Tackling the challenges of Big Data

Slight change from the machine learning posts of the past few weeks, I’ve recently paid and enrolled on a course being delivered by Massachusetts Institute of Technology called “Tackling the Challenges of Big Data“.

You can see a short video what’s covered here:

The course is held over six weeks and will provide the following:

• Five modules covering 18 topic areas: with 20 hours of video
• Five assessments

I’m looking forwarded to learning about the following:

• Distinguish what is Big Data (volume, velocity, variety), and will learn where it comes from, and what are the key challenges
• Determine how and where Big Data challenges arise in a number of domains, including social media, transportation, finance, and medicine
• Investigate multicore challenges and how to engineer around them
• Explore the relational model, SQL, and capabilities of new relational systems in terms of scalability and performance
• Understand the capabilities of NoSQL systems, their capabilities and pitfalls, and how the NewSQL movement addresses these issues
• Learn how to maximize the MapReduce programming model: What are its benefits, how it compares to relational systems, and new developments that improve its performance and robustness
• Learn why building secure Big Data systems is so hard and survey recent techniques that help; including learning direct processing on encrypted data, information flow control, auditing, and replay
• Discover user interfaces for Big Data and what makes building them difficult
• Measure the need for and understand how to create sublinear time algorithms
• Manage the development of data compression algorithms
• Formulate the “data integration problem”: semantic and schematic heterogeneity and discuss recent breakthroughs in solving this problem
• Understand the benefits and challenges of open-linked data
• Comprehend machine learning and algorithms for data analytics

I’m sure I’ll be able to apply what I learn in this course to Social Opinion and add new features to improve the product.

Undertaking this course, coupled with a full time job and being in the running to win the Twitter AdTech Challenge – and hopefully becoming a recognised Twitter Official Partner will mean the blogging may have to take a back seat for a few weeks until I get some of these things out of the way!