The famous Manolis Kaparakis sends me information about a crazy new course going up this fall under the designation of COMP 360, COMP260/QAC260 and called “Special Topics in Computer Science (“Big Data” Analysis),” taught by Professor Norman Danner.
Next semester (Fall 2013), Computer Science will be offering a special course on data analysis (COMP 260), in which students from non-computing disciplines will team up with Computer Science students (COMP360) to work on a research problem that requires significant data analysis.
All students will learn the fundamental techniques of such analysis.
The specific techniques to be learned will be determined by the research problems. The non-CS students will fully develop their research proposals and produce an appropriate research paper describing the project and its results. The Computer Science students will be responsible for developing a well-written software platform that can be used for the project-specific analysis. Ideally the platform will be reusable in other projects.
Enrollment is POI, but to be admitted to the course, non-computing students must submit a one-half to one-page research project proposal via e-mail to ndanner[at]wesleyan[dot]edu by May 31, 2013. The proposal must give a sense of the question(s) to be answered and the kind of data to be collected and analyzed. We encourage proposals that have some faculty backing such as those that will contribute to an honors thesis or are part of an independent research course. We encourage joint proposals from computing and non-computing students. However, joint proposals are not required, and we will match students as well as possible given project needs and student interests.