IBM Targets ‘Big Data’ Skills With University Partnerships

For instance, Dublin City University (DCU) is teaming up with IBM to create a new Masters Degree in Computer Science with Big Data, Business Analytics and Smarter Cities. The Masters in Computing (Data Analytics) course content has been developed jointly by IBM and DCU to equip students with deep analytical skills to support the changing face of business and will help graduate students develop critical IT skills for urban analysis, consumer behaviour, social networks, sentiment analysis, health care and network security.

Meanwhile, the George Washington University School of Business is partnering with IBM to launch a Master of Science degree in Business Analytics this Autumn. The University of Missouri College of Engineering’s Department of Computer Science will offer a new undergraduate course, titled “Big Data Analytics,” in the fall 2013 semester. Northwestern University School of Continuing Studies, which launched two analytics graduate degrees last year with IBM, is expanding big data curricula in two of its continuing education programs. Northwestern’s Master of Science degrees in Information Systems and in Predictive Analytics will both include a new “Analytics and Business Intelligence” track. And Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is combining forces with IBM to offer a new graduate program in fall 2013 to prepare students for big data and analytics careers, IBM said.

Faculty Awards

Regarding the $10,000 faculty awards, among the standouts are Nitesh Chawla, associate professor at the University of Notre Dame, who developed a novel data science program that requires immersion of an individual in a domain to innovate by conducting data exploration, feature engineering, machine learning, information system design and database design, and what-if analysis.

Jeffrey Popyack, an associate professor at Drexel University, won an award for his effort to introduce frameworks such as Amazon S3, InfoSphere BigInsights, Hadoop and MapReduce into the Computer Architecture and Artificial Intelligence tracks of the university’s Computer Science curriculum, with an emphasis on parallelism, scalability, big data and machine learning.

Alexander Rasin, an assistant professor at DePaul University, won an award for his efforts to provide graduate students with practical data mining skills. Rasin will develop a graduate data mining course based on Apache Hadoop and Mahout that leverages IBM BigInsights and IBM SmartCloud.

The IBM Faculty Awards support basic research, curriculum innovation and educational assistance in focus areas that are fundamental to innovation in the 21st century and strategic to IBM’s core business. The focus areas of particular interest include smarter planets and cities, health care and personalised education, mobile first and social technologies, big data and business analytics, cyber-security and cloud computing, and multi-core and hybrid systems, IBM said.

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Originally published on eWeek.