City University London launches data science and cyber security courses

City University London will this year begin its first post-graduate courses in data science and cyber security, which will help businesses fill skills gaps as they try to get more out of the high volumes of data they have and protect its value against cyber threats.

The MSc Data Science course was announced to potential applicants in January and signed off last month to begin in September.

“We saw that there was interest in industry for so-called data scientists,” said Dr Artur d'Avila Garcez, reader in neural-symbolic computing at City University London who heads up the course. He added that if you take a look at job boards in London, the high demand for professionals that can analyse and understand data is high.

The course will have three core foundations: machine learning, high performance computing and data visualisation.

The university already has two research groups focussed on machine learning and data visualistation. “The data science role needs to be specialist and it cannot be done by the IT guy or business analyst,” said Garcez.

He said applicants have come from a variety of backgrounds as well as computer engineers and business analysts with applicants from social science backgrounds, such as economics and psychology.

There will be modules to introduce students to computer science and big data for students that come from different backgrounds.

“This course is broader than computer science and includes business computing and other application areas.” He said interest in the course has come particularly from companies in the energy, transport, security and health sectors.

Garcez said in the last three months there have been 25 applications and the university plans to enrol up to ten for the first year of the course.

Meanwhile, the new MSc Cyber Security at the university will begin in September. The course adds to the university’s cyber security centre set up three years ago and will see teaching added to the research it already does in the area of cyber security.