The National Academies will plan and organize a cross-disciplinary public workshop to explore perspectives on the training that students from diverse fields need in order to extract value from Big Data. The workshop will identify key skills that are needed to prepare students for analyzing Big Data. It will consider the needs of industry, academia, and government and build on the experience gained from emerging courses and curricula for this topic. Invited participants to the workshop will include experts in statistics, machine learning, databases, large-scale computing systems, streaming computing, user domains, health and biological informatics, and industry.
Many traditional methods for data analysis do not work, or do not work well, with the massive amounts of data emerging in numerous endeavors. In order to reliably extract insight from Big Data, students need to learn new skills, and many of those skills cut across multiple disciplines and, thus, are not necessarily accessible through standard courses and curricula. During the academic year 2012-2013, a number of courses were introduced at various universities to impart the needed understanding. The planned workshop will enable educators to share insights gained from these courses and make adjustments. A summary report of the workshop will make these insights available more broadly.
