Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Berkeley offers its data science course online for free

news.berkeley.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 164 posts

Re: Berkeley offers its data science course online for free

#61

Post by swedishfish »

banned1 wrote: post #47
fma wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it sounds cool...I remember when I was applying for college (2001), nanotechnology and biomedical engineering was all the rage. Glad I stuck with electrical engineering.

I thought biomedical engineering still has a lot of potential to offer?

My friend who majored in biomed kept getting passed over during her job search. Turns out all the biomed companies just wanted to hire mechanical engineers. (She did eventually find a job in her field.)

I guess it's analogous to the data science degrees popping up today. Will be interesting to see if it ends up as a fad degree or a legitimate career path.

Re: Berkeley offers its data science course online for free

#62

Post by selimthegrim »

graycat wrote: post #36
nextos wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of value in your posts. Mathematizing problems, when successful, brings elegant solutions with well understood properties. Hence, I don't understand the downvotes you are usually getting. I'm a pure CS / logician by training, but I've spent a few years trying to expand my expertise into probability theory and stochastic processes. Lots of your advice resonates with me. My MSc advisor recommended I shoul…

In most academic fields, work that mathematizes the field is regarded as the best. Neveu is elegant beyond belief. I keep my copy close. I was aimed at Neveu by a star student of E. Cinlar, long at Princeton and before that at Northwestern -- long editor in chief of Mathematics of Operations Research . Neveu was a student of M. Loeve at Berkeley. So was the current darling of machine learning, L. Breiman, because of…

Did Neveu ever take a detour into physics? There is a well-known QFT model with his name on it.

Incidentally, I have a copy of Loeve's old probability textbook - I wonder if it is too out of date to be any use.

Re: Berkeley offers its data science course online for free

#63

Post by swedishfish »

carlosgg wrote: post #29

Berkeley also used to have this Data Science with Spark series on edX but they taught it just the one time and now even the archived versions of the courses are closed. https://www.edx.org/xseries/data-science-engineering-apacher...

I'm so sad this was never taught again. It's the most useful MOOC I've taken, and it motivated me to start using pyspark on a daily basis. I would say the class is better for learning pyspark than actual data science concepts though.

Re: Berkeley offers its data science course online for free

#64

Post by itronitron »

resolaibohp wrote: post #10
jamestimmins wrote: post #5

I find it curious that there are so many courses for data-science related subjects, which superficially seem to cover the same material, and relatively few courses covering more traditional CS topics such as computer systems, networks, OS. I suppose it has to do with the market, but also feels like colleges are skating to where the puck is, rather than where it will be (or perhaps, where it could be).

I have also found this interesting. What I don't understand is that the amount of data science jobs are no where near the levels that people make it seem. I am not sure where all these people will end up working if they want to be a data scientist. There is not a need to hire huge teams of data scientists like you might for dev roles, it doesn't scale the same way.

I actually think in order to do it right you need to have a sizable team (n > 7) of data scientists in order to keep them honest, productive, and developing their skills. They will need to pair up with a team of software devs/ML/data wranglers to help them push the edge on what they are doing. Depending on the company that could be the complete engineering team, or it could be a disjoint set.

Re: Berkeley offers its data science course online for free

#65

Post by amrx101 »

mr_toad wrote: post #45
resolaibohp wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have also found this interesting. What I don't understand is that the amount of data science jobs are no where near the levels that people make it seem. I am not sure where all these people will end up working if they want to be a data scientist. There is not a need to hire huge teams of data scientists like you might for dev roles, it doesn't scale the same way.

Every job that involves data in any way is being relabeled a data science job. Most of them are just generating dashboards and posters in Excel or Tableau for people who are data illiterate. I know many people with maths/stats/comp-sci backgrounds who end up in these sorts of jobs. “Just add a bunch of green up arrows and red down arrows, your manager will love it” was advice from a co-worker of mine. Sadly, she was…

This. You are exactly right. I work for a startup not in anyway related to Data Science or ML etc. We use Python here. My flatmates work for a big named DataScience company and most of the time its numpy and a bit of data visualisation.Pandas and Numpy to the rescue. I am like dude, I can do that in blink.

