Week 1 - Introduction

Slides

• html
• pdf

To do before class

As a way to wet your apetite about the content of the first class, I recommend you:

• Listen to this interview with Hilary Mason, Max Shron, and Alex Pentland about the power of data.

• Watch this video by Mike Flowers, Chief Analytics Officer, at the City of New York about how data is used to influence policy decisions.

Additional readings

The contents of this lecture are loosely based on, and explored into further detail, in the following three references :

• [Recommended] “Chapter 1: Introduction” (Schutt & O’Neil, 2013). Free sampler of the book containing the chapter available online (html, pdf).
• A very influential pro-big data/data science article (Anderson, 2008).
• A reflexive call of caution (Lazer, Kennedy, King, & Vespignani, 2014).

References

1. Anderson, C. (2008). The end of theory: The data deluge makes the scientific method obsolete. Wired Magazine. Updated 6/23/2008), Available at: http://www. wired. com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory.
2. Lazer, D., Kennedy, R., King, G., & Vespignani, A. (2014). The Parable of Google Flu: Traps in Big Data Analysis. Science, 343(6176), 1203–1205. http://doi.org/10.1126/science.1248506
3. Schutt, R., & O’Neil, C. (2013). Doing data science: Straight talk from the frontline. “ O’Reilly Media, Inc.”