This year University of Hyderabad (UoH) has introduced the first value added course for students of different disciplines as summer course. Students from diverse disciplines such as Management, Statistics, Economics, Biotechnology, Public Health etc attended. To cater to the needs of this diverse group, data sets from these disciplines were used in the course.
Dr. Alok Srivastava from CRRAO-AIMSCS took a course on Data Analysis using R under the auspices of Computer Centre, UoH. The students were introduced to the topics – An introduction to R, Graphics and Data Visualization, Programming, Basic statistics, and Application to Data analysis such as normalization, clustering, dimension reduction techniques. There were 30 participants in the first course which was organized in May-June 2014.
Seen in the photograph are Prof. Ramakrishna Ramaswamy, Vice-Chancellor, UoH, Prof. S Kumerasan, Professor-incharge, Computer Center and Dean, School of Mathematics and Statistics and Dr. Alok Srivastava from CRRAO-AIMSCS.
This is perhaps the first such course in an Indian University in the emerging field of Big Data Analysis, analytics etc. An agency report says that 4 million jobs globally will need to be filled by the year 2015 and that more than two thirds cannot be filled due to the non-availability of people with the requisite knowledge and skills. University of Hyderabad has taken the first step to equip its students with the skills required in this field. In the next semester, School of Mathematics and Statistics plans to introduce a new course on “Machine Learning with R” which will enhance the employment opportunities of the students of UoH. Any student of UoH with the background of R, Programming and a basic knowledge of Statistics can take this course.