The Data Theory major at UCLA – the first of its kind in the world.

the amount of data is just staggering it's in the air right now streaming around us every part of your life can be quantified at this point just about everything from medicine to sociology to ai as data it's a revolution we're not just coming up with new ways of collecting data but we're coming up with new ways of thinking about data i'm a climate scientist i develop advanced and often cutting edge statistical methods to analyze complex data sets i deal with disease epidemics trying to forecast the spread of ebola in west africa one of the things that i study is networks and the mathematics of social networks i'm interested in both the mathematical foundations of data i'm also really interested in lots of applications in particular medical data in life sciences there are so many things you can discover from those massive data but how to analyze those data becomes a more pressing challenge the exciting thing is really how math and statistics are all coming together to solve problems [Music] in some sense the explosion of data science is exactly what has motivated the creation of a data theory major this major is a partnership with the math department and the statistics department to be the other side of the coin that complements the application of data science we really wanted to distinguish ourselves as being focused on a foundation of theoretical techniques we really want to understand the underpinnings of what makes these technologies work we need statistics to think about uncertainty in data we also need mathematics to solve some of those complicated optimization problems so that can help us have faster and smarter solutions you're going to learn all of those sexy topics you're going to learn about the machine learning models you're going to learn about the data science models the additional thing you're going to gain from the data theory is you will be able to answer the why questions do you want to be somebody that builds robots why do you want to be somebody that understands how robots work and why they work and then go also on to build robots from the ground up students in this program can expect to study lots of math at an advanced level computer programming optimization of algorithms lots of data analysis and data visualization we've created several new courses that are almost unheard of to require in a data science type major a mathematical modeling course methods of data theory and a very important one is data ethics and how it fits in with society we want to train scientists who can be the leaders in this field the world of data and data-driven approaches is just growing so fast if you just learn what's currently being used you're already going to be behind whereas our major in data theory gives you the foundation to be able to learn to innovate to adapt to future things to be the future and be at that forefront [Music] you

Channel: UCLA Physical Sciences

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Length: 3min 7sec (187 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 20 2020