First Year Odyssey Seminar: Data Science
FYOS 1001 – Fall 2016
The contemporary world is flooded by data. The acquisition of data and use of analytics for decision-making are increasingly important in areas of society ranging from science and health care to government policy to business. Data science is the emerging discipline at the nexus of three primary disciplines – computer programming, machine learning, and statistics – that aims to make sense of these data. Students in this seminar engaged data science through the lenses of ecology and epidemiology. Students studied the primary disciplines that constitute data science and learned about applications of data science to research and across a range of careers. Students engaged in critical thinking about evidence, numerical arguments, and the use of data in personal life; considered how the acquisition of data can lead to bias; and used Tufte’s principles to identify intentionally misleading elements in graphical displays of data.