Data Intensive Computing Certificate

*Not a baccalaureate degree program

This data-intensive computing certificate program is relevant and useful in any discipline with large data-analysis needs. The program is equally available to students in other fields of study. The program consists of a total of five courses: three required CSE courses, one elective course from the major discipline of the student and a capstone project course that applies the concepts in the earlier courses of the certificate. The program requires just 1-3 credits (for the capstone project) more than a regular minor in CSE. It creatively integrates the computational needs of the student's chosen discipline with the data-intensive computing solutions, methods and tools offered by the CSE courses. Thus the certificate program offers a pathway into computing for non-CSE students through its curriculum and its achievable design.

Upon successful completion of the certificate program students will have the ability to:

• Recognize a data-intensive problem.
  
• Assess the scale of data and requirements.
• Retrieve data using appropriate methods.
• Describe the data layout and define the data repository format (Ex: store).
• Decide the algorithms (Ex: MapReduce) and programming models (Ex: Bayesian).
• Define application-specific algorithms and analytics (Ex: network analysis).
  
• Design the data-intensive program solution and system configuration.
• Implement the data-intensive solution and test the solution.
• Write a report summarizing the solution and results.
• Incorporate services from cloud computing platforms.
• Study the foundational concepts enabling cloud computing: services-based interface, programmatic consumption of services, virtualization, PKI-based security, large-scale storage, load-balancing, machine images and on-demand services.
• Formulate data-intensive visualization solutions for presenting the results.
  

The School of Engineering and Applied Sciences offers nine engineering programs leading to the degree of bachelor of science (BS) degree: aerospace, biomedical, chemical, civil, computer, electrical, environmental, industrial and mechanical engineering.

Five combined BS/MBA programs are offered in conjunction with the School of Management. BA, BS, and BS/MS degrees in computer science are offered through the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. A BS degree in engineering physics is offered jointly with the Department of Physics.

The curricula allow students flexibility in their programs of study and encourages interaction between students and faculty. The undergraduate educational experience prepares students for professional practice and advanced study. Special programs including our experiential learning program, undergraduate research, and internship opportunities provide professional development skills and experiences and facilitate placement of our graduates in high-quality engineering positions.

The School of Engineering and Applied Sciences occupies six buildings on UB's north campus: Bell, Bonner, Davis, Furnas, Jarvis, and Ketter Hall.

Together, these buildings form an outstanding educational and research facility, comprising 275,000 square feet of laboratory and office space.

In addition to the excellent Computer Science and Engineering department Computing Facilities, students enrolled in this certificate program will also work on cloud computing resources such as Amazon web services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Google App Engine (GAE).

The faculty members of the department, all of whom have national and international reputations in their fields, are involved in research projects that have a variety of special contracts. Many have also received research funding from corporations such as Cisco, Google, IBM, Intel, Kodak, Microsoft, Nokia and Xerox.

These projects include research in:

• algorithms and theory
• augmentative technology for the handicapped
• computer networks and distributed systems
• computer security and information assurance
• computer vision and information visualization
• data integration and databases
• high performance and grid computing
• cyber infrastructure and computational science
• knowledge representation
• computational linguistics
• medical applications and bioinformatics
• human computer interaction
• wireless computing
• multimedia databases and informational retrieval
• pattern recognition
• machine learning
• data mining
• programming languages and software systems
• embedded systems
• VLSI
• computer architecture

Please visit the Computer Science and Engineering department website for additional information about our faculty.

Data-intensive computing has been hailed as the fourth paradigm after experimental, theoretical, and computational sciences. In the popular literature, data-intensive computing is closely associated with another emerging technology, namely, cloud computing. The skills and competencies learned in this certificate program are highly sought after by a wide range of industries from scientific research to stock market analytics.

Career Choices

Data intensive computing is a collective solution to address the data deluge that has been brought about by tremendous advances in distributed systems and Internet-based computing. The need to deal with huge volumes of data is being felt across industry, government, and academia. This includes the analysis needs of intelligence agencies for data from satellite imagery, signal intercepts, sensors, etc.; medical agencies analyzing images, genetic and other diagnostic data; environmental agencies with sensor-collected data on air, water, and meteorological conditions; and organizations in general needing to exploit the massive document databases on the world wide web (several hundred trillion bytes of text); among others. There are excellent opportunities for using the certificate for finding employment in many fields that require data analytics.

Salary Information

Salaries depend on the major study of the student. But the data-intensive computing and cloud computing skills are in great demand. We expect the salaries to be greater than $50,000.

SEAS Office of Undergraduate Education
410 Bonner Hall
North Campus
Buffalo, NY 14260-1900
Phone: 716-645-2774

School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Website

Students interested in the Data Intensive Computing certificate program should seek advisement on course selection from Dr. Bina Ramamurthy.