprise. The objective of this course is to introduce students to Data Science approaches to mine large amounts of information, the necessary tools, and learn from real use cases what is necessary for a company to create Big Data Centers of Excellence in order to successfully turn data analysis into competitive advantage. Additionally, students will also learn about using Hadoop, MapReduce to process and analyze large datasets, and data mining algorithms used for classification, estimation, and prediction purposes.