Ian is the Associate Director for Design Studio at the Jeffrey S. Raikes School of Computer Science and Management and Assistant Professor of Practice in Software Engineering. As a featured researcher in data science, he describes how his work revolves around the use of data and making its use easier.
I think that big data can be a relative term. What is big data for one is small data for another. Big data is really data in enough quantity that it outpaces the researchers ability to draw conclusions from it without the support of computational tools and techniques. These tools would tend to fall in a broad spectrum from pure data science, which would closely relate to statistics, to pure computer science. Data science more generally could be defined as the statistical methods for processing and analyzing data realized through the application of computational approaches to problem solving.
As a software engineer, my interest in big data is two-fold. First, I study approaches to software architecture and data modeling that can be incorporated into application and system development to support gaining insight from and making decisions with big data. This work tends to be high-level and focused on software engineering topics and application development best practices. The rests generally result in end-user systems for another purpose that provide data analysis functionality. Secondly, my interest in big data and data science stem from software development telemetry data. When developing software, teams can gather metrics for performance, quality, and practice of the teams. These metrics can lead to vast quantities of data from software source code repositories to issue completion cadence data. In order to draw conclusions from this data and gain insight into the performance of a team, I apply various analysis methods from data science to the raw data for processing and/or visualization.
As the need by other disciplines for data science for big data processing grows, so too will the need for software systems to handle it. So, the future of my area is significant in that there will be many challenges associated with building these systems and better understanding their use and the quality of the teams building them.
Ian's areas of expertise include software architecture and design, mobile and web application development, lean startup, agile methods, design thinking, big data, knowledge management, and program analysis. He has a rich interdisciplinary background in software design and engineering, software architecture, and innovation gained over 15 years developing software and leading teams in corporate, startup, and institutional research environments. He has served as Chief Software Architect for the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UNL, President of Red Brain inc. President of OrangePeel Inc., and Development Lead in IBM Global Services. Ian holds an M.Sc, in Computer Science and a B.Sc. in Computer Science and German.
In this current capacity, he is responsible for research and strategic partnerships for the Raikes School, and directs the operations of the 75-person development and industry outreach program, Design Studio, and oversees faculty research activities in the school.
More details at: http://go.unl.edu/kffb