

Universities Go in Big for Big Data - taylorbuley
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/08/28/universities-go-in-big-for-big-data/

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dev1n
So what would be the difference between a masters in "Big Data" versus a
masters in computational science?

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mathattack
The cynic would say say branding.

In reality, I think that Big Data contains three dimensions: \- Computational
science: Getting the data, cleaning the data and writing code for the stats.
This is a combination of database knowledge (SQL & others), scripting (python
& others) and statistical programming (R & others). \- Statistics: What does
the data mean? What can you infer? What can't you infer? \- Domain knowledge:
What are the needs of a consumer products company? Or telecom company? Or
financial services company.

A "Big Data" person needs all three. Most computational science programs focus
mostly on the first, only a little on the second, and not at all on the third.
I'd argue that academic programs should go heavier on the stats, as that's the
field that will change the least, and will be the hardest to learn later. You
can always learn a scripting language later, and much of the domain knowledge
can be picked up outside of school.

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bobbinsIII
I don't think most people working with R and python for data analysis are
doing 'Big Data'.

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mathattack
It's one subset of many. I do see people scripting and scrubbing data in
python before getting to the heavy duty tools.

