This course builds on your database and programming skills. It aims to give you an in-depth understanding of a wide range of fundamental algorithms and processing platforms used in big data management.

The course covers Big Data Fundamentals, including the characteristics of Big Data, the sources Big Data (such as social media, sensor data, and geospatial data), as well as the challenges imposed around information management, data analytics, as well as platforms and architectures. Emphasis will be given to non-relational databases by examining techniques for storing and processing large volumes of structured and unstructured data, streaming data as well as complex analytics on them. Cloud computing and data centres will also be presented as a solution to handling big data and business intelligence applications.

The course aims to keep a balance between algorithmic and systematic issues. The algorithms discussed in this course involve methods of organising big data for efficient complex computation. In addition, we consider Big Data platforms (such as Hadoop) to present practical applications of the algorithms covered in the course.