Big Data Blitz

Catalog description

This course is designed to guide students through the process of preparing and conducting a data mining multi-disciplinary project in the field of coastal and marine system sciences that utilizes big data. The course begins with an introduction to python programming and data search and format manipulation, where students will learn how to locate and collect relevant spatial and/or temporal data from various sources and how to manipulate it into a format that can be easily analyzed and visualized. The course then moves on to experiment design, where students will learn how to design experiments to collect spatial and/or temporal data that can be analyzed using big data and data mining techniques. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) will also be introduced as a powerful tool for analyzing complex data sets and students will learn how to apply various AI and ML algorithms to real-world problems in coastal and marine system sciences. Finally, students will present their projects identifying their research question, experiment design, the data identified, data used, data processing and manipulation steps, any analyses and visualizations (e.g., summary statistics, maps), and their proposed next steps with their data. Instructor permission.