Introduction to Data Science: An Interdisciplinary Course for Undergraduates

• Activity Number: 575
• Type: Invited
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 12, 2015 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Education
• Author(s): Alyson Wilson*
• Companies: North Carolina State University
• Keywords: data science ; interdisciplinary ; undergraduate

Abstract

Data Science has become increasingly important in nearly every industry sector and academic field. It has gained significant national attention and interest by combining techniques from several fields like computer science, statistics, and mathematics to extract knowledge from data. In Fall 2014 at NC State University, we taught a joint Statistics-Computer Science course to introduce undergraduates (junior and senior statistics and computer science majors and minors) to many of the foundational topics in data science. We kept the pre-requisites minimal (one programming course, one statistics, course, linear algebra), and consequently, we had a broad range of skills and backgrounds in the class. We introduced the students to cloud computing, MapReduce and Hadoop, data lifecycle, SQL and NoSQL databases, semantic web, classification, clustering, association analysis, geospatial analytics, and visualization. In this talk we will discuss what went well with the course, and what we will change before we teach it again.