Courses v.1

Hello! It is Olga again here. As I promised I would like to tell some insides from the WISE study process.

This time I gonna tell you about course with a name "Big Data Engineering". Our main lecturer is a Doctoral student here in University of Jyväskylä. Also during the course period we had couple of visiting lectures from partner universities, IBM and couple joining lectures with other courses connected to big data and clustering subject.

The course content is not focused as you may think on the abstract knowledge of Big Data. Instead we look into the methods on how to process and manipulate massive data sets. After all  having terabytes of data "collecting dust" is different from analyzing and getting the knowledge from it. The materials were oriented on clustering, hash functions, distance calculations (between documents or pictures), and we have even got some incites on the most basic web page ranking technique.

During the course we had 4 Demos. Demos are tasks and problems which we need to solve in most cases by writing a program or an algorithm. During the last demo we were given to solve problem from a chemistry side. In a nutshell we are given a huge data set of experiments and our goal is to find constraints and dependent variables based on initial parameters and the outcome. But the main goal for the exercise is to practice communication with a super computer named TAITO from CSC.

As you may notice the course sounds challenging but it is worth it. I have learnt already a lot from the subject and am even thinking of taking the thesis topic related Big Data area.

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