Big Data Analytics

The recent explosion of social media and the computerization of every aspect of economic activity resulted in the creation of big data: mountains of mostly unstructured data in the form of web logs, videos, speech recordings, photographs, e-mails, and tweets. In a parallel development, computers kept getting ever more powerful and storage ever cheaper. Today, we have the ability to reliably and cheaply store huge volumes of data, efficiently analyze them, and extract business and socially relevant information.

This course brings together several key information technologies used in manipulating, storing, and analyzing big data. Students gain the ability to design highly scalable systems that can accept, store, and analyze large volumes of unstructured data in batch mode and/or real time. Acquired techniques could be profitably used in a variety of fields.