Course Description

We are entering the “Age of Big Data” – an extremely large amount of information is created every day, which is revolutionizing science and technology, governments, economy, and international development. A variety of sources contribute to the Big Data, including the Internet, Wikipedia, social networks (e.g. Facebook), micro blogs, mobile phones, and cameras. This era of “information burst” has brought convenience to our daily lives. More recently, the emergence of foundation models (e.g., GPT) is also an outcome of big data, massive high-quality is the fuel to the success training of these large machine learning models. However, the availability of such a vast amount of information has also created many problems. For example, reported incidents of leakage of private data, due to the use of the Foxy software, and the loss of USB drives that contain thousands of patients’ records, have raised serious legal and social concerns.

The goal of this course is to engage students in examining the critical issues that they could encounter in the Age of Big Data. They will examine how Big Data is affecting our society and daily lives and how Big Data is used in our daily life. They will study the security and credibility issues of Big Data. They will also address the issues of organizing and exploring Big Data. Solutions proposed in legal, technological, and education domains will be explored and discussed.

Course Learning Outcomes

On completing the course, students will be able to:

1. Describe and explain why and how Big Data impacts different aspects of the society.
2. Analyze and understand the effect of Big Data on social and moral values.
3. Apply the understanding of security issues of Big Data to the protection of personal data, or new kinds of data appearing in the future.
4. Describe and explain the conditions under which a given piece of data can be trusted.
5. Apply the knowledge about the trust on Big Data to improve the quality of confidence in a given piece of data.
6. Describe and understand the basic principles of organizing and searching Big Data.
7. Apply data organizing and searching methodologies to organize a potentially large amount of personal information.

Offer Semester and Day of Teaching

Second semester (Wed)