The Past, Present, and Future of Data Science Education

For our January event, we're very happy to have Prof. Kirk Borne (http://kirkborne.net) from GMU speaking about Data Science education. As Data Science (or whichever buzzword you prefer) becomes professionalized, it becomes more and more important for practitioners and the organizations that hire them to have clear expectations about skills and training. Whether you're in that broad category of "not quite a data scientist yet", or have a PhD and want to know how to frame your career, or want to get involved in educating the next generation of data scientists, this will be a fascinating discussion.

NOTE: We're back at GWU this month.

Agenda:

6:30pm -- Networking, Empenadas, and Refreshments

7:00pm -- Introduction

7:15pm -- Presentations and discussion

8:30pm -- Adjourn for Data Drinks (Tonic, 2201 G St. NW)

Abstract:

Big Data are transforming education for the next-generation workforce -- both what and how we teach are being revolutionized. Data Science training is essential for specialists and non-specialists, primarily because the new digital world is (and will continue to be) inundated with, driven by, and blended with data and information content ubiquitously. I will discuss some of the past, present, and future developments that I see in Big Data, Analytics, and Data Science education, both formally and informally.

Bio:

Dr. Kirk Borne (http://www.linkedin.com/in/kirkdborne) is a Data Scientist and Professor of Astrophysics and Computational Science in the George Mason University School of Physics, Astronomy, and Computational Sciences. He received his B.S. degree in physics from LSU and his Ph.D. in astronomy from the California Institute of Technology. He has been at Mason since 2003, where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in Data Science and advises many doctoral dissertation students in Data Science research projects. Previously, he spent nearly 20 years supporting NASA projects, including the Hubble Space Telescope (as Data Archive Project Scientist) and the Space Science Data Operations Office (as contract Project Manager). He is currently chairman of the Informatics and Statistics Research Collaboration for the proposed petascale Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). He has extensive experience in big data and has advised several federal agencies on data mining and big data applications. He focuses on achieving big discoveries from big data and promotes the use of data-centric experiences with big data in the STEM education pipeline at all levels. He promotes the "Borne Ultimatum" -- data literacy for all!

Follow Kirk on Twitter at @KirkDBorne (https://twitter.com/KirkDBorne).

Sponsors:

This event is sponsored by Intridea (http://www.intridea.com/), Cloudera (http://www.cloudera.com/), Statistics.com (http://bit.ly/12YljkP), Elder Research (http://datamininglab.com/), and MemSQL (http://memsql.com/).