Industry Quotes
Durham University’s MISCADA program is an opportunity for NAG to help train the next generation of computational scientists. The course as a whole is important for building the talent pool that NAG draws on for its R&D work as it covers key programming skills and key numerical algorithms for scientific computing.
The MiSCADA course was the perfect way for me to transition from my Engineering undergraduate degree to my current job as a Geospatial Python Developer at CGG Satellite Mapping. The interdisciplinary nature of the course has provided vital baseline knowledge required to undertake both my software development and data science duties.
“For companies like Clicksco – a leader in the mining and manipulation of big data in the retail, finance and travel sectors, providing lead generation, web search, comparison shopping and affiliate marketing services – statistics and data analysis are essential. Clicksco collects a vast amount of data about the customer’s interactions across a network of ecommerce, price comparison, news, magazine and blog websites. This data is often unexploited due to its volume and complexity.
“While basic machine learning and statistical techniques can be applied to the problem, they do not provide a formal model and so lack the potential to exploit the data fully. Knowledge of data analysis and statistics are essential for bridging this gap and providing the appropriate tools for exploring, modelling, understanding, and making inferences. Similarly, without a good understanding of statistical computing it would be impossible to process, manipulate, and analyse the data in the first place.
“Clicksco and the Department of Mathematical Sciences are part of a Knowledge Transfer Partnership project, which aims to develop, evaluate and embed statistical models of the online browsing data in order to better understand and target cohorts of users, and so improve the click through rate and revenue. Data analysis, statistics, and scientific computing are fundamental to this work and are key to its success.”
“I am very enthusiastic about these cross-disciplinary courses, having benefited personally from crossing disciplines several times, and finding my most senior staff from similar backgrounds.”