Are You a Computer Science Student? Want To Be a Data Scientist? Then Check This Out

The Data Sciences Summer Institute is a six week summer program for students interested in data science. It will be held at the University of Illinois Department of Computer Science and include: a class on the mathematical foundations of data science, advanced tutorials, expert speakers and collaborative research projects. Why go? Well, data science is shaping up to be a smart career choice for the 21st century, and this looks like an excellent way for computer science majors to more acquainted with the field.

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Here are the subjects the summer program covers:

• Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and Information Extraction
• Computer Vision
• Information Retrieval and Web Information Access
• Knowledge Discovery in Social & Information Networks

Compare that with the top three college majors Microsoft recommends:

• Data Mining/Machine Learning/AI/Natural Language Processing
• Business Intelligence/Competitive Intelligence
• Analytics/Statistics – specifically Web Analytics, A/B Testing and statistical analysis

As our own Audrey Watters put it:

If The Graduate were remade today, the advice to young Benjamin Braddock might be “just one word… statistics.”

The application requirements are as follows:

• College Junior or Senior Computer Science students (majors or minors) and beginning Graduate students.
• Students should show strong academic performance and must have sufficient mathematical and programming experience.
• Applicants must currently be living in the United States as citizens, residents or Visa holders.

Here’s an introduction video from University of Illinois:

For more information on what data scientists do, check out some of our previous articles on the subject:

• Closer Look: Rise of the Data Scientist
• Secrets of the LinkedIn Data Scientists
• Foursquare Searching for Data Scientist – A Sign of Things to Come?.

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