About the Program
Humankind started collecting data on clay tablets millenia ago and today we are at the forefront of the Big Data revolution. There are three most important qualities that make the data “Big” nowadays: Volume, Velocity, and Variety. Just think about the over 3 billion active internet users; 208 thousand photos are being shared on Facebook, 100 hours videos are being uploaded on YouTube, 350 thousand tweets are being posted on Twitter in just one minute and at the same time over 3.5 million searches are conducted on Google. Thanks to this immense volume and velocity, 90% of the total data produced throughout our existence has been created in the two years. Furthermore, "data," traditionally perceived as a quantitative concept, presents itself in new and different forms. Each phone call, each e-mail message, each city surveillance camera recording and each page visited on the Internet can be stored as a sound file, a text, an image, a click and then can be analyzed.
...Today, if you would burn CDs of the worldwide data flow for one single day and stack them up to a pile, that pile would reach up to Mars and back...
Werner Herzog, Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World (2016)
The important task of making sense of this exponentially growing data and creating insights/predictions from it falls squarely on Data Science experts' shoulders. “Data Science,” related to almost all aspects of life ranging from meteorology, economics, seismology and the stock market to medicine, sports, politics, national and global security, is regarded as the most appealing job of the 21st century in the United States of America. According to a report released by McKinsey Consulting Company (also cited by The New York Times) only in the U.S., there is a vacancy for 140 to 190 thousand employees with advanced analytical skills to work on Big Data and 1.5 million managers who have adequate capabilities to make decisions by using the analyses generated. The discrepancy between the increase in the data generated and the need for a more data savvy work force is becoming more palpable each day.
When we look at today’s business environment, companies are looking for experienced professionals from diverse backgrounds such as engineering, technology, economics, and social sciences to add value to their competitive edge by describing, aggregating, analyzing, and interpreting dynamic data. As MEF University, we designed this program so that the participants gain the necessary analytical abilities and knowledge required by today's business world.
