CODATA and the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) – and other partners – will convene an International Training Workshop on Big Data. This will continue the emerging series of International Training Workshops which CODATA is seeking to establish with a variety of partners.  Recent training workshops have been held in Beijing, China and in Nairobi, Kenya.

The International Training Workshop will take place at the Indian Statistical Institute in Bangalore, India on 9-20 March 2015. Places for roughly twenty students will be available.

Travel, subsistence and accommodation for participants from India will be provided through ISI. Interested participants should contact Devika P. Madalli <devika[AT]drtc.isibang.ac.in>.

Students from SAARC countries and from other countries in South Asia will be welcome. A limited number of scholarships supporting travel, accommodation and subsistence may be available. Further announcements will be made, however, interested parties should send a brief CV as soon as possible to Simon Hodson <execdir[AT]codata.org> and Devika Madalli <devika[AT]drtc.isibang.ac.in> and you will be contacted about scholarship opportunities.

Further details are provided below…

Objective

The intensive, two week residential course has as its objective to train early and mid-career data professionals in using latest technology and techniques in Big Data management and its exploitation.

Methodology

The workshop will have a carefully designed curriculum to cover the broad introductory topics to data, data handling issues, standards and interoperability – it will consider generic data issues and specific challenges associated with Big Data. In an integrated way, the workshop will combine theoretical topics with practical activities including demonstrations and illustrations, short exercises involving the participants and project work.

Subjects Covered

Topics to be covered by the course, will include the following:

• Introduction – What is Big Data? What are its features?
• Big Data Storage – formats – scaling
• Tools and techniques for handling Big Data [4-8 lectures]
• Standards for Big Data
• Semantics for Big Data organization and retrieval
• Data models and services
• Domain based data
• Open Government Data
• Big Data Licensing: access, use, reuse modalities
• Data and text mining
• Approaches to structured and unstructured data
• Case studies, Big data projects and alliances

Eligible Participants

The workshop is targeted at early and mid-career data professionals.  The definition is deliberately flexible to allow candidates from a variety of backgrounds to make a case.  However, doctoral students, post-doctoral researchers, young faculty members and early career data experts, data managers etc are the target group.  Ideal candidates will have some experience as data managers, data encoders, metadata managers, archivers, data exploitation personnel, analysts, data publishers or similar roles. Data experts that help policy makers in data related policies are also included.