Wednesday, August 3, 2016

Data Science Initiative at Rice University

There are many Masters in Data Science programs that have been developed over the last few years including at universitiesmassive open online courses (MOOCs) such as the Data Science Specialization on Coursera or if you're really self motivated an Open Source Data Science Masters curriculum that you can work through at your own pace. A few weeks ago I was happy to see my graduate school alma mater (Rice University in Houston, TX) announced that it was awarded a $1.4 million dollar grant from the NSF to start a Data Science program between faculty in the Statistics and Computer Science departments. The money will be used to develop courses by faculty in both departments and to allow undergraduate students, graduate students and postdoctoral researchers to take courses and complete research projects. This comes after the university announced last fall a $43 million dollar investment of establishing a world-class program in data science. I look forward to seeing exciting things from these two initiatives!

Congrats to Rice!