UBC MDS

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... [Read More]

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... [Read More]

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... [Read More]

One of the most rewarding aspects of working on the UBC Master of Data Science program has been the close collaboration between my home department, computer science, and the statistics department here at UBC. The collaboration has also come with a challenge, though: the two communities often use different words... [Read More]

When people stress the importance of good communication in data science, they are usually saying something like what Hadley Wickham says in his book R for Data Science: “[It] doesn’t matter how great your analysis is unless you can explain it to others: you need to communicate your results.” In... [Read More]