Instructors

David Beck

Teaching Assistants: Evan Komp (evankomp+cse583@uw.edu), Nels Schimek

Logistics

Days: Tuesdays, Thursday

Time: 11:30am - 12:50pm

Place: NAN 181

David’s office hours: flexible for students, by appointment via dacb AT uw.edu on Zoom

Evan’s (TA) office hours: Mon 15:00-16:30, In person @ WRF Data Science studio, Zoom id ‘evankomp’. BONUS OH WEEK 1 & 2: Wed 15:00-16:30.

Nels’s (TA) office hours: Tue 15:30-16:30, In person @ WRF Data Science studio, Zoom id ‘nelsschimek’

Note: preference will be given to in person office hours unless a specific request is made. We reserve the right to remove the remote option.

Fastest way to get help would be by posting your questions on the Ed Discussion platform: CSE 583 - 23au – Ed Discussion

If you are feeling sick, please follow these guidelines from the University: https://www.washington.edu/coronavirus/student-faq/#feelsick .

Course Description

Scientists, engineers, and other technical professionals require skills in computing and data analysis to do their jobs. We refer to these as data science skills.

Examples of data science skills abound. Biologists search thousands of genomes for DNA sequences with special characteristics, such as genes that transcribe non-coding RNA that is “anti-sense” to messenger RNAs. Astronomers search, integrate, and visualize data from many instruments that produce terabytes of complex data. Social scientists do text analytics on massive repositories of social media data to distill patterns in topics and trends in sentiment.

This course teaches graduate students the software engineering skills to do research in data science fields and to be successful technical professionals in the 21st Century. In particular, this course teaches how to approach computational research with reproducibility in mind: to create sharable and reusable research projects that incorporate both computation and data.

Students will learn the following skills:

The course emphasizes a hands-on learning approach in which class time is often used for problem solving in small groups. The first part of the class teaches the skills described above. The second part is devoted to the class project, creating a computational research project of their choosing.

Some prior computing experience is desirable. For example, we expect that given a CSV file you can open it and plot the data in a language like MATLAB, IDL, R, or Python. A Software Carpentry bootcamp, Codeacademy, or similar MOOC would be appropriate venues to learn these skills. Lessons include, e.g.: