Congratulations to Stirling Winners

The DataLab award prizes to the best student internship projects each year and I'm pleased to say that this year Stirling students were both the runner up and the winner. Well done to Leslie Salami, whose project was for Nalanda Technology and to Christopher Lunny, who won for his project for Urban Tide. Here they are accepting their awards:

There is a nice video here where companies and students talk about the DataLab projects.

Summer Projects Completed

Another year of the Stirling Big Data MSc. has passed successfully. The students have now completed their summer dissertation projects and are looking forward to graduation in November. We have had a fabulous set of projects this year covering many aspects of data and analytics. I'm very proud of all of our students. Well done to everyone!

Thanks to the Datalab, many of our students were able to carry out their dissertation project as an internship with a company. I'm pleased to report that quite a few of the students have now been offered jobs at the companies where they carried out their internships.

Here is a little taste of some of the projects. One student analysed data generated by customers as they visited the e-commerce site of the well known childrens' comic, the Beano. Another developed a predictive analytics system to detect when cows were about to give birth. Two students carried out text mining and sentiment analysis projects. One developed a system for spotting children at risk from care report documents. There was a project that analysed live traffic flow data and another that used data from a fitness tracker watch. Some projects involved a lot of programming, such as the project that developed a new method for allowing customers to search in online stores, and some were purely data analytics.

Well, I wish all last year's students the best of luck. It was a real pleasure teaching you all and I look forward to hearing of your continued success in the future.

Dissertation Projects are Go!

How time flies! Our students have taken their exams and completed the taught part of the programme. The sun is shining and it is dissertation time. Thanks to help from the Datalab, many of our students have paid internships this year in fields as diverse as finance, publishing, retail and even dairy farming! Of our 25 students, 14 have chosen a work placement as part of their dissertation. The students are working in company offices in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Dundee, gaining valuable exposure to real problems, real data and real work!

Those students who are not on work placements are carrying out project that are either of their own design, or are part of the exciting research that takes place at the University. These projects involve designing new ways for online stores to allow customers to search for products, new machine learning algorithms and new ways of detecting human behaviour from activity watches.

Datalab Student day at Stirling

The University of Stirling recently hosted a day long event for the Datalab students from Dundee, RGU and Stirling. The theme of the day was a "Tech-Data-Startup-Challenge" in which students were treated to a series of short talks about technology startups, business modelling, raising finance and new data technology. Students were then split into groups and each group was asked to conceive a new idea for a data technology startup company.

After a short time to work on their ideas and the aspects of a business model such as revenue streams, customer identification, marketing channels and resource requirements, each group gave a short pitch in a Dragons' Den style session. Event organiser, Kevin Swingler said "I must say the students did very well in the face of tough questioning from the dragons. Our thanks also go out to the members of the panel including representatives from SAS, Think Analytics, HSBC, Scottish Enterprise and the Stirling Management School."

The students' business ideas covered diverse subjects such as online  retail, refuse collection and health and safety assessments. Kevin added "I hope the event went some way to opening the students' eyes to wider questions of how code is turned into money. Employers need staff with good technical skills, but they must also understand how technology fits into the overall business. The Stirling Big Data MSc. is designed to equip students with the skills they will need in work - both technical and commercial".

The Data Lab enables industry, public sector and world-class university researchers to innovate and develop new data science capabilities in a collaborative environment. Its core mission is to generate significant economic, social and scientific value from big data.

British Airways Graduate Programme

British Airways have been in touch about their Operational Research Graduate Programme. This offers a great opportunity to students with analytical skills. Here is the web site:

www.britishairways.com/careers/graduates

The closing data this year is 15/01/2016

Datalab launch

The Stirling Big Data MSc. is proud to be part of the DataLab MSc. Our students join with those from Dundee and Robert Gordon University to be part of something bigger. We recently all attended the first DataLab MSc. event in the faboulous setting of the Playfair library in Edinburgh.

There were talks about Big Data in sport, finance and science as well as a very encouraging presentation from analytics recruitment company MBN about the excellent prospects for data literate graduates.

Here are all the students lined up for a group picture!

Welcome to Our New Students

I'm pleased to say we have 25 students on the Big Data MSc. this year. I'm enjoying getting to know them all. They seem to have diverse backgrounds, so I hope they will learn a lot from each other as well as from us!

I was very pleased to get an email from one of last year's graduates from the programme who has just been offered a job at a Big Data consultancy in Glasgow. That is great news.