University of California San Diego

Description Counting is one of the basic mathematically related tasks we encounter on a day to day basis. The main question here is the following. If we need to count something, can we do anything better than just counting all objects one by one? Do we need to create a list of all phone numbers…

Description How can students learn about abstraction by creating a movie scene? Or make an interactive map using lists? You’ll learn (and do it yourself) in this course! This class teaches the concepts of abstraction (methods and parameters) and lists. For each concept, we’ll start by helping you connect real-world experiences you are already familiar…

Description Apply the skills you learned during the sequence of courses — from needfinding to visual design — as you redesign a new interface, service, or product for your Interaction Design Capstone Project. We’re working with some exciting design teams in Silicon Valley across multiple industries to develop real-world design challenges for this final project.…

Description In this capstone project we’ll combine all of the skills from all four specialization courses to do something really fun: analyze social networks! The opportunities for learning are practically endless in a social network. Who are the “influential” members of the network? What are the sub-communities in the network? Who is connected to whom,…

Description This course will help us to evaluate and compare the models we have developed in previous courses. So far we have developed techniques for regression and classification, but how low should the error of a classifier be (for example) before we decide that the classifier is “good enough”? Or how do we decide which…

Description The course covers basic algorithmic techniques and ideas for computational problems arising frequently in practical applications: sorting and searching, divide and conquer, greedy algorithms, dynamic programming. We will learn a lot of theory: how to sort data and how it helps for searching; how to break a large problem into pieces and solve them…

Description Want to understand your data network structure and how it changes under different conditions? Curious to know how to identify closely interacting clusters within a graph? Have you heard of the fast-growing area of graph analytics and want to learn more? This course gives you a broad overview of the field of graph analytics…

Description In this course you’ll focus on the fundamentals of teaching the impacts of technology, starting by exploring how you interact with and benefit from technology in a typical 24 hour period, such as the desire for instant food and entertainment. This will be done through a series of paired teaching sections, exploring a specific…

Description Once we have sequenced genomes in the previous course, we would like to compare them to determine how species have evolved and what makes them different. In the first half of the course, we will compare two short biological sequences, such as genes (i.e., short sequences of DNA) or proteins. We will encounter a…

Description Welcome to the Capstone Project for Big Data! In this culminating project, you will build a big data ecosystem using tools and methods form the earlier courses in this specialization. You will analyze a data set simulating big data generated from a large number of users who are playing our imaginary game “Catch the…