Data Intensive Computing Certificate

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 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

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.