Data science is growing at a rapid rate. Companies are now looking for professionals who can examine large amounts of data to execute business decisions quickly.
“It is a very useful and applicable set of skills that one can put under their belt in preparation for future careers,” says Anand Malpani, Engr ’13 (MSE), ‘17 (PhD), an assistant research scientist at the Johns Hopkins Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare.
This fall, Malpani is teaching Data Science for Healthcare Applications through the Hopkins Engineering Applications & Research Tutorials, or HEART, program.
“The HEART program allows me to cater to the entire undergraduate population and teach data science without any prerequisites, adding a challenge to how I structure a course and teach it,” he says. “I believe this experience will help me become a better science communicator by giving me the opportunity to explain concepts to an audience who isn’t already familiar with my research. After all, that’s one of the goals of the HEART program—to give future academicians an exposure to teaching.”
Malpani’s course will introduce undergraduates to skills in the most sought-after disciplines in today’s job market: data science and machine learning. Coursework will use visual illustrations to explain everything from founding principles of statistics and probability to the fundamental concepts behind common machine learning applications like Facebook’s photo tag suggestions and Google’s search autocompletion. In addition, the course will present insights on how data science can revolutionize the field of surgery—also known as surgical data science.
“An introduction to data science, this course will entice students who are interested in the field to dive deeper into the subject and to take full-credit courses in the future,” says Malpani. “If those two words ‘data’ and ‘science’ are not enough, add ‘health care’ to the mix—you are now talking about the application domain that JHU is known for globally.”
The course was initially offered in 2017 and was co-instructed by Princy Parsana, a fifth-year PhD student in computer science.
“With our 2017 offering, we saw students change their majors to computer science just to learn more. We saw students who started working in research groups conducting data science research. Data science has such a broad spectrum of applications that students from multiple majors may find it useful down the road,” says Malpani.
Malpani’s research focuses on the development of technology platforms powered by crowdsourcing and machine learning for surgical skill training and assessment.