Re: Berkeley offers its data science course online for free

#66

Post by amrx101 »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #20
jamestimmins wrote: post #5

I find it curious that there are so many courses for data-science related subjects, which superficially seem to cover the same material, and relatively few courses covering more traditional CS topics such as computer systems, networks, OS. I suppose it has to do with the market, but also feels like colleges are skating to where the puck is, rather than where it will be (or perhaps, where it could be).

MIT open courseware has a bunch of classes related to traditional CS topics. Also just searching universities you can find some. Data Science is the new hip class and it’s just very aggressively marketed. The other one being marketed heavily is intro to coding .

I think all MOOCs have traditional CS courses but marketing hype is on Data Science and ML. I remember doing Tim Roughgarden(StanFord) Algorithm course on Coursera. Loved it.

Re: Berkeley offers its data science course online for free

#67

Post by amrx101 »

appleiigs wrote: post #48
jph wrote: post #8

Berkeley and the UC schools are making major strides in online education, including edX participation and on-campus projects. If you're interested in Berkeley and data science, there's an online masters program too. (Disclosure: Berkeley is in my client roster). https://requestinfo.datascience.berkeley.edu

US$65K for tuition

LOL. As someone from third world where local currency is enormously devalued with respect to US$, I wonder why would anyone do this?

Re: Berkeley offers its data science course online for free

#68

Post by et-al »

analognoise wrote: post #34
et-al wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How good a community college is often dependent on how wealthy its county is. Secondly, a data science course may be offered, but only during fall semester and everyone else wants to sign up for it. Also bootcamps can compress the curriculum from two years worth of junior college into 8-12 weeks. For someone who never enjoyed being in school, I'll take the bootcamp.

"Also bootcamps can compress the curriculum from two years worth of junior college into 8-12 weeks" Right, and I got a doctorate by listening to an audio tape.

Except no one from a bootcamp is adding "BSc Computer Science" behind their name. And somehow they're getting decent jobs.

Re: Berkeley offers its data science course online for free

#69

Post by itronitron »

QML wrote: post #28
jamestimmins wrote: post #5

I find it curious that there are so many courses for data-science related subjects, which superficially seem to cover the same material, and relatively few courses covering more traditional CS topics such as computer systems, networks, OS. I suppose it has to do with the market, but also feels like colleges are skating to where the puck is, rather than where it will be (or perhaps, where it could be).

I think it’s because data science has a more immediate, broader applicability than computer science. Not everybody needs to know how to program a full application; but they should be able to load in a dataset and statistically analyze it. Looking at the type of people taking Data 8 compared to CS61A (the introductory programming course), I would say the former is a fairly diverse crowd (political science majors, econ…

It might be more popular as many data science courses use Python and therefore students don't have to get their code to compile.

Seriously though, I think people are drawn to data science out of a desire to create stories with some underlying support (data/evidence) in order to influence policy or business decisions.

Re: Berkeley offers its data science course online for free

#70

Post by amrx101 »

graycat wrote: post #23

Okay, here's a view of what appears to be part of the course: We have a course (right a school application of stuff taught in school!) with two teachers, that is, two sections of the course, each section with its own teacher and its own students. At the end of the two courses, that is, the two sections, we want to compare the teachers. So we give the same test to all of the students from both courses. Suppose one sec…

I loved your post man. I think you are right about the rebranding of Applied Stat as ML|AI. I love stuff like these. I did take 3 Stat course in university. Currently I am working as a dev.I took a course in my free time http://codingthematrix.com/ and loved the programming part of it. Do you happen to know some courses where one would have stat part as well as the programming par?
Post reply on HN