Big Data, MSc, University of Staffordshire

About Big Data, MSc - at University of Staffordshire

• Research-informed teaching that has direct value to industry, commerce and to you as an IT industry professional.
• You will develop a critical perspective of Big Data and be able to apply this to a range of scenarios
• Distance learning however you should be able to access our wide range of facilities, including laboratories housing specialist computing equipment and software to assist with your studies if you wish to study on site at any point, eg as part of your dissertation.

The modern world is experiencing a growth of online data in a variety of forms, including social networks, web documents, digital libraries, blogs, medical records, biological data, remote sensing, imaging, forecasting etc. This data may not be fully structured but still contains valuable information that needs discovering, such as emerging opinions in social networks, consumer purchase behaviour, trends from search engines, and other patterns that emerge from such huge data sources.

These developments mean traditional applications are no longer appropriate to the processing and analysis of the amount of data available. Companies, such as Google, are leading the movement from a large-scale relational database reflecting the desire to analyse data automatically and on a larger scale than previously seen.