Intro – Dr Matthew Parry:

G'day, I'm Matt from the Data Science team at Otago. So maybe you’ve heard of a Netflix problem.

Netflix have more movies and shows than you can possibly have to watch in your lifetime and even hope to search through in your lifetime. So what they do, they look through all the information they have on all the hundreds and millions of years and all the hundreds of thousands of shows they have to come up with shows they think you’ll like to watch.

And it’s not just Netflix solving problems like this using data. Second, we know communities and towns and cities collect data on air quality and water pollution, and they want to know things like this—public health going to be affected. Businesses also want to plan for the future, so they use data to track customer demand and satisfaction, what’s selling, what’s not selling.

And professional sports teams, another example, use data on player performance to figure out what would be the best team selection and also what would be the best strategy for the game.

What is Data Science

So data science is at the heart of an organization’s decision-making process. In fact, anywhere you find out are, you’ll find data science. So data science for me is that is the science of learning from data.

And data science is something for everyone. So if you like communication, graphics, visualization, then data science is for you. If you like programming and getting a computer to do all the hard work for you, then you’re like data science.

If you’re passionate about any area which involves data, then you want to do data science. And if you like number crunching like I do, then data science is for you too.

Data Science at Otago

Otago is unique. It brings together the best we’ve got—information science, computer science, and statistics. And then you get to combine it with another area of study, something you care about, and that’d be a minor or a second major in the area.

For example, you can almost do anything. So if you like commerce, you can do a commerce, any commerce option. You can do computer science, you can do marine science, you can do public health. The list just goes on and on.

In first year, there’ll be five data science papers to take. You get an introduction to information technology and information systems. You’ll get your hands dirty during practical data science. You’ll learn how to program and also get an introduction into statistics. And all this will give you plenty of time to start working towards your minor or second major.

Prerequisites

So what do you have to do to get into data science? Well, in fact, there’s no official prerequisites for data science, but we strongly recommend NCEA Level 3 digital technologies and in mathematics as being helpful.

For me, what more, it’s more important is the unofficial prerequisite—just being passionate about data. If you want to go out and get it, if you want to plot it and play with it, if you want to do something with it, then data science is for you.

And if that sounds like you, we would love to have you do Data Science at Otago.