“The future belongs to the companies and people that turn data into products”. Data are related to every aspect of our life and we use data products every day. Some well-known examples include Google, Yahoo, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, and Baidu. This course is to introduce interesting cases, findings, and techniques on the analysis of data.
The course will mainly focus on different aspects of data analysis from diverse disciplines such as geography, ecommerce, finance, medicine, and social networks. Students will have chances to manipulate those data, and perform simple yet interesting discoveries. Students will get familiarized with a number of computational tools; for instance, Infographics, Weka, Tanagra, R Language, Octave, and Gephi to manipulate, visualize, and understand data. Very limited programming skills are required in the course. Instead, students will be taught to think scientifically and creatively about data. The aim is for students to not only analyse data, but also develop interesting applications out of the findings.