Before starting the Master of Data Science (MDS) program at UBC, I had been working as a civil engineer for a consulting firm in Vancouver. I soon realized that despite producing vast amounts of data, the civil engineering and construction industries have felt little influence from advancements in data science...
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Learning from real data
by Alexander Kleefeldt
For the past three months, I was on a team of UBC Master of Data Science (MDS) students working on our MDS capstone project. Our team developed a data science product to help the course creators on the Thinkific e-learning platform to improve their online courses. Unsurprisingly, working on the...
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Becoming a data scientist: My year-long hiatus from medical school
by Daniel Raff
In my second year of medical school, I decided to open an unfamiliar email entitled “UBC Centennial Symposium on Health Informatics”. What was Health Informatics? I had no idea, but I intended to find out. The symposium featured the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) and showcased their use of large...
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Our curriculum, Part 1: Computer science & machine learning
by Mike Gelbart
This is the first in what will hopefully become a series of posts on our curriculum for the Master of Data Science (MDS) program at UBC. Our program is structured as six four-week blocks, each containing four mini-courses, for a total of 24 mini-courses. Each of these mini-courses is about...
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Visualizing massive open online courses
by Matthew Emery
After eight months of coursework, the UBC Master of Data Science (MDS) program concludes with a 2-month Capstone project. We partnered with Ido Roll from UBC’s Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology (CTLT) to analyze data from UBC’s massive open online courses (MOOCs). UBC offers dozens of MOOCs to thousands...
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